Maria Sharapova showcases her Midas-like PR skills with US Open withdrawal

Maria Sharapova

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

On the surface, there isn’t any problem at all. Maria Sharapova is ranked No. 3 in the world, she has a career Grand Slam to her credit, she is supremely comfortable in her own skin, and she is the richest female athlete on the planet. That’s as close to an ideal tennis player’s life as you can get.

But dig a little deeper, and the complications emerge. As her recent withdrawal from the upcoming US Open shows, her life has started looking less like a professional athlete’s career and more like a theatre artist’s performance. And it’s no ordinary performance either; it’s a display so heavily teeming with contradictions and mystique that it can make your head spin.

The list of contradictions surrounding the Russian is as long as it is intriguing. For starters, Sharapova has a legion of devoted admirers all over the world, but it’s incredibly hard for any serious student of the game to be a ‘fan’ of hers. If you admit to being a Sharpaova fan, will you be accused of falling prey to her good looks like the rest of the ‘superficial’ world? Being a Sharapova fan is simultaneously the most natural and the most embarrassing thing in the world for a tennis follower.

Her game is a study of opposites. As I had noted in one of my earlier posts, Sharapova’s style of play shouldn’t technically lend itself to consistent results, and yet she is one of the most consistent players on the tour, almost unfailingly reaching the late stages of tournaments when she’s fully fit. Even more surprisingly though, once she reaches the business end of a tournament, her power-packed game which is designed to defeat anyone when it’s on, almost invariably comes up short against the very best of women’s tennis. You’d expect a player with such low margins as Sharapova to be a constant threat to the top players, and perpetually susceptible to the odd upset against a lesser player. The reality, though, is the exact opposite.

Sharapova’s famed mental strength is another mysterious little oddity. Against nearly every player on the tour, she makes up for her technical deficiencies with a tough, never-say-die attitude, and almost wills her way to victory. But when she faces one particular player – you know who I’m talking about – she turns into a jittery mental wreck, unable to put the ball in the court. Against Serena Williams, Sharapova’s biggest strength turns into her most damning weakness, and no one knows why.

Off the court, Sharapova is a model of professionalism – she trains harder than anyone else, never indulges in treacherous mind games, and never gives excuses for her losses. But on the court, her incessant grunting is hard to be described as anything other than gamesmanship; it is – there’s no denying this – an act that both intimidates and distracts her opponents.

Sharapova is a thorough diplomat, and she frequently uses her icy stare to make any feeble attempt at provoking a ‘spicy’ line out of her freeze before it even reaches the reporter’s lips. And yet, when Serena Williams made a few ill-advised comments about the Steubenville rape case - an incident that had as little to do with Sharapova as NASA’s Mars exploration program – the Russian couldn’t help but launch into a public tirade against her famed rival. Sharapova’s fierce reaction came completely out of the blue, and at one point even threatened to turn Wimbledon into a personal grudge match between the warring ladies (it’s probably just as well, then, that they both lost before they came anywhere close to their projected final matchup).

Things have just been getting progressively murkier since then. After Wimbledon, Sharapova announced the appointment of American legend Jimmy Connors as her coach. The decision seemed like a head-scratcher to everyone initially; how could the in-your-face methods of Connors possibly suit Sharapova’s quietly headstrong personality? But the tennis world found a way to make its peace with the partnership – if Sharapova trusted Connors to help her, who were we to argue?

One match later (a loss to Sloane Stephens), Sharapova promptly fired Connors. At that point, the question had to be asked: is she deliberately trying to confound the tennis world?