Going to War Together

Can the women in tennis get along? Last year at this time, USA Today, in an article entitled “Frenemy Territory: No Love Lost Among Some Women Tennis Stars,” led us to believe that the answer was no. “What can I tell you,” Nadia Petrova told Doug Robson, “girls are girls. We always find something to fuss about.” Those were the days, after all, of Serena Williams’ public feuds with Sloane “I Made You” Stephens and Maria “She’s Still Not Going to Be Invited to the Cool Parties” Sharapova.

What a difference 12 months has made. Serena, after spending 2014 in a traveling love fest with Caroline Wozniacki, began the Aussie Open by saying this about the WTA: “It’s like a big family now.” Asked if she thought this was a positive development, Serena nodded. “I do, because you get to know the ladies. If someone gets hurt, you hear about it and you feel for them. You want to reach out to them.”

Which brings us to the two ladies who define the WTA’s frenemy divide at the moment, Wozniacki and Victoria Azarenka. Caro, 24, and Vika, 25, who will face off in an unfortunately early second-round match on Thursday, have been friendly combatants since their junior days. As pros, they’ve ridden the tour roller coaster together.

Both have spent time at No. 1, and then watched as their rankings plummeted out of the Top 15. Wozniacki rebuilt her game in 2014; Azarenka is in the process of trying to do the same in 2015. They’ve played one epic match, in Doha six years ago, which Wozniacki won 7-5 in the third. At the time, I thought she had the brighter future of the two, because of her consistency. But Azarenka just needed more time to put her bigger game together.

Over the years, their friendship, like many friendships, has waxed and waned. As another player from the 1970s once said, while mourning the lack of camaraderie on the ATP side in those bad-boy days, “It’s hard to be friends when everyone has a ranking number hanging over their heads.” That’s especially true when the ranking is No. 1. Last year, though, Wozniacki and Azarenka connected again while each was going through a break-up.

“We were both in Monaco when her situation happened and everything with me happened,” Azarenka told Chris Clarey of the New York Times earlier this month. “We were just having dinner and crying on each other’s shoulders.”

“We’ve always been pretty close,” Wozniacki said yesterday. “You know, I think there’s times, periods where you spend more time together, periods when you don’t. Friends, you know your best friends, when you don’t talk to them for a few months, all of a sudden you talk, it’s like you’ve seen each other yesterday. She’s a fun girl to be around. There’s always loads to talk about. I’m glad to see her back.”

Wozniacki reacted to her break-up with golfer Rory McIlroy by getting right back to work. Success for her came quickly, as she reached the final of the U.S. Open and qualified for the tour championships in Singapore. Azarenka says she went through a period of depression after her break-up with the performer Redfoo, and took up painting as an outlet. Vika, whose coach and mentor is a philosophizing Frenchman named Sam Sumyk, has become something of a seeker in recent years.

“The dreams are always big,” she said yesterday of her plans for 2015. “And I think that’s kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just to look and have a big objective of where you want to go.”

Judging by their performances yesterday, Wozniacki and Azarenka look poised to reascend the rankings ladder together this year. Both women were playing young Americans—Azarenka faced Sloane Stephens; Wozniacki faced Taylor Townsend—and both found their ways through them in characteristic fashion.

Azarenka made herself the aggressor against Stephens, going up the line and coming forward whenever possible, and in the process exposing Stephens’ inability to do either of those things.

“When you play against [Sloane],” Azarenka said afterward, “you want to try not to give her an opportunity to use her weapons....The important thing is just to try to control the game as much as you can.”

Speaking of frenemies, or in this case just plain enemies, Azarenka was pretty direct in her assessment of Stephens’ game, and what she’s not doing with it at the moment.

“You know, Sloane is a player that has really big weapons,” Vika said, “and when she uses them she’s a very, very dangerous player....She’s always been a dangerous player. She just needs to work hard.”

Wozniacki, meanwhile, had her hands full with Townsend. The 18-year-old’s aggressiveness, Caro said, made her “uncomfortable.” That was especially true in the first set, which went to a tiebreaker. Townsend, unlike Stephens, is using her weapons to the hilt these days, and there are few players of any age or at any level who can follow pace with touch the way she can. But Wozniacki, a veteran of many ups and downs at 24, knew she held a trump card over the teenager.

“I knew that at some point she’s going to start thinking,” Wozniacki said, “and I need to take advantage of that. Whenever I see her hesitating a little bit, I need to step it up, I need to get more returns in, I need to serve better. In the tiebreaker, I did so.”

On the surface, Wozniacki has a friendlier personality than Azarenka, but she’s her equal as a competitor—where Vika is fierce and boiling, Caro is quietly tenacious. More important, she believes in herself—Wozniacki almost dares her opponent to beat her, and she looks surprised when the player pulls it off.

Wozniacki and Azarenka supported each other last year, but they'll do battle this week. Does it matter if they get along? Does it matter if the women get along in general? When the men in tennis don’t like each other, we call it a bad boy era, and look back on it with wry fondness. When the women don’t like each other, we say that girls "will always find something to fuss about."

In truth, an environment where you’re directly competing to make a living with the people you see every day is never going to be conducive to easy friendships. And the tennis tours, men's and women's, will always be a mix of the social and the un-social—for every maverick Jimmy Connors, there’s a happy-go-lucky Vitas Gerulaitis; for every Li Na, who seemed to be universally loved by her tour-mates, there’s a Genie Bouchard who says she's happy to go it alone.

As a fan, when I think about Azarenka and Wozniacki, what I like most about them is the way they compete. And that’s all I’ll have to care about when they play on Thursday.