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Ana Ivanovic is an awfully nice girl, but I think she deserves to be written about anyway.
So I made a point of getting out to the Pacific Life Open early today, because Ivanovic was first on, playing Vera Zvonareva. The stadium looked like a bowl of hard candies that had been thoroughly picked over, with a handful of people here, another there. If you want to know the degree to which woman have sold their souls to tennis, ponder this: it's a sport in which two or more women have no problem being seen at the big event in the same dress. And get this - they wear the same dress in public for two, three, five days in a row!
You may wonder, Are these really women as we know them?
Well, all I can say is that you'd have to be a truly hard case to mistake Ivanovic, dressed in that sleek, understated salmon-colored number by Adidas, for, oh, a lemur, or a breadbox. I can actually feel myself cringing but I can't stop my fingers from writing this next three words. . .She's all woman!
But let's move on.
Ivanovic was on fire at the start. She broke Zvonareva immediately, if not sooner, and I already found myself wondering how I ought write about her, how I ought to approach this issue of her "niceness." Who did she remind me of, what does she represent? The closest I could come was deciding that if I tried to picture a tennis player as the girl in that great Tom Petty song, Free Fallin', it would be Ana Ivanovic. And I'll be danged if, on the very next changeover, the song didn't come pouring out of the stadium loudspeakers. I ask you - what are the chances?
Meanwhile, Miss Nice was pounding away at Zvonareva with the kind of gusto that's hard to equate with any definition of "nice." And this is no mean feat. You know what usually happens to "good girls" in tennis. They blow 6-1,5-4,40-love leads to lose matches, then press conferences that put to shame that stinko Kevin Costner movie, Waterworld. They get asked to be part of a Maria Sharapova photo shoot, and get put in charge of making sure that the ice in La Sharapova's diet cola is cubes, not crushed. They end up being the doubles partners and BFFs of positively horrible people who win lots of big singles titles, make gazillions of dollars, fire shots at ballkids' heads, and beg off attending their doubles partners weddings.
You know what they say: Good girls don't. . . They don't end up seeded no. 1 at events as big as the PacLife. On the rare occassions that they do, you have tennis's version of a life-affirming experience.
It was like that for me yesterday, and I was immediately struck by the degree to which Ivanovic's habits, mannerisms, and actual game seem natural extensions of her person. Her tennis is understated and effective, well-mannered and attractive, classically pretty rather than exotically alluring. Ivanovic is poised and disciplined, without appearing at all rigid or stiff (in fact,one of the best features of her game is the way she retains her knee bend and stays appropriately low through her stroke). As Pete Sampras has said of Roger Federer, without the obvious double entendre that applies here, "(S)he's easy on the eyes. . ."
I was paying particular attention to Ana's serve, and how well she moves it around and otherwise employs it to keep opponents off balance. Ivanovic doesn't rain down horror on her opponents; it's more like a gentle, killing shower. Although she's cranked serves that broke the magical (for the WTA) 120 MPH barrier, these days she mixes her deliveries with pleasing ease and efficiency. As her coach Sven Groeneveld told me when we were chatting after the match, "Ana has a very natural game; she's basically a relaxed player who is inside of her game and herself almost all the time."
"Balance" is the word that comes to mind, time after time, when I contemplate Ivanovic. She plays with nary a grunt, except for when it's justified by the flow of play (imagine that!). Even her exhortations and celebrations are modest, almost chaste. Shortly after she won the first set, 6-1, she celebrated a particulary good shot with the obligatory clenched fist, although it seemed half-hearted - more suited to safely transporting a captive cricket to safety than further menacing an already punch-drunk opponent.
Think that analogy is a strech? The other night, on Stadium 3, Ivanovic was embroiled in a bitter battle with Francesa Schiavone. Ivanovic was blitzed in the first set,6-2. The second set was tense, and close. Near the end of it, the sky filled with a blizzard of grasshoppers, which soon began dropping to the court. A number of times, Ivanovic escorted a bug to the sideline with the frame of her racket.
Good girls don't. . . stomp insects into a mess of green goo.
Ivanovic quit her Wilson racket not long ago,and now plays with a Yonex. One immediate benefit of the switch, according to Groeneveld, was an improvement in a shot Ivanovic has been working on with special focus lately, her backhand. It's a sweet shot now; the swing is deep and the follow through long. When she has enough time to get her weight behind it, she looks almost like a hammer thrower.
"Come on!" she cried, after making a winner. But even that was less outburst than reminder. She said it with a slight hiss, as if she were afraid to be heard and accused of being rude. Good girls don't. . . make a scene, draw attention to themselves, or get in the faces of girls like Zvonareva, who's been known to break down in tears on the court.
All this might be enough to make you wonder if Ana doesn't harbor some evil twin, or doesn't spend her down time behind closed doors, chortling maniacally as she sticks pins into a Sharapova doll. But Tom Tebbutt, the enterpising tennis correspondent for Canada's Globe and Mail, has been hanging around the ballboys to get their take on the players, and he brings good tidings. It turns out that Ivanovic is a big hit with ballkids, too. When he informed her that she had scored well in the unofficial popularity contest, Ivanovic said:
"Well, I saw in some matches players can be really nasty to the ball kids about the towel or balls and get upset. But you know, at the end of the day they are just kids, and nervous, too. Everybody's watching them, and maybe saying, 'Don't drop the balls.' You know, you have to realize that, so I really try to be nice to them and not get upset."
Sheesh. This girl better watch it. She may have to pitch a puppy into a trash compacter just to mollify the cynics and misanthropes.
This was not a great day for Zvonareva (the weather in her head is often pure Seattle), who was broken with mortifying predictability in the ninth game of the second set. Then Ivanovic served it out with a love game. Zvonareva has an appealing game and a load of athleticism (she's one of those low-slung players who moves like a crab). And unlike so many of her WTA peers, she's perfectly willing to smack a short ball to the corner and rush the net.
But Zvonareva is inconsistent, prone to corrosive self-doubts and breakdowns. It's like her game is a mathematical equation, meant to be explained through a long series of calculations. Only some bonehead inadvertently substituted a 6 for an 8 very early in the process, so the final result is way, way off what you rightfully expect, given the potential with which you're working.
Ivanovic's own equation worked out beautifully today, as it usually does. And if we know one thing, it's that nice girls don't. . . win tennis matches on the basis of their "Nicenesss." In all fairness to the less perfect citizens of Tennisworld, they also don't win them on the basis of "Not Niceness." The top players flourish because, in addition to whatever personal qualities or shortcomings they harbor, they work hard, and dot all the i's and cross all the t's.
I can see where Ivanovic's well-documented, worldwide popularity and obvious sex appeal, combined with her ability make the game look like an agreeable exercise, rather than a war, or personal vendetta, might create the impression that for her, tennis is a way of treading water between photo shoots. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ivanovic not only works hard, she has an impressive,long-term career strategy, concocted with the help of Groneveld and her personal trainer, Scott Burns, a lean, tanned Aussie who's so intense and focused on his mission that he doesn't usually speak to the press. These folks are serious. Trust me.
At Doha, early this year, Ivanovic badly sprained an ankle during her second round match, causing her to withdraw from the event. The night that she sustained her injury, Burns woke up every hour on the hour to massage and change the ice on Ivanovic's ankle. Burns got her sufficently put together for the next week's event in Dubai, where she lost just four games to Nicole Vaidisova before falling to Elena Dementieva (who would go on to win the event).
Intensely Dedicated + Attractive + Technically Sound + Sweetly Mannered = Immensely Popular + Hugely Successful.
That's a rare formula in tennis. Would that it always worked out that way.
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