Relief all around as Sharapova returns to the top

TENNIS: JOHNNY WATTERSONon how the glamorous Russian's return to the final has provided a fillip for the women's game

KVITOVA, AZARENKA, Pironkova, Sharapova, Lisicki. Thoughts crossed people’s minds that it just looked like a bad hand in scrabble. Paszek, Bartoli, Cibulkova. Wimbledon, tumbling and lurching from quarter-final day with an assembly line of barely distinguishable base line hitters, all of them stars in the making but none quite sprinkled with gold dust. It is Sharapova who steps out a saviour of sorts.

The 24-year-old shrieks. The 125-year-old Wimbledon sighs. This week has been resurrected by the most famous sportswoman in the world. Only the All England Club commands that level of intervention.

Week one and the prospect of reigning champion Serena Williams galloping to the final offered the American a tilt at the almost impossible. Just two weeks of practice in her legs after almost a year of inactivity and organisers braced themselves for a family assault. The fear was she might just pull it off.

A successful excursion there so much undercooked could have cost the women’s game its reputation and taken it towards a new level of self-doubt.

Caroline Wozniacki stood in the shadows, a queen without a crown. The world number one arrived with five languages and a perfect smile but no major wins. The door ajar, she failed to open. Kim Clijsters, a warm story of family ties and mom beating the world would have carried it. The Wimbledon crowd would have bought Clijsters perfectly pitched normality. But a foot injury kept her at home in Belgium. You feel she didn’t mind so much.

Li Na dazzled us with the sheer numbers who watched her win at Roland Garros and carried bank default numbers of Chinese fans with her to London. Centre Court felt the rumble of a continent rising to the game but a Wimbledon crown seemed just that little bit too big, too fast. She left week one. Azarenka’s decibels, Pironkova statuesque and tall as a cherrypicker were burned off, the ice of Sharapova securing her a place against Petra Kvitova today and taking her back to the beginning.

This is where it started for the Russian. A first Grand Slam title at 17-years-old and now her career has gone the full circle. It has taken scenic detours and flights of fancy. It ran down cul-de-sacs and it hit a serious speed bump, most recently after shoulder reconstruction. Importantly it never lost its lustre or wattage.

Sharapova waned but kept the light alive and the vapour trail of camera men and management company executives follows the diva again to centre stage a full three-and-a-half years after she won her last Grand Slam in Australia in 2008. You see in women’s tennis image really matters.

Not fully embraced by the Wimbledon Centre Court but more loved than Serena, Sharapova is the poster girl for what can happen to you if you have the strokes and the looks. A Russian from the leave-your-family-as-a-child school of tennis, she was that hungry kid on the dusty court wearing holes in her runners.

Her story unfolds like one of the Charlie Chaplin poor tramp movies. At the age of seven, she attended a tennis clinic in Moscow run by Martina Navratilova, who recommended the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida. Former graduates were Andre Agassi, Monica Seles and Anna Kournikova. With money tight, her father Yuri was forced to borrow the fare to America. Neither could speak English.

Arriving with savings of €600, Sharapova’s father took various low-paying jobs, including dish-washing, to fund her lessons until she was old enough to be admitted to the academy. In 1995, she was signed by the management company IMG, who agreed to pay the tuition fees of $35,000 for her to stay at the academy. Paydirt for everyone.

From there it was a rise to the top of the game and to the top of the world. In tennis the number one position fell onto her designer-covered lap in 2005. That same year Peoplemagazine named her one of the 50 most beautiful celebrities in the world. In 2006, Maximmagazine ranked Sharapova the hottest athlete in the world for the fourth consecutive year. Forbesmagazine listed her as the highest-paid female athlete in the world in June 2007 with annual earnings of over $26 million and in January of last year, Sharapova renewed her contract with Nike, signing an 8-year deal for $70 million.

Now, in one double-fisted backhand and a thousand wails she has given the women’s game what it has needed in stuffy SW19, sex appeal, glamour, global reach and more importantly along with Kvitova fresh faces for the finals. The Williams, Venus and her younger sister Serena have won every Wimbledon final since 2000 except the 2006 championship, won by Amelie Mauresmo.

Nine-times winner Martina Navratilova said this week. “The French Open, Maria was the youngest semi-finalist. Here she’s the oldest. Maybe this is the changing of the guard. Maybe this is the new blood coming.”

The buttoned-up committee members of the All England Club will be thinking along similar lines. Sharapova’s rising this year is also Wimbledon’s triumph.