On the draw's first glance, it looked awful for Maria Sharapova. An athlete on the wrong side of 30 playing her first grand slam match in 19 months against the #2 seed. And then the wily Sharapova took her controversial wild card and turned it into a New York moment, prime-time entertainment for the gilded plutocrats of Gotham.
She is the merger of substance and style, a red-meat capitalist who carries the Olympic flag for Mother Russia. One cannot be blamed for forgetting her athletic prowess; she spent the last couple of years in sports purgatory, desperate to remain significant, posting pictures of herself at Harvard Business School during her hiatus. Her speech reveals not a trace of her native Russian accent, a language she exchanged for English at age seven at Bollietieri's in Florida. Yet it was the drug of choice for Russian athletes, Meldonium, that nearly brought her career to a car-wreck of a close. And then came Monday night.
Conditions were perfect: despite being the number two seed, Simona Halep was facing a crisis in confidence and was winless against the six foot slugger. The late Bud Collins referred to Bjorn Borg as the "Angelic Assassin," but that moniker might have been better spent on Sharapova. In a match worthy of a major final in terms of theater, Sharapova toyed with Halep and then dispatched her in prime time. In a single match, 19 months of doubt, and even worse for the marketing-mad Sharapova, irrelevance, had been thrown aside like last year's fashions.
The prevailing question in the gleeful celebration, was how much of her post-match joy was genuine? The brand force that is Maria Sharapova, the woman who temporarily changed her name to "Sugarpova" in New York during the U.S. Open fortnight, appeared to cry into her hands after match point.
But when it came to sharing her thoughts with the public, she spewed copy straight from her publicist. Tom Rinaldi asked her about the low points during her time off, and she volleyed it away. "I don't think this is the time to talk about that." The ice maiden (thanks for the loan Chrissy) proceeded to reference her dress maker and finished the interview with stale propaganda, and then spoke of herself in the third person: "It's prime time baby...this girl has a lot of grit and she's not going anywhere."
21st century athletes are often criticized about being more concerned with building their personal brand than about competing. Sharapova has mastered the former, and for one night at least, showed she could embrace the latter. It was the perfect stage for this unimaginable comeback moment, under the hot lights of Arthur Ashe where she is a perfect 18 and 0, the return of Sharapova, the Russian-born Kapitalist providing roaring entertainment for the scions of Goldman Sachs. A six foot maiden with broad shoulders, crammed into a little black dress, sending everyone home with a story tell and a brand to sell. Maria Sharapova, New York's adopted Devushka.
She is the merger of substance and style, a red-meat capitalist who carries the Olympic flag for Mother Russia. One cannot be blamed for forgetting her athletic prowess; she spent the last couple of years in sports purgatory, desperate to remain significant, posting pictures of herself at Harvard Business School during her hiatus. Her speech reveals not a trace of her native Russian accent, a language she exchanged for English at age seven at Bollietieri's in Florida. Yet it was the drug of choice for Russian athletes, Meldonium, that nearly brought her career to a car-wreck of a close. And then came Monday night.
Conditions were perfect: despite being the number two seed, Simona Halep was facing a crisis in confidence and was winless against the six foot slugger. The late Bud Collins referred to Bjorn Borg as the "Angelic Assassin," but that moniker might have been better spent on Sharapova. In a match worthy of a major final in terms of theater, Sharapova toyed with Halep and then dispatched her in prime time. In a single match, 19 months of doubt, and even worse for the marketing-mad Sharapova, irrelevance, had been thrown aside like last year's fashions.
The prevailing question in the gleeful celebration, was how much of her post-match joy was genuine? The brand force that is Maria Sharapova, the woman who temporarily changed her name to "Sugarpova" in New York during the U.S. Open fortnight, appeared to cry into her hands after match point.
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| Sugarpova |
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| Big moment in a little black dress |
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