NEW YORK—As games go, it was a heartbreaker, and when it was over—after Maria Sharapova followed up that break of serve with a match-clinching hold to beat Marion Bartoli, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4—you were entitled to pay homage to Sharapova’s well-documented fighting spirit.
But you could also easily conjure up that bittersweet taste that must have lingered in Bartoli’s mouth for long moments after her opponent sealed her passage to the U.S. Open semifinals with a service winner. The French iconoclast (and No. 11 seed) had played a terrific match, but came up just a smidgen short, mainly because somebody has to.
“I could not have played a better match,” she would say, salvaging pride from the wreckage. “Honestly.”
In that ninth game of the third set, with the score even at 4-all, Bartoli fell behind 15-40 through no particular fault of her own (it was that kind of match, at least once Sharapova settled down and stopped slinging double faults). Bartoli saved the first break point with a service winner and the second when she induced an error from Sharapova’s forehand.
Safe at deuce, Bartoli cracked a backhand winner, but she wasted the advantage with a backhand error into the net. And how many times had she—and every other tennis player on the planet—been told, “If you’re going to miss on a big point, miss long or wide, but never into the net.”
The shift of momentum was seismic. From the second deuce, Bartoli made a brace of errors, one forehand and one backhand—or, if you prefer, a multi-fisted error from one side or the other, take your pick, as distinguishing forehand from backhand in Bartoli’s case is a little like trying to tell Mike from Bob Bryan. Except you can’t even cheat a little by noticing and remembering that Bob is the one who wears that white puka shell necklace all the time.
Unless you’ve watched Bartoli often, admittedly a fate worse than death to some aesthetes, you keep having to work through it from the start to tell which shot she hit: Let’s see. . . she just served, so that’s her right hand at the bottom of her racquet, and she hit that ball from her left side, so. . .it’s a backhand! Right?”
That key break removed a lot of the pressure Sharapova might have felt in the last game, and she served it out with ease. It ended a match that began more than 24 hours earlier, but was suspended because of rain with Bartoli having her way with the No. 3 seed, leading 4-0 in the first set.
“I wish I could have looked up at the sky yesterday night and said, ‘Please, please stop to rain,‘ ”Bartoli said ruefully. “Because the first time we started she was a little slower and making more mistakes. But coming out today she was really another player. She was a very hard fighter out there.”
All true, but Bartoli also was also a different player from the one who, in four previous meetings, had never even forced a tiebreaker, much less won a set, from Sharapova. It was true of the brief first act yesterday as well as of the lengthy one today. That’s also the cost of doing business for grand champions like Sharapova, who felt lucky to escape with the win, and said:
“When you see the level of Bartoli’s play and you look at her, the other results she had during the year, you think: ‘Well, there is no way she played like that losing to some of the players.’ It's really the honest truth. It's the reality sometimes.
“But in a way, that's what makes it so much tougher to be at the top. I mean, it's tough to get there; it's extremely difficult to stay there, because everybody—they almost have the feeling of not having much to lose. They're not expected to win, so I think everything is kind of free and they really go for it.”
That may be selling Bartoli short, at least by a little, because while she does absorb puzzling losses and unexpected setbacks at major events, she’s a former Wimbledon finalist who established herself as a solid Top 10 player—and one of the very few French pros capable of surviving a few rounds on the red clay of Roland Garros. And she’s a 27-year-old who has worked very hard at fine-tuning her somewhat eccentric game to make it more lethal against the best players.
Take the way Bartoli, who was seeded No. 11 here, has come to grips with the shortcomings of her double-handed swings on both sides. She’s force-trained herself to stand—and remain—on or inside the baseline, no matter how big her opponent’s serve, or how hot the rally. As she said, of her decision to take Sharapova’s serves early: “I am not really retreating two or three meters behind the baseline. With two hands on both sides, I don’t want to see myself 10 feet behind the baseline.”
Bartoli held her ground admirably all day, despite the fact that once Sharapova surmounted her service anxieties (about midway through the second set), her groundstrokes were both explosive and accurate. The women had numerous warp-speed rallies, some of which demonstrated the price paid for adopting that both-hands game that can so confuse opponents.
Sharapova generally got the best of those rallies and covered the court impressively, while Bartoli often seemed stretched to the limit—so much so that she couldn’t quite buy enough time to reset the rallies to neutral, never mind turn the tables. Her only chance to some of those long, high-quality rallies was to belt a desperate try for a winner. That she accomplished that a few times merits credit, but Sharapova deserves as much praise for putting her on the end of a string.
Bartoli’s best chance may have been in the sixth game of the third set, when she led 3-2 and had Sharapova in a service hole at 15-40. Sharapova missed her first serve both times, but avoided the killer double-fault on each occasion. Each point was decided after a rally, with Bartoli driving a backhand out. Having dodged that bullet, Sharapova hit a cross-court forehand winner and an ace to hold.
It was one of the myriad games that could have gone either way; Bartoli has a knack for bringing fans to the edges of their seats and fingernails between incisors, not least because she plays such a high-risk, flat game.
“I guess unpredictable is good in a way for her,” Sharapova said. “A little bit on the serve, as well. She was going a lot for her second serves. I think she probably had like 30 serves that were 99 M.P.H. second serves. It's like she worked consistently to get 99 M.P.H. Every time I looked at the clock it was like 99, 99. . . If I lose this match, I'm going to have nightmares.
“I guess she just has that nontraditional game where it's kind of sneaky. You don't know if she's going to come in or if she's gonna hit the ball or be flat or hit the frame. But, yeah, she's worked a lot on it. That's why it's good.”
It’s safe to assume that Bartoli will keep working on that unusual game, trying to lift it from good to “great,” with two hands on the racquet and all hands on deck.
To read all of Peter Bodo's reports from the 2012 U.S. Open, click here.