The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (35 page)

“I had a panic attack,” she says with a shiver. “I was like, ‘I have no idea what I'm going to do next.'”

Then there's the whole kids thing. She's only 31, but she can hear the clock ticking.

“I've seriously thought of freezing my eggs—no joke. I've thought about it, but with all the drug testing, if you do that, then you can test positive or something. Maybe I'll check into it again.”

That all seems far away, at least for a moment. She wants to play through the 2016 Olympics, so she's got at least three years to come up with a master plan or maybe even a new persona. Over the next two months, she sweeps through the Sony Open, from there cruising to victories on clay in Rome and Madrid. And then it was on to the French Open, her old nemesis. All Serena did, according to sometimes-doubter Chris Evert, was play some of the best tennis Evert had ever seen. She lost only one set all tournament. In the finals, she rolled past Sharapova in straight sets. Afterward, she spoke to the crowd in French. Serena smiled and shouted,
“Je suis incroyable”
—aka “I am incredible.” Folks said she misspoke, meaning to say, “That's incredible,” but it doesn't matter. As usual, Serena Williams told the truth.

But that's all in the future. Right now, Serena is simply happy with her nails.

“I can't wait until I get mad about something and they change colors.” She frowns. “But now everyone will know what I'm feeling. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.”

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

 

T
HE PATCH OF WIMBLEDON GRASS
known as the Graveyard of Champions was supposedly exorcised four years ago, when the blue-blazered gentlemen of the All England Lawn Tennis Club demolished Court 2, built a new grandstand in its place, and, in 2011, renamed the haunted space Court 3. But the tennis fans watching the 2013 championships still knew. Li Na, China's tennis rebel, knew too. This was the same cursed court where top seeds like Pete Sampras and Serena Williams had suffered ignominious defeats, falling to unheralded players in the early rounds. Now Li, the former French Open champion and sixth-ranked player in the world, teetered one game away from a third-round loss to the Czech veteran Klara Zakopalova. “At that moment,” she told me later, “I suddenly saw myself with my bags going to the airport. It made my heart ache.”

For two hours, Li had struggled against her hard-hitting opponent. Trailing 5–6 in the third set, she walked to the baseline knowing that she had to break serve just to stay alive. Lose the next four points, and she might carry out her pretournament threat to quit the sport she had been forced to start playing nearly a quarter-century ago. Her spring season had been a bruising free fall from the heights of her second Australian Open final in January to her second-round flameout at the French Open in May. Now the graveyard was calling.

As Li crouched at the baseline, the cluster of Chinese fans waving little red flags went still. On the first serve, Li blasted a winner down the line. Five points later, she pounced on her first break-point opportunity, scorching a forehand winner—and letting out a scream—to even the set at 6-all. Two more games, another roar: Li had survived. It was just a third-round match, and she had played erratically. But after her recent run of defeats—marked by what appeared to be a lack of conviction at decisive moments—pulling out this victory felt redemptive. “I fought like mad,” she said with a grin. “Winning this match felt as good as getting to a Grand Slam final.”

One more obstacle awaited Li that afternoon. Walking into the press room in her sleek white sweatsuit, she looked warily at the assembled Chinese reporters. Her smile was pinched. China's state-run media, which happily extols her victories for bringing glory to the motherland, had recently intensified its attacks on her streak of individualism, which has grown only stronger since she left the Chinese sports system in 2008. The furor began after her collapse at the French Open a month earlier, when a reporter for the government's Xinhua News Agency asked her to explain her disappointing result to her nation's fans. “I lost a match and that's it,” Li snapped. “Do I need to get on my knees and kowtow to them?” Her comment ignited a round of official criticism, rebuking her lack of patriotism and manners. Now, the very same reporter raised his hand to ask Li, once again, to address her fans. She glared at him for almost a full minute before mumbling, “I say, ‘Thank you, fans.'”

