Williams Evokes Unbeatable Graf in ’88

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/sports/tennis/sharapova-fights-uphill-battle-vs-williams.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — When Maria Sharapova tries to find a bright spot in her rivalry with Serena Williams, she sifts through the wreckage of a career spent lunging after Williams’s powerful ground strokes and watching serves whiz by. Sharapova clings to one set — the first set in the final at Key Biscayne, Fla., in March.

Sharapova won, 6-4.

What might be most instructive about that set is not that Sharapova played nearly flawlessly for an hour, able to keep Williams on the defensive with good serves and deep ground strokes that kissed the lines. What came after that set might be the best indicator of what is to come in the French Open final Saturday.

Sharapova’s serve went awry, and Williams reeled off the last 10 games and won the match, 4-6, 6-3, 6-0. Afterward, Williams said: “It wasn’t my day. Maria played the best I’ve seen her play.”

That, after handing Sharapova what is known as a bagel in the final set.

Williams has been tested only once in the last two weeks, in a three-set quarterfinal against Svetlana Kuznetsova. She dominated Sara Errani, 6-0, 6-1, in the semifinals. She has not lost to Sharapova since 2004.

All of which has raised the question: could Williams come close to Steffi Graf’s monument to perfection, a 6-0, 6-0 victory over Natasha Zvereva in 32 minutes in the 1988 women’s final at Roland Garros?

Not likely. While Graf also entered that final as prohibitive favorite 25 years ago, Zvereva was only 17 years old and the No. 13 seed, not a four-time major champion like Sharapova. It was the only Grand Slam final that Zvereva would reach.

Although Zvereva was on an incredible run — she had beaten Martina Navratilova, 6-3, 7-6 (5), in the fourth round — Graf was at the height of her powers. In 1988, she won all four majors and the Olympic gold medal, becoming the only player to win a so-called Golden Slam in a single year. Graf dropped just 20 games in seven matches at Roland Garros, nine of them to Gabriela Sabatini in the semifinals. By pounding forehand winners, Graf lost only 13 points to Zvereva in the final.

Philippe Bouin, the longtime chronicler of tennis for L’Equipe, the leading sports newspaper in France, covered the 1988 tournament. He was writing a preview of the men’s final for the next day’s newspaper while Graf played, and the match went by so quickly that he almost missed it.

“I wanted to go later,” Bouin recalled. “It was finished before I could finish my article.”

Bouin remembers seeing just one similarly lopsided match in tennis, when John McEnroe dismissed Jimmy Connors in the 1984 Wimbledon final, 6- 1, 6-1, 6-2. But even then Bouin had a different feeling than he did when watching Graf’s match.

“You knew Connors was a rival of McEnroe,” Bouin said. “On that number, I felt bad for Zvereva. You feel bad for someone who cannot do anything. She was under great stress.”

Zvereva, who later gained renown for demanding that the Soviet Union allow her to keep her prize winnings, fled the interview room in tears after the match. Graf later said she regretted not letting Zvereva win a game or two.

“It was Graf and the final,” Bouin said. “It was like boxing on Everest when you don’t know how to breathe correctly. It was too many handicaps.”

In that respect, Bouin does not see a parallel between Graf’s masterpiece and Williams’s dismissal of Errani on Thursday, despite the similar score lines. Errani was playing correctly; her game was to build her points. Williams would not let her do that, but the circumstances were still much different from how Bouin remembers Zvereva’s paralysis against Graf.

That is why he and virtually everyone else do not expect such a rout Saturday, despite Sharapova’s recent performances against Williams. In the Olympics last summer, played on the grass courts at Wimbledon, Williams beat Sharapova, 6-0, 6-1, the most lopsided women’s final in Olympic history. Williams dominated with her serve and blasted winners from the baseline, the formula she has used for nearly a year in building a 73-3 match record. At the clay-court Madrid Open in May, Williams punished Sharapova again, 6-1, 6-4.

But Kuznetsova proved that as relentless as Williams has seemed in the last year, and as focused as she is on winning the only major she has failed to claim more than once, she is not entirely immune to wobbling.

She lost the second set and fell behind in the third of that quarterfinal match because of inconsistent serves and ground strokes. Williams’s serve was broken four times, and she occasionally looked hesitant in her shot selection. She committed 28 unforced errors and lost 20 of 32 points on her second serve.

Sharapova certainly has the game to make it a match. She will go for aces and backhand winners. Williams is a much more complete player than Sharapova, but that one set in the Key Biscayne sunshine also showed that Sharapova is capable of competing against Williams if her serve does not falter, as it ultimately did that day.

“That set and a half wasn’t enough,” Sharapova said Friday. “You know, a letdown here or there is enough to get her back in the match, and that’s what she did there.”