!!!--Duiz™--!!!
Mar 20th, 2005, 04:44 AM
Tennis: Hero to zero
BARRY FLATMAN IN INDIAN WELLS
The Wimbledon triumph is now a distant memory for Maria Sharapova, and her coach fears a crash if she doesn’t get some rest
The man who tutored Maria Sharapova to the Wimbledon title just eight months ago has warned his multi-millionaire student she is seriously endangering her chances of becoming the best female tennis player in the world by maintaining a schedule that is too demanding.
Coach Robert Lansdorp usually prefers to watch the 17-year-old’s matches on television. However, he was tempted to make the two-hour drive from his Los Angeles home to the middle of the Californian desert and was horrified by what he saw as Sharapova was humiliated 6-0 6-0 by the world No 1 Lindsay Davenport in the Pacific Life Open. Any immediate aspirations Sharapova had of unseating Davenport at the top of the WTA Tour world rankings were rendered laughable as the youngster suffered the most crushing result of her professional career.
“Maria has got to be far more sensible than she is being right now,” Lansdorp said. “I want her to play this game at a very high level for many years and if she’s sensible there’s no question she will become the world’s No 1 player. But right now she’s not physically strong enough to maintain the schedule that’s been set for her.
“It was painful to watch her against Lindsay. I was shocked by what I saw because she seems exhausted. She was playing on empty and had no physical reserves to call upon.”
Lansdorp well remembers the rigours subjected on another of his former adolescent charges, Tracy Austin, more than two decades ago. The Californian was younger than Sharapova when she won the 1979 US Open title three months before her 17th birthday. Six months later she became the youngest world No 1 (Monica Seles and Martina Hingis have since attained the ranking at a younger age). She won the US Open again in
1981, her only other major, and was sidelined from the game before she turned 21.
“Maria is still a month short of her 18th birthday but she’s been putting far too many demands on her body,” said Lansdorp, who has coached Sharapova for six years. “She’s been flying all over the world but struggles badly to overcome jet lag and she’s been playing far too many tournaments. We are only halfway through March but already this year she’s been to Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, back to the United States, off to Doha in the Middle East and now here in California.
“She’s been sick on a couple of occasions, flew all the way to Paris and then was forced to pull out of the tournament because she was suffering from flu. Now it’s all taken its toll and she’s got to invest more time away from the tour to ensure she makes herself physically stronger.”
The signs were there in the way she could not offer any fight against the experienced Davenport. Soon after the Russian trooped disconsolately off court after offering the most token resistance for just 49 minutes, Lansdorp insisted on a meeting with Sharapova, her father Yuri and agent Max Eisenbud. “I said the time has come to be sensible and it would be best if she did not play next week’s Nasdaq 100 Open in Miami,” said the 66-year-old Lansdorp. “I appreciate it’s probably the biggest tournament in the world outside of the four Grand Slams and the sponsors are desperate for her to play. But she’s got to start thinking in the long term.
“Right now Maria is not sure what she’s going to do. She’ll fly back home to Florida in a day or so and says she wants to get her body fixed up a little bit. But then she’s only got a couple of days before she’s expected to fulfil tournament obligations in Miami. That is nowhere near long enough to recover from what she has just suffered.
“There’s no real let-up. Yet what she really needs to do is take time away. The big tournaments will still be there to win in the future and by then she will be much stronger.”
With a designer pink handbag slung over her shoulder and hands stuck deep into the pockets of her grey tracksuit, Sharapova was not about to make excuses for her lacklustre performance. Before she walked on court to face Davenport she had triumphed in all but one of her 22 preceding matches, the lone defeat coming in the semi-final of the Australian Open in January after she failed to capitalise on three match points against Serena Williams, the eventual champion. After concluding 2004 by winning the WTA Tour Championships in Los Angeles in November, she has added lucrative titles at the Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo and Qatar’s Total Open in Doha this year.
The Tokyo victory was highlighted with a 6-1 3-6 7-6 final win over Davenport, and Sharapova also beat the American so impressively in the Wimbledon semi-final last summer before she overcame Serena Williams.
