INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Let's just say it: Until today, it hadn’t been a great week for the WTA. The women’s tour went head to head with the men at just the wrong moment. The ATP semifinals gathered all the recent Grand Slam champions together, and the early rounds of the men’s draw showcased a potential future in the making in Milos Raonic and Ryan Harrison. Even the men's doubles, with its star players and cool new winning team, was livelier than ever.
Meanwhile, the women were learning a number of disturbing facts about their own future. That Venus Williams will be joining her sister on the sidelines for the tour’s next big mandatory tournament, in Key Biscayne; that her sister, Serena, is “depressed”; and that Kim Clijsters, the winner of the last two majors, doesn’t care about the tour’s events at all. The only consolation seemed to be the discovery that the WTA had been harboring a female Einstein among its ranks: On her way to the final, Marion Bartoli revealed that she has an IQ of 175, but that rather than do math or science or something boring like that, she never found anything she enjoyed doing more than slapping a tennis ball against a wall over and over. Now if that isn’t an endorsement for the sport . . .
But whatever the WTA’s struggles at the moment, the women's champion, Caroline Wozniacki, didn’t need to be quite so apologetic when she received her winner’s trophy, the most important of her career thus far. She wanted to make her speech quick, she said, because, “I know a lot of you are waiting to see the men’s final.”
Wozniacki should have been basking. Her win was a validation of her improved game this season—in the final, she won by subtly dictating as much as did by patiently defending. Her win was a nice turnabout from her heartbreaking defeat in the Aussie Open semifinals to Li Na after she held a match point; this time Wozniacki wobbled when she had the lead, but she didn’t fall over. And as far as the women’s tour went, her win was the best thing that happened all tournament; for one week, at least, the WTA's rankings rang true.
“Once again,” Wozniacki said afterward, “I showed that I can played great tennis, and I’ve beaten some good players this week.”
OK, good, there’s a little of the confidence, even cockiness, we expect from our No. 1's. And in truth, Wozniacki was more assertive about her abilities this week than I’ve seen her. She said that anyone who wanted to beat her had to play well, that they either had to overpower her or be willing to stay out there all day. Those were strong words coming from young Caro, who likes to be liked rather than feared.
But she backed them up, and as usual she did it with a deceptive toughness on the court. Wozniacki is best appreciated live. The stroke production that looks routine on TV is revealed to be the hard-earned product of strong legs and meticulous footwork. She plays a physical brand of tennis, but not an aggressive one—call it athletically defensive. Though “defensive” is a little unfair. Wozniacki plays with the defensive intelligence of a pool shark. It’s an axiom in that game that a good player never forces himself to take a difficult shot.
In 2011, though, Wozniacki has been constructing points proactively, with just a hint more risk, and she did that to perfection in the first set against Marion Bartoli today. She did it softly. A little hook forehand here, a nice quiet, gruntless topspin forehand safely placed down the line, a swing volley that looked like a caress, and the point was hers.
“I played very, very well, I thought,” Wozniacki said, “actually in the whole match, but the first set I felt like I had the most control. I had her running; I had her moving.”
It appeared that Wozniacki was going to run Bartoli straight back to the locker room. But the Frenchwoman made the match an entertaining one by doing the only thing she could do—trying a little bit of everything. She hit harder from the baseline. She came to the net. She hit drop shots on consecutive points. She lobbed. Most of all she carved up the court with the sharp angles that she can get with her two-handed strokes and extra-long racquet.
Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that it’s too bad we don’t see more of the wacky Bartoli and her mad-scientist father. As she noted afterward with a laugh, Dad, sitting back with his feet up the whole time, while his daughter ran herself ragged, was the sole member of her player’s box. From her painful-looking heel-toe service stance, to her strange motion, which begins with her right arm opening up like a car door, to her robotic between-point practice swings, Bartoli gives you a lot to watch, and the crowd at Indian Wells got behind her.
“It was one of the best matches I ever played from the second set on towards the end,” Bartoli said. “I think it was a great match to watch from the crowd, and I really enjoyed playing it.”
That’s the best part of sports: Just when you think the women’s game has had a week to forget, the final turns out to be the better match of the day, full of tactics, turnarounds, and crowd-pleasing surprises.
Then, after all that, Bartoli got tired. Wozniacki showed some nerves in closing it out, letting Bartoli back from 1-4 to 3-4 in the third set. There, though, she righted the ship with a fierce backhand crosscourt winner and a fist-pump. It was a little cocky, and that was a good thing. Wozniacki didn’t lose another game.
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History really does repeat itself, doesn’t it? Yesterday I watched Roger Federer lose a three-set semifinal to Novak Djokovic from the same seat where I had watched him lose a very similar three-set semifinal to Andy Murray two years before. Today, from that same seat, I watched Rafael Nadal lose a final to Djokovic that bore an uncanny resemblance to a semifinal he had lost to the Serb three years earlier.
