From a marketing perspective, the women's tennis tour should be sitting pretty right now. The seduction quotient has been upped significantly with the emergence at the top of the game of Ana Ivanovic, who stands shoulder to shoulder with the sport's other glamorous, photogenic champion Maria Sharapova.
They are the ad executive's perfect glamor-and-guts dream, two sportswomen (not to mention other similarly attractive female players such as Maria Kirilenko of Russia, Severine Bremond of France and Slovak Daniela Hantuchova, the top seed at the upcoming Commonwealth Bank Tennis Classic in Bali) who can tough it out on court but scrub up nicely to promote any number of products, from cell phones to watches to good causes. It's a sex appeal that other major sports lack.
But it's not a picture-perfect story in women's tennis today.
The sudden retirement of Justine Henin shortly before the French Open in May was a shock to the game. After a desultory early part of the year -- including suffering a thrashing at the hands of Sharapova in the Australian Open semifinals -- the Belgian cited personal reasons in calling it quits.
Her unexpected exit (as well as the retirements, unofficial or not, of former top tenners Jennifer Capriati, Monica Seles and Kim Clijsters) has led to a musical chairs scenario for the top rankings of the sports.
Ivanovic, the French Open champion, took over the top spot, before a string of upset losses and injuries saw her drop behind compatriot Jelena Jankovic, before regaining her former place.
Although Sharapova is now out of the running with a recurrence of a shoulder injury, also vying for the top are her compatriot Dinara Safina (whose breakout results this year make her many fans' unofficial number one), the Williams sisters, whose power brand of tennis is virtually unstoppable when they are on and injury-free, and Elena Dementieva, the athletic Russian with the dynamite groundstrokes and an often fragile first serve. After winning Olympic gold in Beijing, Dementieva finally seems to have regained her confidence -- for now.
Still, the changing of the guard does not sit well with some lovers of the game. Fan websites are crammed with angry laments about women's tennis today, that it is boring, dominated by baseline ball bashers (in contrast to the all-court game of Henin and her gorgeous, stylish backhand) who are not fit to take over from the Belgian.
Ivanovic's poor form and Jankovic's record (she had never reached a Grand Slam final coming into the ongoing U.S. Open) have brought out the "haters", the fans who troll through webpages adding their vitriolic five cents' worth.
Part of the issue for many may stem from the unusualness of the current topsy-turvy ranking situation. From the beginning of open tennis in 1968, there have been clearly defined rivalries at the top of the game: Billie Jean King vs. Margaret Court; King vs. Chris Evert; Evert vs. Goolagong Cawley; Evert vs. Navratilova; Navratilova vs. Graf; Graf vs. Seles; Graf vs. Sanchez Vicario, and so on, continuing with the rivalries between Martina Hingis and the Williams sisters, and Henin with Amelie Mauresmo in 2006. The current situation has none of that comforting consistency in which fans could pick between two sides and root for their top shot.
Then there is the "boring, everybody plays the same" argument. It's true that the Williams' brand of power hitting, plus technological advancements in racket materials and strings, has changed the way the game is played.
"With the strings today, you can basically hit anything as hard as you like and it still goes in the court," Navratilova told The Jakarta Post WEEKENDER earlier this year.
Although she favors the same kind of restrictions on equipment technology used in golf, there is no going back in tennis (she herself benefited from switching to a graphite racket from wood in the early 1980s). *And while the power game can be ugly when a weaker player is being steamrolled or, as with Sharapova in the past and Ivanovic recently, the power hitter experiences woeful timing on her strokes and cannot keep the ball in play, when it comes together it is a sight to behold, a thing of raw, intense beauty.
Witness the Wimbledon final between the Williams' sisters and their U.S. Open quarterfinal in New York City this past week that contained sizzling, spectacular rallies that pushed both to the brink, or Safina's dissection of Flavia Pennetta game in the same round, with a blasting return followed by an exquisitely placed wrong-footing pass.
So is women's tennis losing its luster? Look at it this way. It is evolving and changing, just as it has throughout history, from the famed baseline game of Helen Wills Moody in the 1930s (considered the power hitter of her time), the army of American serve and volleyers in the 1950s and Chris Evert's precision groundstrokes and double-handed backhand in the 1970s.
Indonesia's Yayuk Basuki, a former top 20 player known for her stylish play, has at the age of 37 returned to European satellite tournament play in doubles and is enjoying success, despite the vast changes in the game since she played in the 1990s.
Yes, Henin is gone (although many wistfully hope she will one day return), the power game is here to stay and the personalities and individual styles will continue to change. And that is a good thing.
The writer is an editorial consultant with The Jakarta Post WEEKENDER.