Yet from the outset of the Pacific Life Open semi-final her displeasure was apparent. Cold and windy conditions forced Sharapova to play in a sweat top but while Davenport was forceful, she was hardly stretched by a jaded opponent. “I was playing the No 1 player and can’t expect to win every single match I play but just wasn’t feeling anything was out there,” said the third-ranked Russian, who hit one return of serve that bounced twice before it trickled into the net and misdirected another so erroneously that it finished in the photographers’ pit. “I guess next time I go out there against her, I definitely have to do something different. From her first return she was just banging the ball in. I never felt like I could dictate the play. There are days when you go out on court and feel like you can’ t miss. This was one where I was playing terribly and she was hitting every single ball as hard as she could off the line.”
If Sharapova does withdraw from the Miami event without citing a specific physical injury, she may be fined heavily by the WTA Tour. However, the amount would be negligible compared to the $568,477 she has accumulated in prize-money this year. Her fortune is predicted to surpass $100m if she maintains her career over the next 10 years and her agents, IMG, have secured long-term endorsements with Motorola, Tag Heuer and Canon as well as Nike and racket maker Prince.
The matter of money for players to appear at smaller tournaments — supposedly forbidden on the women’s tour but widely accepted as being paid to marquee names — has also become a topic of discussion. Such payments have long been accepted on the men’s ATP tour, though not for Grand Slams and the nine Masters Series events. In fact, such guarantees are often 10 times the figure on the cheque awarded to the tournament winner.
Larry Scott, chief executive of the WTA Tour, remains insistent the women will not follow the lead of their male counterparts despite requests from Player Council representative Nathalie Dechy to no longer make the payments clandestine. However, Scott did admit: “I know Sharapova has contracts with companies that pay her to play in Japan. But as long as there is a bona fide commercial opportunity that is outside her normal tournament obligations, I’m okay with the situation.”
In last night’s final against Belgium’s Kim Clijsters, Davenport suffered an extraordinary reverse of her own. She led the first set 4-0, only to lose the next six games. To her credit, the American gritted her teeth to win the second set 6-4, but Clijsters was not to be denied, taking the final set 6-2.
It was an emotional victory for Clijsters. Once ranked No 1 in the world, she has been out of the game for almost a year with a wrist injury and has seen her ranking slump to 133, but she is clearly back to something approaching her best form.
BARRY FLATMAN IN INDIAN WELLS
The Wimbledon triumph is now a distant memory for Maria Sharapova, and her coach fears a crash if she doesn’t get some rest
The man who tutored Maria Sharapova to the Wimbledon title just eight months ago has warned his multi-millionaire student she is seriously endangering her chances of becoming the best female tennis player in the world by maintaining a schedule that is too demanding.
Coach Robert Lansdorp usually prefers to watch the 17-year-old’s matches on television. However, he was tempted to make the two-hour drive from his Los Angeles home to the middle of the Californian desert and was horrified by what he saw as Sharapova was humiliated 6-0 6-0 by the world No 1 Lindsay Davenport in the Pacific Life Open. Any immediate aspirations Sharapova had of unseating Davenport at the top of the WTA Tour world rankings were rendered laughable as the youngster suffered the most crushing result of her professional career.
“Maria has got to be far more sensible than she is being right now,” Lansdorp said. “I want her to play this game at a very high level for many years and if she’s sensible there’s no question she will become the world’s No 1 player. But right now she’s not physically strong enough to maintain the schedule that’s been set for her.
“It was painful to watch her against Lindsay. I was shocked by what I saw because she seems exhausted. She was playing on empty and had no physical reserves to call upon.”
Lansdorp well remembers the rigours subjected on another of his former adolescent charges, Tracy Austin, more than two decades ago. The Californian was younger than Sharapova when she won the 1979 US Open title three months before her 17th birthday. Six months later she became the youngest world No 1 (Monica Seles and Martina Hingis have since attained the ranking at a younger age). She won the US Open again in
1981, her only other major, and was sidelined from the game before she turned 21.
“Maria is still a month short of her 18th birthday but she’s been putting far too many demands on her body,” said Lansdorp, who has coached Sharapova for six years. “She’s been flying all over the world but struggles badly to overcome jet lag and she’s been playing far too many tournaments. We are only halfway through March but already this year she’s been to Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, back to the United States, off to Doha in the Middle East and now here in California.
