Rising force or struggling champ? Class clown or prom queen? The story behind May's cover story shows that while Maria Sharapova is hard to miss in tennis these days, she's even harder to pin down.
By Joel Drucker
By the time she’s retired from tennis Maria Sharapova will have probably been on more than 200 magazine covers. And yet the funny thing is that while you’d think Sharapova is world-weary when it comes to publicity, she’s actually quite concerned with what’s written about her. At last year’s U.S. Open, Sharapova asked me if the story I was writing about her for TENNIS was done. When I told her it was far from completion, she raised an eyebrow.
“How come?” she asked.
“Because I’m still trying to figure you out,” I said.
And even now, when the issue is hitting newstands, that answer still holds true.
Though it’s tempting to sound blasé or jaded about being assigned to profile the top stars, I find assignments like this quite alluring – getting cozy with a player’s camp, learning about her past and present, the quest to obtain the personal interview. Tennis is a sport of exceptional individualism, and being able to provide a perspective into this game and its stars is a major reason I love writing about the sport.
The good news is that unlike in team sports, every tennis player is a quarterback. The bad news is that every player is also a team owner, focused strictly on personal needs. The NBA and the Los Angeles Lakers have the clout to convince Kobe Bryant to conduct interviews. Apart from post-match conferences, no such leverage exists in tennis. I’m envious of how profiles were once written, when TENNIS’ Peter Bodo would spend hours and even days with his subjects.
And so I went off in pursuit of Sharapova, a woman who likely occupies more advertising time and space than any female athlete on the planet but is also the center of an extremely tight-lipped posse – and one who herself rarely gives interviews.
A sad facet of tennis is that many times a player’s handler is more willing to give interview time to an unfamiliar face. Fortunately, that was not the case with Sharapova. Her agent at IMG, Max Eisenbud, has arranged several interviews for me with her, going back to when she was 15 and playing World Team Tennis. In this instance, familiarity was an asset. After a few weeks of e-mails between various parties (Sony Ericsson WTA Tour staff are the ones who arrange the final time and place), I interviewed Sharapova last August at the site of the tour’s San Diego stop.
My belief is that no matter how eloquently or inarticulately they speak, assessing tennis players should always start and end on the court. As I see it, how the person plays – that is, how he or she competes, fights, thinks, wins and loses – constitutes at least 51 percent of the verdict. Alas, because tennis is so undercovered, a good many of the journalists who come to it can end up basing their opinions more on coverage of press conferences than matches.
Still, as I saw in the course of researching Sharapova, her speaking style does indeed reveal much about her – good and bad. For all the efforts to market her as a vixen à la Kournikova, Sharapova is much more of a class clown than a prom queen.
For all the upsides of magazine writing – a profile can be far more enduring and insightful than a transitory newspaper piece – interim events can make things rather tricky. For example, at a key stage in the assignment, Sharapova proved she was no one-Slam wonder, winning the 2006 U.S. Open. When she made it to the finals of the Australian Open earlier this year, her arc seemed even that much sharper. But then she was pummeled by Serena Williams, and since then has hardly played her best tennis.
And so now we’re back to where I started, with Sharapova still sitting on top of the money mountain but once again trying to clamber back to the peak of the women’s game. Looks like she – and we – are still trying to figure it out. Consider the current story merely an attempt.
Read the end result, “Solving Maria” by Joel Drucker, in the May issue of TENNIS magazine.
“How come?” she asked.
“Because I’m still trying to figure you out,” I said.
And even now, when the issue is hitting newstands, that answer still holds true.
Though it’s tempting to sound blasé or jaded about being assigned to profile the top stars, I find assignments like this quite alluring – getting cozy with a player’s camp, learning about her past and present, the quest to obtain the personal interview. Tennis is a sport of exceptional individualism, and being able to provide a perspective into this game and its stars is a major reason I love writing about the sport.
The good news is that unlike in team sports, every tennis player is a quarterback. The bad news is that every player is also a team owner, focused strictly on personal needs. The NBA and the Los Angeles Lakers have the clout to convince Kobe Bryant to conduct interviews. Apart from post-match conferences, no such leverage exists in tennis. I’m envious of how profiles were once written, when TENNIS’ Peter Bodo would spend hours and even days with his subjects.
And so I went off in pursuit of Sharapova, a woman who likely occupies more advertising time and space than any female athlete on the planet but is also the center of an extremely tight-lipped posse – and one who herself rarely gives interviews.
A sad facet of tennis is that many times a player’s handler is more willing to give interview time to an unfamiliar face. Fortunately, that was not the case with Sharapova. Her agent at IMG, Max Eisenbud, has arranged several interviews for me with her, going back to when she was 15 and playing World Team Tennis. In this instance, familiarity was an asset. After a few weeks of e-mails between various parties (Sony Ericsson WTA Tour staff are the ones who arrange the final time and place), I interviewed Sharapova last August at the site of the tour’s San Diego stop.
My belief is that no matter how eloquently or inarticulately they speak, assessing tennis players should always start and end on the court. As I see it, how the person plays – that is, how he or she competes, fights, thinks, wins and loses – constitutes at least 51 percent of the verdict. Alas, because tennis is so undercovered, a good many of the journalists who come to it can end up basing their opinions more on coverage of press conferences than matches.
Still, as I saw in the course of researching Sharapova, her speaking style does indeed reveal much about her – good and bad. For all the efforts to market her as a vixen à la Kournikova, Sharapova is much more of a class clown than a prom queen.
For all the upsides of magazine writing – a profile can be far more enduring and insightful than a transitory newspaper piece – interim events can make things rather tricky. For example, at a key stage in the assignment, Sharapova proved she was no one-Slam wonder, winning the 2006 U.S. Open. When she made it to the finals of the Australian Open earlier this year, her arc seemed even that much sharper. But then she was pummeled by Serena Williams, and since then has hardly played her best tennis.
And so now we’re back to where I started, with Sharapova still sitting on top of the money mountain but once again trying to clamber back to the peak of the women’s game. Looks like she – and we – are still trying to figure it out. Consider the current story merely an attempt.
Read the end result, “Solving Maria” by Joel Drucker, in the May issue of TENNIS magazine.
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