Maria Sharapova and her fiancée, pro basketball player Sasha Vujacic, have ended their engagement, the Russian confirmed. The two became engaged in the fall of 2010 after they met in Los Angeles while he was playing for the Los Angeles Lakers. Sharapova owns a home in Los Angeles.
After Vujacic decided to play for a team in Turkey last fall, the two grew apart, as he was rarely allowed to travel and they only saw each other sporadically. Sharapova said the two split at the end of the spring. Since the beginning of April she has won Stuttgart, Rome, Roland Garros, and an Olympic silver singles medal.
"It was obviously a challenging decision from both of our ends,” she said after her win over Mallory Burdette at the U.S. Open. “It was a really nice period of time for both of us, but our career schedules just made it extremely difficult to see each other with the traveling, and especially his career move to Turkey. The playing there was a little bit different in terms of he wasn't able to travel much. He wasn't home one time during the ten months that he was in Turkey, so that made it extremely difficult. But we have a tremendous amount of respect for each other. Still would love to call him as a friend. We spent really great years together.”