Serena Williams’s indomitable powers are, slowly but surely, on the wane. With Father Time on her tails, the American is galloping toward the sunset.
Li Na is in a similar space. With her growing catalogue of injuries, the latest of which have forced her out of this week’s US Open, the reigning Australian Open champion must be pondering her future.
Maria Sharapova, the glamour queen of tennis, will turn 28 in April and could be thinking about a “nice husband and a few kids”, as she said at the 2008 Australian Open, regarding the coming years.
Women’s tennis is seeking a new star, and for good reason, Canadian sensation Eugenie Bouchard has been anointed for the role with endorsements from virtually everyone that matters.
“She has the champion gifts,” Stacey Allaster, the head of the WTA Tour, said recently. “She has a mental capacity the likes of what I see in Serena, Venus [Williams] and Maria.
“She’s got good composure. She loves the pressure. There are only a handful of champions that have that attitude. Others are happy they made it to the quarters. She’s not.”
Players sound like a veritable echo.
“We all talk about her poise and mental toughness, but we don’t give enough credit to the big game that she has,” said Chris Evert, who won 18 grand slam titles during her playing career and now works as an ESPN analyst. “She’s aggressive, she moves well, she attacks all the time … she has no holes right now in her game.”
Bouchard’s tennis, however, is only half the story. The other half is her star power. No newcomer on the WTA Tour has managed to create such a buzz over the last decade, not since Sharapova won the Wimbledon crown in 2004. That, for the WTA, is a massive plus.
“What I’m trying to teach our athletes is that they’re not just sportswomen, you are sport entertainers,” Allaster said. “We’re in the business of fans, and Genie understands that.”
Impressed by her celebrity status, Venus Williams described Bouchard as a “movie star”, while younger sister Serena called her the “future face of tennis”.
“She’s had a stellar year, to be honest,” Serena said. “She’s done better than me in a lot of the tournaments.”
That is a fact. While Serena has yet to reach a quarter-final at a grand slam this year, Bouchard is the only player on the women’s tour to have reached the semis at all three majors of the year.
She made it to the last four in Australia and France, losing to the eventual champion on both occasions, before going one better at Wimbledon, where she made the final.
Things, however, have not gone to plan since her humbling 6-3, 6-0 loss to Petra Kvitova at the All England Club. Bouchard, 20, has one win in her last five matches and, it seems, she has yet to recover from the Wimbledon defeat.
For the first time in her fledgling career, Bouchard is showing the mental frailties that most would expect from a player her age.
The coming two weeks in New York will offer clues about which way Bouchard is headed. The transition from rising star to the hunted one is never easy. In recent times, we have seen the likes of Ana Ivanovic, Caroline Wozniacki, and Sloane Stephens struggle with the extra attention that early success brings.
It will be difficult for Bouchard as well, since she has always had things her way. Among her siblings, she was known as “The Chosen One” because mother Leclair spent much of her time driving Bouchard around for lessons and tournaments. She seems to be “The Chosen One” of women’s tennis as well, and Allaster is not too worried about her recent struggles. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” she said.
“I don’t need one-hit wonders. I need a sustained product that’s competitive.”
Bouchard is certainly being promoted as that product by the WTA and, if she can put that Wimbledon defeat out of her mind, the Canadian could repay them for that trust at Flushing Meadows. Time, as we know, is ripe for a change of guard.
arizvi@thenational.ae
