French Open 2011: It's All About the Style

Yes, the ‘age’ angle is being a little overused in tennis circles these days. Na Li, who became the first Chinese Grand Slam champion when she defeated Francesca Schiavone 6-4, 7-6 in yesterday’s French Open final, is no spring chicken after having spent 12 years on the tour. But the only thing more taxing for her 29-year-old body than smacking those vicious backhands must be answering the same old question in every press conference she’s faced this year. What does she think is the reason for her success at this late stage of her career? What has changed over the past couple of years that has made her so much more of a threat now than she ever was in her ‘prime years’? How has she arrested the effects of aging so efficiently? Li would’ve been forgiven if she had, rather than give a straight answer to any of these questions, instead given the questioner a death stare and announced that her conscience refused to entertain the astounding daftness of every single reporter under the sun. But just as she has learned to do so well on the court, she’s kept her calm in the press room too. “Age doesn’t mean anything. Age just paper” was one of the more memorable quotes coming from Li in the past fortnight. And she’s right – there was nothing in her performance all through the French Open this year that suggested she was any less energetic or enthusiastic than the hordes of teenagers and twenty-somethings bouncing about around her.

Is it just me, or has it started taking considerably longer for female players to develop their games? Maria Sharavpoa, who’s referred to as a veteran these days despite being only 24 years old, was the last true ‘prodigy’ on the women’s tour. The days of 16-year-olds beating up on their more accomplished rivals (think Chris Evert, Monica Seles, Martina Hingis) are long gone. Is this a sign that the women’s game has become more well-rounded and pervasive? That is one way to look at it, but another interpretation could be that the talent pool has simply dried up, which gives the women with limited but solidly mechanical games developed through years of playing (and not always winning or even playing well) an advantage over the younger players. I’m not altogether sure whether we can generalize the whole sport by choosing one interpretation over the other, but what I am sure of is that Li’s game cannot possibly be categorized as the unskilled, mechanical type that has only gained traction because of homing in on a target for years together. And I say this because Li, that same diminutive little Asian who’s listed as 5 feet 7 inches tall and seems even smaller when she stands next to her hulking opponents on the court, is so full of talent that sometimes her play looks positively unreal.

Li has always had an ultra-aggressive mindset on the court, a mindset that is surprising not only because of her size limitations but also because of the relatively modest tennis history in her country. When your people as a whole are not used to dominating bigger and stronger opponents from faraway exotic lands, it’s natural, when pitted against those seemingly supernatural aliens, to have a defensive, survival instinct rather than an imposing, offensive one. But such compromising stoicism has never been Li’s style. Over the years, when I watched her swinging away her racquet, combining a generous helping of glorious winners with an equal measure of random, inexplicable errors, I always felt a twinge of sadness that she simply didn’t seem to have it in her to screw her head on straight, learn to be more patient, and make full use of all that talent.

Then 2011 happened, and all of a sudden Li brought an element that was previously completely alien to her game, consistency, while retaining a substantial portion of her all-out, no-holds-barred attacking style. A maiden appearance in a Grand Slam final at this year’s Australian Open was the almost inevitable conclusion, where she made all the right noises against Kim Clijsters for a set and a half before Clijsters dug deep and pulled out a hard-fought win. Li didn’t do too much wrong in Melbourne; she was simply beaten by a superlatively skilled athlete on a hot streak. But yesterday, there wasn’t much danger of something like that happening in Paris; while Schiavone, her opponent, is possibly the most skilled player on the tour today, her athleticism is nowhere close to that of Clijsters. It helped, too, that Li had just come off a remarkably impressive win in the semifinals, dousing the screams of a desperate Maria Sharapova with a minimum of fuss. Li was not going to go into another Slam final as the clear underdog, and she was clearly enjoying every bit of it.

Still, this was clay, Li’s least favorite surface, and she was squaring off against someone who was familiar with performing on the highest stage. Those two factors probably explain Li’s temporary blip with the finish line in sight. The tension in her play when she was two holds away from the match was palpable; the wild errors so common with the Li of old resurfaced, and Schiavone broke serve, threatening to take the match to a 3^rd set, where her experience would be a definitive advantage. But Li, much in the same manner as Novak Djokovic this year, has learned to regain her focus when things aren’t going her way. She seemed to physically banish all the negative vibes from her mind as she started to put more margin into her strokes, holding serve in a couple of nervous games to stay hanging in the set by a thread. But when the tiebreak came around, she was back to her bold, attacking self, running away with the match in the blink of an eye. The demons in Li’s mind had been slain, and a Grand Slam champion was born.

The thing with being the first person to do anything is that it invariably spawns a litany of questions about how much of an influence the achievement is going to have on the millions of people who were privileged enough to witness it. Is Li’s win going to stimulate all the Chinese kids to rush to the tennis courts and start taking the game seriously? Will this title engender a burst of Chinese players in the rankings? Can this victory help turn tennis into a truly global sport? An incredibly tough series of questions to handle, there’s no doubt about that. But judging from how Li managed to field the age-related questions with so much poise, I think she’ll be okay with this new barrage of relentless interrogation. And she’ll do it all with a smile and a joke too. That, after all, is her inimitable, uncompromising style.