A change of scenery did the women some good. The empty seats in L.A. the last couple years must have made everyone a little gloomy; my main memory of the 2005 WTA Championships was how tired, exhausted, beat up, ready to sleep the players said they were, even as they were being showered with ungodly sums of money.
Not so in 2006. Most of the world’s Top 8 came in looking hungry, making shots, and showing off about as much athleticism as you can ask from a tennis tournament. The crowds in the fancy front-row boxes were hardly raucous—Maria Sharapova went to a soccer match in Madrid and came away asking, “What are we doing wrong?”—but at least they existed for most of the week. Here’s a rundown of how the WTA's final four wound up their seasons.
Justine Henin-Hardenne
She wanted this one. For most of the week, Henin-Hardenne played in spurts—two rocket winners followed by one rocket error. She knows no other way than to wind up and attack. But she upped her level at the end of close sets; the errors generally disappeared just long enough for her to fight through. While the final against Amelie Mauresmo had its patchy moments, Henin-Hardenne’s big-point skills were never more apparent. She hit clean winners to win games at 4-4 and 5-4 in the first set, and again at 0-0 and 2-2 in the second. As the match wore on, she started hitting harder, to the point where Mauresmo simply couldn’t handle a few of her shots. Mauresmo remains the player of the year in my mind because of her two Slams, but Henin-Hardenne deserves the No. 1 slot. Day to day she’s the best in the game.
Amelie Mauresmo
I thought she was going to get out of this tournament in a hurry. She had been iffy about playing it in the first place, she seemed satisfied with her year, and she got blitzed the first day by Nadia Petrova. To her credit, though, Mauresmo found a way back into the thick of things and almost pulled it out. Her semifinal against Clijsters was a highlight. Mauresmo won from all over the court, with angled volleys at the net and by holding her own at the baseline against the relentless bashing of Clijsters. I thought she might turn things around against Henin-Hardenne in the final by lengthening the court and going vertical with looping topspin, but Justine put the clamp down and robbed her of all preparation time. Still, it was an honorable performance from the Frenchwoman, who could have walked away from Madrid much earlier and still been happy with her year.
Kim Clijsters
Like her countrywoman, Clijsters seemed rejuvenated by her time away from the tour. She was flat-out belting the ball much of the week, and while she lost in three to Mauresmo, she showed off some of her best stuff along the way: the vicious, grimacing swing volley, the sliding-squeaking-splitting retrieval, the ground stroke winners from anywhere, any time. As always, though, Clijsters was an athlete first, tennis player second (it’s the opposite for Mauresmo), which means she’ll never construct a point when she’s got a chance to haul off. But it was good to have her back—can she really want to stop doing all this by the end of 2007?
Maria Sharapova
The great competitor regressed a bit in her semifinal loss to Henin-Hardenne. She had been firing on all cylinders in her earlier matches, but as she has in the semis at Grand Slams in the past, she came out flat for this one, going down 0-3 in minutes. After the U.S. Open, I thought Sharapova might have turned a corner toward the No. 1 ranking and a multiple-Slam future. But she showed again that her mental toughness is still not enough for her to overcome superior variety and movement. The drop-off in quality from how she had been playing was odd, and reminiscent of another Robert Lansdorp student, Lindsay Davenport, who has always had trouble at the finish line. Does Sharapova care about winning each point so much that she doesn’t pace herself and focus on finishing at the big tournaments? (You could call it a tennis version of not seeing the forest for the trees.) Or was she just tired after a long European lead-up run? We'll get the next answer to that question in Australia in January.