Notes on a Draw Sheet

Sharapova's the player of the year
Rainy days in Houston, but semis looking good

By Matthew Cronin, TennisReporters.net

Susan Mullane/Camerawork USA

Maria Sharapova: Player of the Year.

Yes, she ended the year ranked No. 4, but Maria Sharapova is my WTA Player of the Year.

Going into WTA Championships, you could make a case for all of the current Top 5: Lindsay Davenport, Amelie Mauresmo, Anastasia Myskina, Sharapova or Svetlana Kuznetsova. Whoever won the "fifth Slam" would get the edge in the Player of the Year Dept. and, given that the winner turned out to be a Slam winner, there's really no other choice than Maria.

Sharapova has won five titles and two of the biggest five events of the year. If you really think about, the runner-up for the Player of the Year accolade might be Justine Henin-Hardenne, who took Australia, Indian Wells and the Olympics (the sixth most important tournament of 2004 in my book), not the other five.
Sharapova also won three other titles, and reached the second week at three other Slams.

Not only did Sharapova go beyond expectations at Wimbledon, but she the skinny Siberian outlasted the rough-and-tumble best-of-the-best field in LA. She beat the other two Slam titlist for first time – Kuznetsova and Myskina – and outlasted tigress Serena in Williams' house. Davenport and Mauresmo won more titles, but they didn't even meet their own expectations at the Slams, so how can you give them the award? Myskina has numerous chances to sew up the accolade – at the Olympics, the US Open and Championships – and she fell way short. Her semi-tank against Sharapova in the third set of their semis in LA iced her out of the award. Sharapova has had a flat out better year than Sveta, so it's not even worth discussing their respective records.

Yes, the 17-year-old is often petulant off court, but that's pretty normal for her age, whether she realizes it or not. Here's my opinion of the infamous Sharapova billboard: We can deal with the pose, where Sharapova's sitting in tennis clothes, but if that was our 17-year-old daughter and someone wrote the caption that included "the hotter it gets," his teeth would be at risk. The cut lines were unnecessary. Something like "We just got a girl named Maria" would have gotten it done.

Pity Serena, who put it all on the line during the week and then watched her body break down on her during the final. Would she have won the match had she been healthy? Maybe not, but she was certainly in the driver's seat before the second set.

Can you blame Amelie Mauresmo for pulling out Fed Cup in order to concentrate on the Aussie Open? Yes you can, but she's just going along with Andre Agassi's, Lindsay Davenport's and a host of other veteran players thinking when it comes to international team play: been there, done that. You may as well hand the Fed Cup to Russia right now.

BTW: Davenport said it's very unlikely she'll play Fed Cup next year, either.

Rainy days in Houston, but semis looking good
As of a rainy Wednesday afternoon, the Tennis Masters Cup Houston was shaping up pretty nicely with Roger Federer, Lleyton Hewitt, Andy Roddick and Marat Safin posting wins. Roddick rallied from 2-5 down in his tiebreak against Tim Henman to knock off the Briton 7-5, 7-6(6) in an opening Blue group match. Hewitt took out Carlos Moya 6-7(5), 6-2, 6-4, while Safin straight-setted Guillermo Coria and Federer did the same to Gaston Gaudio on Monday. Look for those four to advance to the semis.

As Hewitt says, there's little reason to get excited as to who finishes No. 2 between he and Roddick, who backed him up. "Lleyton and I both had a taste of No. 1 and finishing there," said Roddick. "I'm here, I'm going to try my best. If I finish there, then that's great."

Art Seitz

Andy Roddick: He's No. 2 and not complaining.

Andy still trying to put a positive face on his season, where he reached one Slam final, a semi and a quarterfinal. "If leading the tour in match wins is a disappointing year, I'll take it. I'm going to look back on 2004 and take a lot of positives out of it." The sometimes Austin resident will look back on it in a much more positive fashion if he wins TMC Houston.

Here's some nice work by The London Times' Neil Harman, interviewing Paul Annacone on his student, Tim Henman. "Tim broke new ground this year, which is great and if he continues to learn to practice and play smart rather than practice and play hard, the better he is going to get," Annacone said. "I don't think he played great tennis this year – in spots he played good tennis. At the French he played good matches and bad matches, but he got through the bad situations better than he used to, which is the key. The autumn was disappointing, but he was grinding so hard to get here, he wanted to finish strongly and put too much pressure on himself. One of the biggest things about being at this level is not to let the highs get too high and the lows get too low. Expectation is a terrible word and when you buy into it that's when you set yourself up for failure and immense pressure. As Roger Federer said here, 'You have to treat every week as a new start; it's zero-zero again.' That's a terrific philosophy."

A piece by Barry Flatman in The Sunday Times is revealing when keeping Henman's comments in mind about why he went after some members of his home country's press. "I'd be lying if I said that turning 30 in September wasn't something that caused a little introspection for a while, but it didn't last too long," said Henman. "For so many years I took the view that it was wiser to give the 'correct' answer rather than the truthful one. Now I've decided to say what I really think about things."

Pro poker player Yevgeny Kafelnikov told The Independent why he retired from tennis: "So when people on the street in Moscow ask why I stopped playing, I say 'Because I don't want to see you people crying when I lose'. They understand that."