It’s 9:05 A.M. Monday morning. A deeply tan and muscular woman, 6-foot-tall, her face concealed beneath a black visor, is hitting volleys on Stadium 3. There’s no one in the stands or in the vicinity other than myself, until a father and his two young sons walk up to peek inside. They watch for a minute, mutely. The father leans over and asks me, “Who’s that practicing?”
“That's Yanina Wickmayer.”
He nods, turns to his sons, and begins to lead them away. “Let’s go see what else is going on.”
Obscurity and under-appreciation aren’t new concepts to Wickmayer. Unknown and ranked far from the Top 50 for most of her four-year career, the 20-year-old Belgian couldn’t even get any respect after she came out of nowhere to reach the semifinals of the U.S. Open last year. In an on-court interview with her opponent in that round, Caroline Wozniacki, ESPN’s Pam Shriver referred to her with something less than awe in her voice: “Now you play Wickmayer,” she told Wozniacki. The implied next phrase being: “Whoever that is.”
All that changed, in a bad way, last November. Wickmayer, along with fellow Belgian Xavier Malisse, was given a one-year ban for failing three times in 2009 to alert tennis’ drug-testing authorities of where she could be found for out-of-competition tests. The ban was later overturned by a Belgian court, and the case remains tied up in that country’s legal system—it could be years before anything is resolved. Wickmayer, who said she cried for days when she learned of the ban, maintains that she was away from home when the doping authorities attempted to contact her for testing. She says she hadn’t realized that she was subject to the rule, since it only applies to players in the Top 50, a club she didn’t join until the fall.
Wickmayer is nothing if not determined—her eyes have a steely quality—and, though she denies it, she appears to have been motivated by the ban. She began the year with a title in Auckland and extended her countrywoman Justine Henin to three sets in the round of 16 at the Australian Open. Because she had to qualify, she actually won seven matches in Melbourne. But all that tennis took its toll. Wickmayer lost early in her next two events, in Paris and Dubai.
“I started off the year really well,” she said today. “That was quite exciting. Then I was sick. I had a stomach flu, so I was pretty bad [in those tournaments]. I was mentally tired, but I’m feeling better again and playing good here.”
Wickmayer has won two three-set matches so far in Indian Wells. Today she faced Italy’s Roberta Vinci, a 27-year-old with a nice but inconsistent one-handed slice backhand who pretty much defines the term “crafty veteran.” It looked like a match that could trip up a young and relatively inexperienced baseline basher like Wickmayer.
“Baseline basher” sounds like an insult, of course, but what I really mean is that Wickmayer, though she’s Belgian, has brought a pugnacious Eastern European approach to the sport that contrasts sharply with the bouncy athleticism Kim Clijsters and the classic flair of Justine Henin. Instead, Wickmayer, who is coached by her father (her mother died of cancer when Yanina was 9) and who joined the Mouratoglou Academy in Paris in January, has followed in the Maria Sharapova footsteps. She whips her forehand around her head and circles through the backswing on her two-handed backhand, both à la Maria. She can’t match Sharapova’s screech, but she has developed a reliable grunt, and at least for the moment her serve is an asset. Despite a high ball toss and a lack of flexibility in her front leg—she doesn’t get much knee bend before she extends up—she hits it cleanly for power and has a kick serve that bounced high and won her several points outright against the shorter Vinci.
Like most Eastern Euros, Wickmayer’s best shot is her backhand. She has the flexibility to hit it completely flat or with topspin. Her forehand, which she hits oddly—the racquet head is perpendicular to the ground at contact—is shakier. When Wickmayer stumbled at the start of the second set, it was the forehand that let her down. She appeared to get tight, which is not an uncommon occurrence after an easy first set. The nerves manifested themselves in her forehand, which she began guiding rather than hitting, with predictably bad results.
“I’m a little disappointed about the second set,” she said. “I let her back in the game and started playing less aggressive, and she took over.”
What was surprising, and what bodes well for Wickmayer in the future, was how she handled this bad stretch of play. With a player this intense—think Victoria Azarenka—the flip side will often be a temper, a temper that can easily be lost. As Wickmayer went down 1-3, and then 1-4, and then 1-5, I waited for the meltdown. I’m happy to say that it never came. Wickmayer kept her head in it and climbed back to 3-5 before Vinci finished the set off.
The momentum from the second carried over into the third, when Wickmayer turned the rallies around completely and jumped to a 3-0 lead. “I just started off really moving well,” she sad of the third set, “and being aggressive on my legs and moving into the court.”
Wickmayer held out for 6-3 and the match. For today, at least, she showed that determination and intensity don’t have to go hand in hand with impatience and negativity, which is often the case with the Russian and Eastern European women. Sharapova has that winning psychological combination, but it’s a rare find. Wickmayer is aware of its importance. Asked today what she’s improved most over the last year, she said, “Mentally, for sure. Today I proved that even if the second set wasn’t too good, I can go into the match and do things better and just start over and play good again in the third. A year or two ago I wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
Wickmayer lacks finesse and touch—Vinci was by far the smoother player—but she’s tough, and she’s a jock whose height doesn’t hinder her movement. She’s the flavor of the month, but will that taste last into next month, or next year? There's no saying on the WTA side these days. But she did make at least one stride today, recognition-wise. Near the end of her match, I caught a conversation between two guys in front of me.
“Who is that?” one of them asked. His friend was a big blond dude in a sweaty baseball cap who had just cracked open a can of Bud. I anticipated a shrug, like the one I got from the father this morning while she was practicing. Instead, the big dude turned and said, “That’s Yanina Wickmayer, ranked No. 13.”
For the record, Wickmayer is No. 15. But maybe this guy knows which way she’s heading.