[vc_empty_space height="5px"]
By Giri Nathan
[vc_empty_space height="15px"]I often wonder how much players keep the actuarial stakes of a given match in mind while they’re still playing it, if the ranking points ever distract them from the actual tennis points. When Maria Sakkari won her semifinal match in Indian Wells this March, she knew immediately that she had become the No. 3 player in the world. “[In Greece] I was always the person and the player that, because my mom was very famous back home, they always used to say, ‘She’s never going to make it, even if she changes everything. She will never make it.’ And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I become one of the best players in the world,” she said at media day in Montreal last weekend. That No. 3 ranking is the high-water mark for any Greek tennis player ever, tied only by her pal Stefanos Tsitsipas. But the freedom of the underdog suits some people more than the pressure of the favorite; Sakkari learned that she was one of them. After losing in the second round at San Jose last week, she sat down with her coach, Tom Hill, and stared down reality.