* !Picby Pete Bodo*
Caroline Wozniacki is a personable, outgoing 21-year old who clearly enjoys her celebrity and has slipped nicely into the "nice girl" niche that nobody in the WTA other than fading Kim Clijsters seems to have wanted.
The role comes naturally to Wozniacki, but she also has a shrewd grasp of public relations, as evidenced at the recent Madison Square Garden exhibition where she danced with an eight-year old and dragged Rory McIlroy, her famous golfer boyfriend, onto the court to play a point against Maria Sharapova.
Up to now, Wozniacki has also managed her unique position in the women's game expertly. She has yet to win a Grand Slam title, but for two years running (2010, 2011) she was the year-end No. 1 player of the WTA. She raised many questions and took a lot of flak — a fair amount of it unwarranted, given that all she was doing was playing a lot and giving it her best — for being the first "Slamless No. 1" for two consecutive years, but she handled the critics and skeptics with aplomb.
But lately, cracks have appeared in her generally cool, streamlined ability to stay on message — that being that her game is fine and, given her age, still developing — good enough to win a major at the right time.
Just the other day, she told Tennis.com: “It not easy to lose and I hate to lose and I don’t know anything worse than losing. It’s tough because you know you have to break the barrier (presumably, by winning a Grand Slam singles title), but if you know the door is open and you just need to put your foot inside the door, it’s worth taking that risk. I’m the kind of player who can take risks in a match and if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to my base and try to grind it out.”
Translation: maybe my game isn't good enough to win a major now. Maybe that "right time" has passed with the emergence of Petra Kvitova and the full maturation of Victoria Azarenka.
As well, that rapid fall from No. 1 to No. 4, with dogged Agnieszka Radwanska breathing down Wozniacki's neck, can't have boosted the former No. 1s faith in her game. Wozniacki has started to send mixed messages, right down to the way she semi-jokingly reminds us that we're unlikely to see her hitting drop shots or serving and volleying — to which she defiantly and perhaps defensively added: "You shouldn't repair something that's not broken, I've been in Top 5 for three years I must be doing something right."
Fair enough. But if Wozniacki wants to be something better than a top candidate for best player never to win a major, she needs to look at her game as something that, while not broken, isn't quite whole either. She demonstrated since she became the top-ranked player that she isn't enough of a natural-born competitor to be No. 1 with a flawed game (it's been known to happen, you know), so finding a better game seems the only way for her to make that breakthrough.
It seemed that Wozniacki had embraced that challenge when she and her father/coach Piotr hired coach Ricardo Sanchez at the beginning of the year — only to fire him barely two months later, after the Australian Open (Wozniacki lost to Clijsters in the quarterfinals). Sanchez wanted to school Wozniacki in the finer points of a more aggressive, threatening game, but he ran afoul of Piotr.
As Sanchez said in the aftermath of his dismissal: "I have great respect for Piotr, who never even played tennis, and for the work he has done. But Piotr has his system, I have mine. If I were to continue, it would be under Piotr’s system. That’s main reason for our break."
Wozniacki responded by telling Danish television: "I feel so experienced in my game that I know what I need to practice and from there we felt all along that it was the right way. I also felt that he (Sanchez) could not make a big difference for me personally as a player."
Translation: Sanchez took me out of my comfort zone.
After bolting to the upper echelon of the game, Wozniacki settled into her comfort zone. But she needs to acknowledge that staying inside it isn't going to win her a Grand Slam title. Recent developments and her own analysis suggests that the truth is dawning on her, but denial is a powerful agent and, in the end, life has been awfully good to Wozniacki, a nice girl with a nice game that isn't good enough to win a Grand Slam singles title.