The Company She Keeps

LONDON—Some of them arrived more than two weeks ago, to do duty as broadcasters or coaches; others drifted in over the course of the last two weeks, always welcome at Wimbledon, where any former singles quarterfinalist enjoys the privileges of membership in the Last 8 Club.

By the time the women's finalists were determined they were here in force, and present today in the Royal Box. Jan Kodes and Jana Novotna, Martina Navratilova and Helena Sukova, all came to witness—they hoped—the coronation of a new Wimbledon champion to carry on the distinguished tradition of their small nation, the Czech Republic.

As Martina Navratilova said the other day, "I got to thinking now with (Petra) Kvitova the final, a potential winner, she would be the third lefty Czech to win this, with (me) and (Jaroslav) Drobny.  Really, if you think about the Czech Republic and Slovakia—Hingis came from there originally—(Ivan) Lendl, myself, Kodes won here in '73. . .  It's astonishing. And Berdych was in the finals last year. . . Hana Mandlikova. So many great players came out of a very little country, consistently."

You can now add the name of an extremely shy 21-year-old from the village of Fulnek (population 6,000, plus four tennis courts) to that list of champions, for Petra Kvitova won her first Grand Slam title today, and she did it on the strength of a convincing and not entirely meat-and-potatoes game driven by a superior serve and extreme baseline power.

In the run up to the match, most pundits predicted that most of the friction would be between Kvitova's swerving, biting left-handed serve—a serve that even the icon Navratilova, a nine-time Wimbledon champ, could only have wished to possess—and Sharapova's return. As it turned out, though, the outstanding feature of the final was the way Kvitova won the battle of the baseline, consistently getting the better of Sharapova in the rallies no matter who was serving.

As Sharapova put it after absorbing the 6-3, 6-4 loss, "She was hitting really powerful and hitting, you know, winners from all over the court. She made a defensive shot into an offensive one. And, yeah, you know, just kind of laid on a lot of those shots. I think she was just more aggressive than I was, hit deeper and harder, and got the advantage in the points."

It was an accurate and unflinching summary, but the problem with someone like Kvitova, who's a big  young lady (6' 1") with a conspicuous weapon in that left-handed serve, is that it's awful easy to overlook the nuances and subtleties that sometimes play an even much larger role in a match than obvious themes. Take that serve: Kvitova's fastest was the same as Sharapova's, 113 mph, and their average first- and second-serve speeds were identical as well (100 mph and 92 mph, respectively). If Kvitova's serve was a cut above, it was for reasons other than its pace.

Granted, Sharapova hurt her own cause with double faults, particularly in the first set, in which she yielded the break that put Kvitova up for good, 4-2, with back-to-back doubles. But one of the main reasons Kvitova was able to transition from defense to offense and take the initiative—and dictate—in so many rallies was because she did a great job handcuffing Sharapova with serves to the body. I had expected her to rely more heavily on conventional, southpaw stuff—the wide serve and the heavy slice, especially in the ad-court, where a lefthander has such an enormous advantage.

But that wide-swinging slice goes to the backhand of a right-hander like Sharapova. Not only is her backhand more reliable than her forehand, but the wider the slice, the more angle it gives Sharapova to nail a down-the-line backhand return winner.

Not too many people win matches against great lefthanders by tagging backhand service-return winners down the line, but by serving down the T so often, and keeping the ball close to Sharapova's body, Kvitova more or less forced Sharapova to keep the returns well within the lines—and we saw how expertly Kvitova dealt with rally balls.

"I knew that I have to be first who is playing hard and who is made the points," Kvitova explained, doing her best in a foreign tongue. "So I tried. It was about the serve, for sure, and the return. I know that she's return very well, but I know that I can return her serve also. . .So I was preparing for the fast play, like with Azarenka."

An attempt to get her to reveal a bit more about her serving strategy was frustrating. I'm not sure if she was incapable of understanding, or merely cagey about, the issue. But when asked if she went to the body quite a bit with the serve, she just smiled and said, "Well, yeah. It's could be."

These X's and Os are fun to chew over, but they only tell—at best—half the story in any match. There's also the mental side of the game, and the matter of how players react to the stresses inherent in a big occasion like a Wimbledon final. On that score also, Kvitova's reactions were impressive—surprisingly so. Although she made that critical break in the first set hold up and broke Sharapova in the first game of the second set, her own inability to hold in the second set all but invited Sharapova, with her greater store of Grand Slam experience, to work her way back into contention. But Kvitova showed real championship mettle, especially when the set seemed about to slip away, after she was broken for 3-3.

In that game, Kvitova made two gruesome errors—one was a thoughtless, cross-court backhand error off a lousy service return that made the score 30-all instead of a comfortable 40-15; the other was a botched cross-court forehand blast off another poor backhand return by Sharapova—a mistake that gave Sharapova a break point, which she secured with a forehand service return winner. You give a blooded Grand Slam final veteran veteran like Sharapova those kinds of breaks and you're apt to find yourself in deep trouble.

Had Kvitova crumbled at that point, those errors would have assumed a magnified significance to haunt Kvitova for a long, long time. Instead, she blanked out any lingering regrets and broke right back. She  then made great use of spin and placement to get the critical hold for 5-3. When Sharapova raced through her next service game, you know it was only because Kvitova wanted the ball—she wanted to get on with it, and serve out the match.

Kvitova told us after the match that she read on the Internet that the officials in her small town of Fulnek had set up a big-screen television in the town square, so everyone could gather to watch the Wimbledon match. I doubt it was hard to get the town fathers to check off on the plan, given that Kvitova's father, Jiri, is the deputy mayor. Presumably, the pilsner is flowing freely and Fulnekians are still dancing in the streets as you read this.

The other day, when Kvitova was asked if we had reason to know the name of anyone else from Fulnek, she shrugged and said no. Now, Fulnek is the home of the newest Wimbledon champion. But there's nothing new about that for many a town in a nation that, acre-for-acre, may be the best tennis factory on earth.