There is one infallible way to ruin a debate, and that is to mention Hitler, i.e. to “play the Nazi card”. When the infamous “reductio ad Hitlerum” come into dialectic play, it spells doom for any argument, all but driving it towards implosion – and this is especially true if the debate is web-based.
Ever since Maria Sharapova received a ban from the WADA, something akin to what I’ve described has started to happen. In what way? Well, regardless of what I’ll be writing in the next few lines, someone is going to comment on the article by reminding us that Maria has been banned for substance abuse. At that point, defense attorneys and prosecutors will enter the arena, and every other aspect of the discussion will become an afterthought – we might call Sharapova’s predicament “reductio ad Meldonium”.
This is why I’d like to propose a deal to our readers: since we’ve had plenty of occasions to discuss Sharapova and doping, and since we’ll have many more in the future, can we just for once refrain from talking about it, and instead reflect on something else? This isn’t a way to do her a favour (I’m not a defence attorney myself), but rather an attempt to create a chance for reasoning without incurring into the usual jingle.
Another subject that I don’t want to discuss is her glam side, the side that’s been able to become such a household name off-court, transcending sporting achievements. Nor do I want to talk about her resumé – 5 Majors, and a Career Grand Slam. What I’d like to do is focussing on the type of tennis she played, and how she’s left her mark on the women’s game from 2004 onwards.
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High-intensity power tennis
Events such as the arrival of the Williams sisters on the main stage, Lindsay Davenport’s successes, and the twilight of Martina Hingis’ dominance, are all viewed as the essential tokens of the passage to a new tennis era – the advent of power tennis. At the turn of millennium, a new generation of female athletes reached the top, provided with a special gift for injecting pace to their shots, thanks to a superior innate power.
Davenport was born in 1976, four years before Venus, and five before Serena. Sharapova, despite succeeding at an obscenely young age (she won her first Slam at SW19 in 2004), was born in 1987, and thus ascended on the WTA scene a few years later. For this reason, she can’t be considered among the progenitors of the new age, but at the same time she introduced a few innovations that are worthy of a mention.
To explain what I mean, I’ll quote from an article I wrote a few years ago about a historic match, the 2005 Australian Open semifinal between her and Serena (Williams won with a 2-6 7-5 8-6 scoreline). Here it goes: “Serena is a player who still showcases the legacy of the classic game, a game in which the highest degree of aggression is expressed through the charging of the net. Serena did just that in several crucial moments of the match, enacting plays from the previous decades, with aggressive approaches followed by volleys or smashes. Disclaimer: it was unmistakably power tennis, but rallies were devised with the idea of a vertical transition towards the net.”
On the other hand, Sharapova was a thoroughly modern player. Generally, her game never encompassed the idea of verticality, but rather entailed never-ending pressure from the baseline, with supreme confidence in her ability to hit winners with her groundstrokes.
And while Williams has dominated the head-to-head tally against Sharapova, one might argue that history has reversed the tendency, with more and players embracing Masha’s style. Nowadays, it’s hard to believe that Serena herself once approached the net with hints of the classic style, and yet she did, at least until she “Sharapovised” her game through the years, focussing more and more on hitting winners from the baseline.
So, the first aspect that I’d like to highlight vis-à-vis Sharapova’s game is her nature as a pure power hitter from the baseline, wholly detached from the dogmas of the previous century.
Furthermore, there is another aspect that is entirely hers, and that is strictly linked to a baseline-aggresion, namely her constant search for the highest degree of intensity.
Such voltage was conveyed via a brand of aggression that didn’t know hesitation nor pauses, to the point that interlocutory shots were chopped down to a minimum, when not erased altogether.
Sharapova was hardly the first player to display such an intense attitude – the real forerunner in this regard is undoubtedly Monica Seles. However, the Russian might have been the first athlete to employ both of the aforementioned weapons (power and intensity) with such frequency.