 

Li Na might prefer that we forget about China and judge her by her character and accomplishments alone. Hers, after all, is the tale of a conflicted working-class girl—the daughter of an athlete whose own dreams were thwarted by political strife—who rose to become one of the finest, richest, and most influential players of her generation. All in a sport that most of her compatriots had never watched before.

A mercurial star who blends speed and power—and occasional meltdowns—Li became Asia's first and only Grand Slam singles champion when she won the French Open in 2011. She is also the first Chinese-born player to crack the world's top five—an elite group she rejoined last month after her run at Wimbledon. With nearly $40 million in sponsorship deals signed in the past three years, she is now the third-highest-compensated female athlete in
any
sport, trailing only Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams.

Still, it is impossible to separate Li from China. She is one of the country's biggest celebrities, with more than 21 million followers on the Twitter-like Weibo. (By comparison, LeBron James has 9.4 million Twitter followers.) A record 116 million Chinese viewers watched her triumph in the French Open, a bigger audience than the Super Bowl attracted that year. The tens of millions of dollars in endorsements that Li has collected depend on her connection to the Chinese market. Had she been born in Chile, Chad, or even Chicago, she would not be one of the top three earners. Nor would the Women's Tennis Association be unveiling a new pro tournament next year in her home city of Wuhan, in central China. Five years ago, the WTA staged two tournaments in the country; in 2014, there will be eight. The WTA's chief executive, Stacey Allaster, credits Li with helping spark a tennis explosion in Asia. “If the Williams sisters had the greatest impact on the first decade of this century,” Allaster says, “then I would say, without a doubt, that Li Na will be the most important player of this decade.”

But even now, Li's game is plagued by a maddening unpredictability—not unlike the WTA in general, where a decade of relative instability at the top has led to a few players reaching number one without winning a Grand Slam. (Caroline Wozniacki, of Denmark, was only the latest example.) This situation has prompted unfavorable, often unfair, comparisons with the men's tour, which has been defined over the past decade by scintillating battles among four of history's greatest players (Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and now Andy Murray).

On the women's side, the only truly dominating player this decade has been Serena Williams. Her return to the sport full-time last year after being sidelined by injuries has reestablished a more natural order in women's tennis, with two Grand Slam winners, Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka, serving as her worthy, if not yet equal, adversaries. But Wimbledon blew that order into disarray—none of the four semifinalists had ever won a Grand Slam—and showed how erratic the women's game can still be.

As the U.S. Open begins this week, Li senses an opportunity. At 31 years old, she still possesses great foot speed and thunderous ground strokes, including what many consider to be the most cleanly struck backhand in the game. In the past, Li has tended to fade in the later majors from a lack of fitness and focus. (At the U.S. Open, she's gotten to the quarterfinals only once, in 2009.) But this summer, after watching her at Wimbledon, I followed Li back to Beijing to witness up close her demanding midseason training regimen with her coach, Carlos Rodriguez. Li is making a big push to make the world's top three and to win another Grand Slam. “Anybody could win the U.S. Open this year,” Li said. “Why not me?”

 

Born in 1982, Li Na was, like many Chinese athletes, pushed into sports against her will. Her father—a former badminton player whose career had been cut short by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution—was the “sunshine of my childhood,” she said. Even so, he gave his daughter no choice when he enrolled her at age five in a local state-run sports school. Though she was a strong athlete, her shoulders were deemed too broad and her wrists not supple enough to excel at badminton. A coach persuaded her parents that she would have a better chance in a sport that few Chinese at that time had ever seen. “They all agreed that I should play tennis,” she said, “but nobody bothered to ask me.”

From the beginning, Li chafed at the harsh strictures of the state-run sports machine. China's
juguo tizhi
—or “whole-nation sports system”—churns out champions by pushing young athletes to their limits every day for years on end. The first time Li defied her coach came at age 11, when, on the verge of collapse, she refused to continue training. Her punishment was to stand motionless in one spot during practices until she repented. Only after three days of standing did Li apologize. She continued training for her father's sake—“His love was my source of strength,” she said—even though her coach never uttered a word of praise in their nine years together.

