Seeing the Future, and Denying It

PARIS—I sat in the press seats in Chatrier for the better part of an hour today rolling the opening line to this post around in my head.

These are the days that make a tennis writer’s life worthwhile . . .

There are legendary wins and memorable matches, but this is the kind of moment that stays with a serious fan . . .

That’s the beauty of tennis: Just when you think there’ll never be another new great player, that the well is dry and the tap has been turned off, a kid comes out of nowhere and proves you wrong, shows you that the sport’s history will go on . . .

You get the picture: I was thinking big. That’s how good 17-year-old Frenchwoman Caroline Garcia looked for nearly two sets today against Maria Sharapova. I don’t think I had ever heard of her before, but I got word from a colleague as the match started that her country’s tennis people were very high on her. It didn’t take much time to see why. Garcia won the first two games of the match. More than that, she did it with a game that looks like it’s built for a long haul and a rapid climb up the rankings. I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. In the middle of the second set, right when Garcia appeared to be running away with the match, Andy Murray tweeted, “The girl playing Sharapova is going to be No. 1 in the world, you heard it here first. What a player.”

Maybe Garcia somehow heard those words or felt the pressure from a million other fans and writers and commentators and former players around the world who were equally wowed by her game, because she chose that moment to remember exactly where she was, and exactly who she was playing.

“In the beginning, I could ignore who my opponent was,” a nervously giggling Garcia said in her press conference afterward. It didn’t take much imagination to fill in the second half of that sentence, even if Garcia, whose English is limited, couldn’t do it herself. She couldn’t ignore where she was and what she was doing forever.

So what was Garcia doing so well, and why was I composing a variety of epic, “I have seen the future of rock and roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen,” openings for my post on her? The first and most important reason is her forehand. She’s a skinny girl with a live arm and an easy whip—there’s a little bit of a right-handed Rafa thing going on, in the way she finishes across her body and the sidespin she can get on it. But she can also hit it surprisingly early and with a deceptive quickness; early on, it caught Sharapova off guard.

Garcia also has good little-step footwork and can move across clay smoothly. She has a solid two-handed backhand but can take a hand off it when needed and hit a pretty natural-looking one-hander for defense. Garcia has a tennis player’s DNA. She can do the big things that you need to survive in today’s WTA—i.e., hit the hell out of the ball—and she can do the little things that have set stylishly great players like Justine Henin apart in the past. Murray liked how Garcia absorbed Sharapova’s power and redirected the ball so well.

Garcia’s peak, and her most spectacular and confident redirecting of Sharapova’s power, came when she was receiving serve at 3-1 in the second set and up 0-30. When Maria missed her first one, Garcia stepped well inside the baseline, farther inside than she had before in the match. It was a cocky, risky move, and I thought it was going to backfire when Sharapova hit a very good second serve into Garcia’s forehand corner. But the kid moved up and knocked off a blatant crosscourt winner. It felt like the match was over.

But this is where the story of the day, and of this post, takes its turn. It circles all the way around, in fact, from a tale of youth—which, despite Garcia’s subsequent collapse, is still legit—to a tale of experience and the still-amazing mental stamina of a veteran champion. Sharapova said she wasn’t moving well at the start and was too worried about the windy conditions. She finally relaxed in the second set.

Most important, Sharapova was there, still in it, and ready for the 17-year to come down to earth, which is exactly what happened—Garcia hit the earth with a thud that could be heard around Paris. The turnaround from 1-4 down—Sharapova, unbelievably, would win the final 11 games—was mostly the result of Garcia’s nosedive. She began to double fault. She began to miss routine shots that she had been cracking for winners. She began to hit the ball much more softly, especially on her backhand side. She even began to stumble a little—it’s hard to believe what nerves can do to you on a court until they knock you flat.

But Sharapova was there to take advantage of it all, still in ther mentally. Would Kim Clijsters have been able to do the same thing today? We’ll never know, but the two Slam champs always present a stark contrast when it comes to their respective reaction to adversity. Sharapova plays 0-40 points as if they’re 30-30 points; at her worst and most pessimistic, Clijsters does the opposite.

So let’s leave this match and this post with dual memories. I sat in Chatrier watching a potential future of the women’s game, but that future remains unwritten. As Sharapova herself said when she was asked to assess Garcia’s game, “There will be a lot of wins and lot of losses. It’ll be a long road.” Indeed, Garcia is right at the opening gate. When she became confused in English, her first reaction was to stick out her tongue and laugh. But by the end, when the French reporters surrounded her for their final questions, she was beaming. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

Sharapova wasn’t going to join Murray or any writer in predicting all-time greatness for Garcia. She was already a Wimbledon winner at 17, after all. It’s fun to glimpse the New, but it’s also heartening to see a veteran, a champion, a former phenom, who still wants to keep traveling down that long road.

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