No, that’s not how anyone described last week’s WTA Championships, though it was supposed to feature the eight best women in the world. Rather, that’s how, with an awkward twirl of her arm, Lindsay Davenport described the glorious high-rise hotels of Dubai a few hundred times over the last few days. The women have been accused of a lot of things this past week—indifference, selfishness, sloth, greed, gluttony—but the worst sin had to be their low-budget shill-job for United Arab Emirates’s desert-and-steel paradise. You may not have liked the tennis from Los Angeles, but at least it offered a brief reprieve from the lethal ad combo ESPN served up during virtually every changeover. When we weren’t hearing from multi-millionaires shopping Dubai Duty Free, we were rocking to Lotto’s “Get On Up!” tennis shoe, the Raptor (just what every woman wants on her foot).
Meanwhile, the women’s tour again ended with a whimper in L.A. Top players were missing, promotion was minimal, and crowds for weekday matches were sparse. There seemed to be more energy at the smaller European events in Filderstadt and Linz that led to this big-money event. Or maybe the European audiences just didn’t look as bored as the slumped and sprawled-out fans in L.A.
For a second straight year, the event was partially rescued by an entertaining final weekend. In 2004, Maria Sharapova won a tense grudge match over Serena Williams; this year the final was a friendly contest between two French Fed Cup teammates and longtime head cases, Mary Pierce and Amelie Mauresmo.
Now, I’ve been known to do a little Pierce bashing from time to time. Her tics will always be irksome—she even appeared to have added a couple last week, stretching her mouth wide before returns and cleaning her eyelashes when things weren’t going well. But I’ve also never found her stone-handed, face-the-net, muscle game appealing. That said, Pierce was impressive in L.A., and she continues to make breakthroughs, 15 years into her career. She beat Kim Clijsters for the first time in the round-robin and Lindsay Davenport for only the fourth time in 11 tries in the semis. Her quickness was surprising; Pierce has lost weight, and she was pouncing on the ball all week—“boundin’ and poundin’ from the ground” as New York Knicks announcer Walt Frazier might put it (sorry, I’ve been watching the Knicks try to get their first win of the year). Before last week, I had thought of Pierce’s late-career renaissance as a product of the lax commitment of the top players. But, like Andre Agassi, she’s done a rare thing for a 30-year-old player—she hasn’t lost a step.
Wasn’t it nice to see Amelie Mauresmo celebrate a title this big? Depleted field or not, it’s the highest-profile victory of her decade-long career. Mauresmo has been in many Slam semis and quarters and was the finalist in L.A. two years ago, but she’s never raised her game at the right time. She typically plays just well enough to lose, a product perhaps of her now deeply ingrained stoicism about defeat. Mauresmo almost gave it away yesterday, going down 0-40 when she served for the title at 5-4 in the third. Fortunately, she was playing the game’s new bridesmaid, Pierce, who lost two Slam finals this year. She obliged Mauresmo yesterday by suddenly losing track of the court just when she had a chance to get back into the match.
Mauresmo may be the most entertaining woman to watch. Not many players on either tour have her variety and hands. Crosscourt drop shot? She’s got it. Improvised forehand drop volley on the run? Sure. Still, she looked ready to pull her disappearing act in the semifinals, going down 3-5 to Maria Sharapova in the first set. But it was the Russian who got tight and let her opponent back in. It was a strange defeat for the defending champion. Has a season of tight semifinal defeats shaken her formerly steely confidence? Against Mauresmo, Sharapova looked tired in the second set, and her reliable ESPN booster, Mary Joe Fernandez (her husband is a tennis agent at IMG, the same company that represents Sharapova, among many others) began to say that she could be tired from a recent three-set win over Lindsay Davenport. But Fernandez’s partner in the booth, Cliff Drysdale, wasn’t buying it. He thought she had succumbed to nerves, and that surprised him. While Sharapova was indeed hurting, Drysdale was right on both counts. It will be interesting to see how Sharapova rebounds early next year.
So where does the floundering WTA Championships go from here? To another continent—it will be held in Madrid in 2006. This is part of the tours’ endless global chase for money/buzz—Germany is out these days, Spain and China are in. The international nature of the sport allows this kind of short-term cherry picking. The downside is that the events themselves build no character. The ATP’s big season finale was in Texas the last two years. It’s going on again now—in Shanghai. This may not seem like a big deal, except that the appeal of pro tennis is largely about place. The most prestigious and well-recognized tournaments—i.e., the Grand Slams, which seem to get bigger every year—each have a distinctive character that even casual sports fans recognize. Three years in L.A. did build a distinct personality for the WTA Championships. It just wasn’t one that any sport would want to keep.