!90426379 By Pete Bodo
I have this theory about the state of the women's game these days. It's pretty simple. One reason we're seeing so many hot-potato matches is because the opportunities are too abundant. When the game has no dominant duo or trio - think Evert, Navratilova, Graf, Seles, Henin - it increases everyone's chances of making, say, a Grand Slam final. And who knows? You get to that final, and if Serena Williams gets ambushed you could be playing, oh, Dinara Safina, for a major title.
It's a little like one of those basketball half-time promotions: even if you played hoops and sank an average of 7 of 10 free throws on the high school team, what happens when you're invited to shoot one in a packed stadium with a $1,000,000 on the line? Maybe you hit the backboard. Air ball is more likely.
For that reason, the match I was intrigued by today was the one between two players about whom I know squat: Petra Kvitova and Yanina Wickmayer. Ordinarily, at this stage either or both of these girls is cannon fodder; red meat to throw into the cage holding the big cats. She can go out there against an Elena Dementieva or Venus Williams and swing from the heels, because she's under no pressure. A match-up with a high seed gives the journeyman or woman a glorious opportunity to strut her best stuff, since there's no grave danger of her actually winning.
But when you're playing with a quarterfinal berth against Kateryna Bondarenko on offer, and a potential semi against Nadia Petrova, or Caroline Wozniacki - that's a different story. You know that if you lose this thing, it's going to be awfully hard to resist the temptation to fling yourself off the Verrazano Narrows bridge.
When Kvitova and Wickmayer strolled out into the bright sunshine of sparsely Louis Armstrong stadium, each woman knew that half of this double bill would be an execution. This was a brace of big, healthy 19-year olds (both stand 6-feet tall). Wickmayer looked up at the crowd as she approached the chair, and waved tenuously; Kvitova walked with her head down. Would she be the one to enact the role of the condemned?
It certainly looked that way early in the match. Kvitova, a lefty with the breed's characteristically volatile game, sprayed balls all over the place and promptly fell behind 1-4. I was tempted to attribute Kvitova's woeful winner-to-error ratio to poor fitness. Her upset of top-seeded Dinara Safina was a three-set mini-series. And the tight yellow top she wore did little to disguise a plump tummy that would have delighted the Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens. She's a fleshy girl, alright, but I think her inconsistency may have had more to do with being lefthanded. Southpaws often are unstable elements, just look at examples like Goran Ivanisevic, Marcelo Rios, the now forgotten Barbara Potter, still whacky Martina Navratilova and the capo of American tennis himself, John McEnroe.
Wickmayer wore an odd, electric-blue tops-and-shorts outfit, the two back pockets sewn on low in the obligatory hip-hop fashion and studded with rhinestones. It looked more like an outfit a nice lass from Devonshire might wear to a Spanish seaside disco on her package-tour holiday. But she looked cool and comfortable, and was soon merrily belting impressive groundstroke and serves nibbling around the 110 mph mark. The crowed liked her, and one fellow soon called you, "You're my girl, blue!"
This is the WTA and, as they say, everyone makes a run. You could just as well measure a typical women's match these by service holds as service breaks, and this one was no different. In the blink of an eye it was 4-4, and the pattern was clear. Kvitova's a shotmaker (with just a little too much of the shot-blower in the mix); she takes risks, and makes good use of that signature lefty, hook serve. By contrast, Wickmayer is the straight-forward power baseliner who values the well-executed counter-punch over the placement, and is more afraid of the unforced error tally than she is enamored of her winner count.
But this was a battle for a place in the quarters; Wickmayer made a hash of the ninth game. She lost the first three points, coaxed two forehand errors out of Kvitova, then jerked a cross-court backhand a good 15-feet wide of the sideline.
At that point, Melanie Oudin had just won the second-set tiebreaker against Nadia Petrova, and my curiosity got the better of me - could Oudin battle back for the third time against a highly-ranked, experienced Russian? Besides, the way things were going on The Louee, I could probably return in, oh, two-and-a-half hours and find the battlefield still smoky.
I enjoyed watching Oudin turn the tables on Petrova, and the way she handled the conditions on Arthur Ashe stadium - a capacity crowd, the same stakes as those for which Kvitova and Wickmayer were playing - was telling. It's not like Oudin appears to feel entitled to a place in the quarters, or that she has a sense of entitlement or inordinate self-esteem. She just seems more able to take a match as an opportunity rather than an impediment. Sometimes, even the top players forget that there's far more to gain than to lose in any given match (there's a tournament every week, you know), so why sweat the details?
!90426440 A dose of Oudin was enough to re-affirm my faith in the possibilities offered by tennis, and put me in a better mood to be sympathetic toward the two girls still fighting over the bone on Armstrong. After losing the first set, Wickmayer surged back, showing the kind of courage you might expect from a girl who lost her mother to cancer, at age 9, and decided that she wanted to get as far from her native Belgium as possible. "Yes," she confirmed later, "The decison was completely mine. I still don't know how I did it, at 9, but I guess I was older than I thought."
Just as surprisingly, Wickmayer's father, a builder, acquiesed to the wishes of his 9-year old and packed her up (they ended up in Tampa, Fla., where Yanina trained at the Saddlebrook facility). Of this, she said, "He (my father) gave up his job. He gave up his friends, his house, his cars and we just left. . .He wanted to make me happy, no matter what." She added, "Yeah, he's a great guy."
As you might expect, a girl who'd lived through something like that might have a bit more sand than most. And that seemed mainfest shortly after I re-visited their match at 2-2 in the third set. Wickmayer hit punishing groundstrokes and Kvitova hit a wall, and soon Wickmayer was up, 5-2. She had a match point in the next game, Kvitova serving, but a great first serve backed up with a forehand approach winner enabled Kvitolva to survive.
But Wickmayer was soon bleeding blue, as Kvitova broke her, then held the next game to pull even. "At 5-all," Wickmayer would say, "I just thought, 'Well, no breaks anymore.' It was my serve again, I just thought, 'We'll start this over, keep fighting for every shot.' Sometimes she (Kvitova) makes a lot of winners; sometimes she makes mistakes. I guess I just kept hanging in there. She was the one who that made the (fatal) mistake."
Wickmayer held and Kvitova drove her game over the cliff. Behind love-40 thanks to two errors and a Wickmayer winner, the end was inevitable, and it arrived in the form of a go-for-broke forehand (you know leftys and those forehands) that went awry.
Kvitova, her pale face still flushed and her wiry blonde hair bunched up but still misbehaving, was contrite afterwards. "It was very nervous from my side," she confessed. "I was playing bad, I don't know why. . . I do know why. I had three tough matches here, my legs were a little slow. Yes, it was a big opportunity, the draw was very good for me - and for Yanina now."
For now, Wickmayer can content herself knowing that she endured a trial by fire, and she admitted taking some inspiration from the girl who had been playing next door, Oudin. "I love the mentality of her," she mused. "I guess it's just nice that there are newcomers coming up, young girls that are trying to, yeah, get higher in the rankings, and who try to beat the top players. I guess I'm one of them,the younger ones, who is (sic) trying to take over the spot."
It was a tentative self-endorsement, but a good place to start for the girl who was less disposed to end her day on the gallows than her rival.