When she was 14, her father died of a rare cardiovascular disease. She was playing in a tournament in southern China at the time, and her coach didn't tell her for several days, waiting until the competition was over. “It is my deepest pain that I did not make it to say goodbye to him,” Li wrote in her autobiography. Her mother sank into debt, and Li remembers being driven to win in tournaments so that she could earn small bonuses to fend off creditors.

Despite the turmoil, Li's tennis flourished. Her first national junior title came just months after her father's death. The following year, she was invited to a 10-month Nike-sponsored training program in Texas. After her return, she told an interviewer that she aimed to make the top 10 in the world, and by early 2002, her goal actually seemed attainable: the 20-year-old was ranked number one in China and had even climbed, at one point, into the world's top 135. And then she disappeared.

Without telling any of her coaches, Li slipped out of the national training center one morning later that year. To avoid suspicion, Li said, she carried only a small bag of necessities. On the desk in her dorm room was a letter she had written to tennis authorities requesting an early retirement. The note didn't elaborate on her reasons: the burnout from excessive training, the outrage at her coaches' attempts to squelch her romance with a male teammate named Jiang Shan, and the debilitating period that the team leader wanted her to play through by taking hormone medicine.

Within hours, Li was in Wuhan with Jiang, planning their new life as university students. “As soon as I got home, I turned off my mobile and refused to take any phone calls,” Li later wrote. “Freedom was delicious.”

 

Tennis is infamous for tumultuous relationships, usually between parent and child star, coach and protégé. Li is now married to Jiang, a former Davis Cup player. Jiang became her first and only boyfriend at age 16. Romances between teammates were technically forbidden, but Jiang was Li's refuge—first from the system, then from the vicissitudes of success and failure.

Over the years, Jiang has often served as Li's coach—only to be demoted to the roles of sparring partner, cheerleader, and punch line. In postmatch interviews, Li likes to joke about Jiang's snoring, his weight fluctuations, his control of the family credit card. The couple have been together so long—almost exactly half of Li's life—that Rodriguez said, “They are not two people, but one person, fused together.” That doesn't stop them from bickering in public. During an early-round match at Wimbledon, when Jiang exhorted her after a missed shot, she retorted in Mandarin, “You're not my coach!”

Just hours before her fourth-round Wimbledon match with the 11th-seeded Roberta Vinci, Li seemed annoyed with her husband again. They were warming up on one of the practice courts. As Jiang hit an amped-up version of Vinci's skidding slice backhand, Li looked out of sorts, netting backhands, lifting forehands long. At one point, Jiang whipped a shot past her and Li responded by angrily crushing a winner. “Sometimes,” she said later, arching an eyebrow, “I think my husband's purpose is simply to make me unhappy.”

Once the match began, though, Li couldn't miss. She handled Vinci's slice with ease and breezed into the quarterfinals. “I felt so good I could've run for another three hours,” she said. Li had matched her deepest Wimbledon run, and with Williams, Sharapova, and Azarenka gone, the highest seed left, at number four, was Li's next opponent, Agnieszka Radwanska, whom she had beaten handily at the Australian Open in January.

The vibe in Li's camp was so positive that nobody anticipated the attack on her that same day in
People's Daily
, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. “When star athletes' personalities have become insufferable by the standard of social customs and traditions,” the editorial read, “who is to rein in their unchecked insolence?”

Despite China's desire to have Li embody the country's ambitions, she has made it clear that she plays for herself as much as, if not more than, for her homeland. “When people say that I represent the nation,” she told me later, “that is too big a hat for me to wear.” Li's independent streak is part of what makes her resonate deeply with China's younger generation, who have nicknamed her Big Sister Na. But for the country's leaders (be they national, athletic, or media), this is a fundamental challenge to the way the Chinese Communist Party has rallied its subjects for 64 years.