“She’s been sick on a couple of occasions, flew all the way to Paris and then was forced to pull out of the tournament because she was suffering from flu. Now it’s all taken its toll and she’s got to invest more time away from the tour to ensure she makes herself physically stronger.”
The signs were there in the way she could not offer any fight against the experienced Davenport. Soon after the Russian trooped disconsolately off court after offering the most token resistance for just 49 minutes, Lansdorp insisted on a meeting with Sharapova, her father Yuri and agent Max Eisenbud. “I said the time has come to be sensible and it would be best if she did not play next week’s Nasdaq 100 Open in Miami,” said the 66-year-old Lansdorp. “I appreciate it’s probably the biggest tournament in the world outside of the four Grand Slams and the sponsors are desperate for her to play. But she’s got to start thinking in the long term.
“Right now Maria is not sure what she’s going to do. She’ll fly back home to Florida in a day or so and says she wants to get her body fixed up a little bit. But then she’s only got a couple of days before she’s expected to fulfil tournament obligations in Miami. That is nowhere near long enough to recover from what she has just suffered.
“There’s no real let-up. Yet what she really needs to do is take time away. The big tournaments will still be there to win in the future and by then she will be much stronger.”
With a designer pink handbag slung over her shoulder and hands stuck deep into the pockets of her grey tracksuit, Sharapova was not about to make excuses for her lacklustre performance. Before she walked on court to face Davenport she had triumphed in all but one of her 22 preceding matches, the lone defeat coming in the semi-final of the Australian Open in January after she failed to capitalise on three match points against Serena Williams, the eventual champion. After concluding 2004 by winning the WTA Tour Championships in Los Angeles in November, she has added lucrative titles at the Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo and Qatar’s Total Open in Doha this year.
The Tokyo victory was highlighted with a 6-1 3-6 7-6 final win over Davenport, and Sharapova also beat the American so impressively in the Wimbledon semi-final last summer before she overcame Serena Williams.
Yet from the outset of the Pacific Life Open semi-final her displeasure was apparent. Cold and windy conditions forced Sharapova to play in a sweat top but while Davenport was forceful, she was hardly stretched by a jaded opponent. “I was playing the No 1 player and can’t expect to win every single match I play but just wasn’t feeling anything was out there,” said the third-ranked Russian, who hit one return of serve that bounced twice before it trickled into the net and misdirected another so erroneously that it finished in the photographers’ pit. “I guess next time I go out there against her, I definitely have to do something different. From her first return she was just banging the ball in. I never felt like I could dictate the play. There are days when you go out on court and feel like you can’ t miss. This was one where I was playing terribly and she was hitting every single ball as hard as she could off the line.”
If Sharapova does withdraw from the Miami event without citing a specific physical injury, she may be fined heavily by the WTA Tour. However, the amount would be negligible compared to the $568,477 she has accumulated in prize-money this year. Her fortune is predicted to surpass $100m if she maintains her career over the next 10 years and her agents, IMG, have secured long-term endorsements with Motorola, Tag Heuer and Canon as well as Nike and racket maker Prince.
The matter of money for players to appear at smaller tournaments — supposedly forbidden on the women’s tour but widely accepted as being paid to marquee names — has also become a topic of discussion. Such payments have long been accepted on the men’s ATP tour, though not for Grand Slams and the nine Masters Series events. In fact, such guarantees are often 10 times the figure on the cheque awarded to the tournament winner.
Larry Scott, chief executive of the WTA Tour, remains insistent the women will not follow the lead of their male counterparts despite requests from Player Council representative Nathalie Dechy to no longer make the payments clandestine. However, Scott did admit: “I know Sharapova has contracts with companies that pay her to play in Japan. But as long as there is a bona fide commercial opportunity that is outside her normal tournament obligations, I’m okay with the situation.”
In last night’s final against Belgium’s Kim Clijsters, Davenport suffered an extraordinary reverse of her own. She led the first set 4-0, only to lose the next six games. To her credit, the American gritted her teeth to win the second set 6-4, but Clijsters was not to be denied, taking the final set 6-2.
It was an emotional victory for Clijsters. Once ranked No 1 in the world, she has been out of the game for almost a year with a wrist injury and has seen her ranking slump to 133, but she is clearly back to something approaching her best form.