Let’s take a few minutes to compare the resumes of Nicole Vaidisova and Zheng Jie. The 19-year-old Vaidisova spent much of her life at Nick Bollettieri’s tennis academy, which has produced, or helped to train, some of the best player’s the sport has known. She’s 6 feet tall and powerfully built. Her serve often approaches 115 mph. She is only one of six women in the history of the women’s tour to win five singles titles before the age of 17 (along with Tracy Austin, Andrea Jaeger, Monica Seles, and Martina Hingis--pretty good company). At age 14, she made her professional debut and every year since she has been marketed as the next best thing in women’s tennis, a multiple major champion in waiting.
Zheng, 24, is 5-foot-4, and weighs 126 pounds. She has no tennis players in her family and didn’t start playing tennis until age 10. As I learned (and was not surprised to learn) while reporting a story on tennis in China (due out in our magazine in August), Zheng, like other players of her generation, didn’t have optimal training as a junior. Even at 10, she was too weak to wield a racket and needed to swing with both hands. In her earliest lessons, one coach would instruct as many as 20 kids. With so many kids and so few coaches, the kids were often asked to watch, rather than play along (imagine learning tennis via lecture). In China she has become something of a star for her success in doubles (she and Yan Zi won titles at the Australian Open and at Wimbledon in 2006), but she has never been hailed as one of the tour’s most promising players. I can't resist adding that Zheng, according to the WTA Tour's notes on the women's quarterfinals, "admires her parents and grandparents." Thanks for the tip!
Vaidisova and Zheng met on Court 1 at Wimbledon yesterday, and if you had just dropped into the match, via Jelena Jankovic’s helicopter, without knowing anything of their histories, opportunities, and past performances, you would have thought that Vaidisova had hired Zheng, an experienced professional, to teach her a lesson. And teach Zheng did. As Vaidisova flailed about on her forehand, chased after awkward ball tosses on her serve, and repeatedly lost her balance (was this grass or ice?), Zheng patiently created angles, flicked her impressive two-handed backhand crosscourt, and served as hard as her little frame would allow (she topped out at 106 mph and hit two aces; the hulking Vaidisova hit three). The first and third sets of Zheng's 6-2, 5-7, 6-1 victory were a master class of precision.
What happened on Court 1 yesterday makes one wonder about the importance of size in tennis. The game has gotten a lot bigger in the last 20 years: both the men and women are, on average, much taller, more muscular, and more powerful than in years past. But it's interesting how all the fears of the late 1980s--gloom and doom predictions about giants with big serves and strokes so powerful that there would be no place for finesse and tactics, or even rallies--have, largely, not been realized. It's better to have strength and size than not, but tennis still rewards the small, the crafty, the polished. Heck, a player not so different from Zheng--Justine Henin--would still be the No. 1 ranked player in the world if she had not retired before this year's French Open. Henin, to me, was supercharged version of Martina Hingis. Zheng is Hingis light.
Let's wade even deeper into the endlessly fascinating "evolution of the game" discussion. Does grass, as it plays today (truer bounces because of harder soil), favor small players or big players? It seems to me it gives the tiny as many advantages as it does the towering, and perhaps more advantages. The longer rallies last, the more important footing becomes--just ask James Blake, who last week cited his slips and slides as the main cause for his failures at Wimbledon. Novak Djokovic sometimes has trouble with this, too. Djokovic is a slider (he does it on hard courts more than any of the top men and excels at the clay-court glide) but his kind of hard running is not helpful on grass (it leads to falls). I recently had an off-the-record discussion with a top coach (so I won't name him or her) who cited Djokovic's balance and occasional lack of body control as his biggest weakness, especially on grass. This was before the tournament started.
Smaller players have an advantage when it comes to footing, for the simple reason that they have a lower center of gravity and a shorter stride. If they hit the ball flat, as Zheng does, they receive the best benefit of the grass: their shots bounce low, which forces their bigger opponents to bend. Short players have a more difficult time on the serve (fewer angles and less height over the net) but they have some advantages in this regard, too. Just look at Tanasugarn. She has a weak serve, but it has always worked well at Wimbledon because she never kicks it (she prefers the slice) and her low delivery lands in the box at a less severe angle and skids more than sits up. Grass improves her serve.
Here's some more casual evidence that being large can be a disadvantage at Wimbledon. Ivo Karlovic, the 6-foot-10 Croat with the booming serve, has lost in the first round here for four straight years now (last year he lost to Fabrice Santoro, who is Zheng-like in his lack of power and size). The two most surprising members of the men's quarterfinals this year are not just old and seemingly at the end of their careers, but tiny, too (the 30-year-old Arnaud Clement is 5-foot-8 and the 32-year-old Rainer Schuettler is 5-foot-11 in the same way that Andre Agassi is 5-foot-11--that is, 5-foot-10 at most).
None of these small wonders are likely to win Wimbledon, not when the best players are bigger (though not giants), stronger, and as good at the little things (Federer never seems to slip on grass; Nadal doesn't do it often, either). But it seems there will always be a place in tennis, and especially at Wimbledon, for the undersized.
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