On a woman who played every point like it was her last, won an unlikely career Grand Slam, and took her losses like a champ.
For most tennis fans, the only memorable aspect of the 2002 Wimbledon men’s final was the sight of a streaker bounding his way across Centre Court, and bringing a moment of hysteria to the normally orderly arena. If only the match, between Lleyton Hewitt and David Nalbandian, had been half as entertaining.
Fortunately, there was another, more intriguing final played at the All England Club that Sunday, one that would give us a glimpse into the sport’s near future. When Hewitt-Nalbandian came to its mercifully swift conclusion, I wasted no time making my way to the thinly populated side court where a sure-shot teenager named Maria Sharapova was playing for the girls’ title.
She was only 15, but her name had been in circulation for a few years. When a prodigy arrived with recommendations from Nick Bollettieri and Robert Lansdorp, you made sure you took a look. A look, and a listen. I could hear Sharapova, and her soon-to-be famous grunt, before I got to the court. In those says, she also hummed as she hit some shots. She did that at maximum volume, too.
Sharapova made her presence heard at Wimbledon from an early age.
Her frenetic, full-throated desire to win was what struck me most that day. There were smoother movers and more powerfully built athletes in the juniors, but this skinny-armed blonde looked as if she could overwhelm them all by sheer, feverish force of will. Along with Venus and Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal, Sharapova brought a new, headlong intensity to a new century of tennis.
Anything new in this tradition-bound sport tends to be polarizing, and that was true of Sharapova’s icy ruthlessness. Her shriek, her shivery strut and her bash-first style were a bit of a shock to fans’ senses. But as a tactic, her demeanor was effective. From the moment she walked into a stadium—upright, poker-faced, with purposeful little steps—she set a no-nonsense tone, and her opponents were left with no choice but to react to it. Or copy it. Her habit of walking to the back fence before she served, gathering herself, and then spinning back toward the baseline with her left fist clenched, would become a standard ritual among the next WTA generation.
I was impressed with Sharapova in 2002, but never dreamed that, two years later, she would beat Serena for the Wimbledon title. That week Sports Illustrated featured a photo of the beaming, 17-year-old champion on its cover, alongside the words “Star Power.” Sharapova would indeed become big business: Every year from 2008 to 2016, she topped the Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid women athletes.
More important, Sharapova lived up to her star billing on the court. Even amid her endorsements and cover shoots, she remained a competitor first. Her early passion for the fight never faded, and her point-by-point persistence never flagged; her record in marathon matches is a testament to that. She didn’t have an elegant game, double faults were an issue, and when she was bad, she could be very bad. But her ground-stroke drives were thrilling when she connected, and the backhand drop shot she developed was proof that there was more subtlety to her style than has been advertised.
A fast-court lover to start, she was ambitious enough to transform herself into a clay-court specialist, and win Roland Garros twice. Sharapova spent 21 weeks at No. 1, won 36 titles, and was the seventh woman in the Open era to complete a career Grand Slam.
Sharapova won the US Open in 2006, the Australian Open in 2008, and Roland Garros twice, in 2012 and 2014.
Sharapova at a press conference in May 2016, when she announced that she’d failed a doping test for meldonium.
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