To be in the backseat of a car, the cyanotype night on some minor highway, and pass at a distance of one or two hundred yards a rectangle of total green under pooled white lights is to see North American heaven. A community baseball feld, a high school football feld. A tennis court, occasionally. Say you’re a tennis-playing child from an oil town in Siberia where there are no courts, and no oranges, and in photographs of home it’s always snowing or sleeting or for another reason it’s gray. At the age of 6, having frst picked up a secondhand racket on the clay courts in Sochi, of the Black Sea, you arrive in Bradenton, Florida, home of Tropicana Products and the Bollettieri Tennis Academy. Will you ever get over it, the way the green lies shining against the dark? Maria did not. Maria Sharapova was, for a brief lambent time between 2004 and 2006, when she was 17 and 18 and 19, the best female tennis player on grass. She was trained by Nick Bollettieri at the IMG Academy on mostly hard courts, to hone her technique absent variables. She moved on clay, she said later, laughing, like “a cow on ice.” But on grass she was a dancer, a ballerina. One other body moves like hers, and it is that of the actual ballerina Sara Mearns, who shares with Maria a fssive mix of rigor and bounce. Some of Maria’s best serves in the middle 2000s are unbelievable when seen in slow motion. The extension of the right, working leg, reaching à la hauteur. The high toss followed by a hyperbolic swing of the racket, almost dismissive of the ball. Richard Williams, a former chief sportswriter for The Guardian who happens to share his name with the father-coach of Venus and Serena, wrote that a poem about Maria “might start with a description of the moment when she tosses the ball up to serve and, as it reaches its apogee, a line through her left arm and right leg forms a perfect perpendicular.” Which is to say, the girl knew her angles.
Green clay and grass showed Maria to advantage in early photographs. The verdancy made wonder of her coloring, brought out the complementary fush of her cheeks, the gray-green in her cat’s eyes, the analogous streaks of gold in her long straight hair. She looked like a sixth Lisbon girl in Grosse Pointe, as if she’d been away at summer camp while the other fve virgins were suiciding. She wore tank tops and little A-line skirts in white, or pink, or powder blue, obviously from Nike, and a simple gold-plated cross in the Orthodox style. No makeup. Quickbitten nails. Goody-brand snap clips in her basic ponytail. Before each serve, she paused to brush back the newly escaped baby hairs with her ball hand, and the down on her forearm snagged the light. In 2003 she won no matches on the hard courts at the Australian Open nor on the clay at the French Open, but when she got to Wimbledon, to the grass, she beat the 11th-seeded Jelena Dokic and reached the fourth round, where she was beaten by fellow Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova. The tour made her Newcomer of the Year. A talk-show host compared her to Anna Kournikova, and she was ready, saying, “That’s so old.”
At Wimbledon one year later, the turf looked like home. Before beating Serena for the frst and second-to-last time in her career, Maria ended her warm-up 10 minutes early, getting permission, like a bored kid in trig class, to go to the bathroom. Already the boys were crowding on the hill for a free show. She was nervous to be seen. She had only to look in the mirror to see the face of a winner. For days it had been raining; it was in the rain that she’d defeated Lindsay Davenport—“stunned” her, according to the papers—to arrive at the fnal, and now the sun had come through. Her whites were perfect. Her top was thinner-strapped than usual, shoulders so tanned. Her thigh-slit skirt, a new variation on a favorite style, conspired with ankle socks to make her legs look longer than possible. She wore semiformal opalescent drop earrings, and she had the gold cross, the snap clips, and she had altogether the mien of a 22-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow arriving to collect her Oscar in a gum-pink ball gown.
Helen Wills, in her instructive memoir, Tennis, describes a match between two of her fellow lawn stars, Suzanne Lenglen and Molla Mallory, that was unbeatable “for pure dramatic quality.” Lenglen, known in France as “the goddess,” was the most famous female player of the game and would remain among the most memorable. Mallory was then the closest to Langlen in talent, in hard-hitting style, and in fapperish glamour.
Yet when the two met at Forest Hills in 1921, says Wills, “the contrast at once struck the spectators. The players were both dressed in the conventional white, but the similarity ended there. The bronzed tan of Mrs. Mallory emphasized the pallor of the Frenchwoman. Mrs. Mallory’s determination was evident to every one as she strode along. Mlle. Lenglen danced at her side. The air was electrifed, the audience expectant.”
To the spectators at Wimbledon on July 3, 2004, there could have been no more electrifying contest, no more striking contrast, than that between Serena and Maria. Black and white. Master and novitiate. Serena, smoky-eyed and leonine, all cheekbones and brawn, a woman unmistakable for any other. Maria, new-skinned and from the neck up evangelical-looking, a girl your eyes would only just graze were she clothed and brunet, also maybe not six feet tall. Nine minutes into the frst set, Maria easing ahead of Serena two games to one, the commentator John McEnroe said, wowed, “You forget she’s 17.” Men in the stands, heterosexually doing just that. Some women too, feeling moved. Near the end of the second set, challenged and hanging on to her edge, Maria lobbed back a ball with such celerity and airy precision that Serena didn’t even chase it and Tracy Austin chuckled and said, “Nobody wake her up.” Meaning “her” as in the girl, meaning the girl was following a logic like there was no one before her. “It’s certainly dreamlike tennis,” said the BBC’s “Voice of Wimbledon,” John Barrett.
When it turned out to be no dream, she really had done it, Maria rushed up into the stands to fnd and be kissed by her father, Yuri Sharapov. Her agent, Max Eisenbud, was in the player box “crying his eyes out,” he’d later say. Cameras rolling, high-ranked ofcials waiting, the winner tried phoning her mother on an unbranded cell phone, and fnding herself short of reception she pantomimed adorable frustration to laughter in the stands. She held the Venus Rosewater Dish to her face like a golden refector on a studio shoot.
She was being a bit of a brat, being indulged. “I’m only 17,” she said again and again in postgame interviews. No one would lessen the extraordinariness of her win by thinking she was one minute older. Asked about those million-dollar endorsements, she said she hadn’t had the time to think about it, but joked she would love to endorse a chocolate brand. The sweetest thing she could think of, next to winning. The July issue of Vogue Italia was now on stands, and in it were glam shots of Maria, styled like a rich kid in Mommy’s closet, wearing, in one picture, Byzantine costume jewelry and a real fur coat over a belly-baring green-and-white jersey emblazoned with the words: TRUTH IS NOBODY CAN OUTPLAY ME.