What A Truth-Teller Won't Tell
by Pete Bodo
You would think that the journey from pioneer—and national hero to, oh, 1.3 billion people—to head case would be some sort of evolutionary, multi-generational journey—you know, like the saga of some distinguished family that after X-number of generations coughs up a scion who decides that his mission in life is to teach potatoes how to sing. But Li Na is proving that she can make the great leap in far less time. Would you believe 12 months?
Li, who put Chinese tennis on the map with an enormous amount of fanfare when she won the French Open just four months ago, was the No. 4 seed at the China Open in Beijing this week. She faced a wonderful opportunity to enjoy something like a spectacular homecoming, as she had not played a set of competitive tennis in China since she become Asia's first Grand Slam champion. In fact, Li had not hit a ball in anger since she was beaten in the first round of the U.S. Open by Romania's Simona Halep. But a potential national celebration turned into an embarrassment as Li was rudely chased out of Beijing by yet another Romanian, WTA No. 58 Monica Niculescu.
In an attempt to be kind, the WTA story on the upset said Li fell prey to the "tricky" game of Niculescu. But the reality is that Li barely mounted resistance. She fell behind 5-1 in the first set, won three games, and never won another in the 6-4, 6-0 loss. The deer in the headlights described her performance this way: "On the court I don't know what I can do. I felt even winning one point was tough for me. My coach (husband, Jiang Shan) came out and told me exactly what was right, but I couldn't do it. The end of the season is coming and there's a long break—hopefully I'll be able to stand up again and prepare for next year."
Those are the words—read them and weep—of a woman who's been more successful at Grand Slam events this year than any of her peers, including Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, No. 1 Caroline Woznaicki, and even U.S. Open champion Sam Stosur. No other woman has been in two Grand Slam finals, much less won one of them. Of course Li felt pressure. That comes with the territory. And yes, she signed a few more sponsorship deals recently that only added to her need to perform well. So the conventional explanation is that Li just imploded due to the distractions and expectations that have significantly increased since the spring.
But that interpretation seems a little pat to me. Li's history suggests that she is one of those extremely rare people who has learned nothing (and I mean absolutely nothing) from experience—or maybe there's a little more to it than that. Given that Li is mature (she'll be 30 in a few months), experienced (she broke into the Top 100 in 2003), and intelligent (she left the tour in April of 2002 to study journalism, and didn't play another main tour match until the start of 2005) I'm going with the "more to it than that" school of thought.
Li started the year in a big way, splitting a pair of finals with then No. 3 and multiple Grand Slam champ Kim Clijsters. Li beat Clijsters at Gold Coast—rallying from a 5-0 first-set deficit in the process—but lost to her in the Australian Open final. That a Chinese woman contested the championship match at a major was in and of itself sensational news, and Li acquitted herself very well. But at a critical point in the three-setter, Li seemed to lose her focus. She even scolded some Chinese fans, apparently because she experienced their shouted advice as irritating rather than inspirational. Li lost that match but won many, many hearts with her stylish game and effort, and she charmed a vast international audience with her blunt truth-telling (among other things, she complained that her husband/coach Jiang Shan snored).
When Li resumed playing, she lost in the first round at three consecutive tournaments and hardly did better at the fourth (l. to Sabine Lisicki in the second round). But she improved during the clay-court season, partly because she hired a new coach, Michael Mortensen. The blurred line between husband and coach had become too much for Li to bear, and she relieved Jiang of his coaching duties. After her breakthrough win at Roland Garros, Li told a group of us reporters that, earlier in the year, she had indeed succumbed to pressure created by, among others, a slew of new sponsors.
However, Li immediately slumped again after winning Roland Garros—not quite as badly as the first time (after Paris she won a round, but no more, in her next four events, including Wimbledon). Although she made the third round at New Haven, her Grand Slam season was ended abruptly by Halep in New York. And now she's out of Beijing after one match. Can it be that the most successful Grand Slam competitor of 2011 won't even qualify for the WTA's season-ending tour championships?
Li is different from Serena Williams in that she seems committed to playing a full WTA schedule; yet she seems incapable of accepting the day-to-day demands of the touring life. Her experience at the beginning of the year ought to have prepared her for what lay in store after she won at Roland Garros; if it did, the benefit was marginal at best. And there's this: mature Grand Slam champions (that leaves Petra Kvitova out) usually enjoy who they are and draw heavily on what they've done. Just look at the way Schiavone cultivated the bearing of a Grand Slam champion after she won at Roland Garros in 2010, or the way Sharapova and Williams carry themselves. These champions create an aura and then develop and burnish it—convince themselves that they're superior, which makes it easier to convince their peers of the same thing.
Li seems to have done none of this; it's as if she's in denial about being a Grand Slam champ. What can you put that down to, a lack of self-esteem or confidence? Or is it somehow tied in with being Chinese—you know, the great Chinese-communist vision of egalitarianism and all that (much of which is being blown apart as China develops economically). Perhaps at heart Li is a contrarian, subconsciously rejecting the obligations and expectations imposed on her by her sport and her society. She's certainly shown those tendencies in the past.
I'm still not sure any of us really knows what happened between Li and the Chinese federation, back when she theoretically decided that becoming a journalist was much more appealing than playing professional tennis (much as I'd feel vindicated if it were true, I doubt it). There were various rumors flying around, most of them having to do with Li's desire for autonomy. We do know that she ultimately clashed with the authorities, but convinced them in 2008 to come up in with the "Fly Alone" program (the expression was coined by the Chinese media) that allowed Li to run her career without interference from tennis bureaucrats, and lowered the Chinese government's take of her prize money from a high of 65% to between 8 and 12%.
The striking thing to me is that Li has created a narrative unlike any other we've seen in tennis. It seems that the better she gets, the less predictable she becomes. The better she does at majors, the less chance there is that she'll clean up at regular tour events. She appears to inhabit a parallel-universe, but one in which she keeps re-living the same bad dream.
The coaching situation is telling. Just months ago Li had nothing but high praise for Mortensen and his supportive ways: “He's working so hard with me, and for my team," she said at Roland Garros. "He's trust me a lot. He give me a lot of confidence. Also, he say, 'You know, every person have the mistake, so I should give the chance to have the mistake.'"
More recently, though, she dismissed Mortensen because she was tired of his "mild and gentle" ways. So she re-connected with her husband (I presume she just gave him a shot in the ribs with an elbow one night), and told reporters, "Naturally Jiang knows me best and between us it seems no language is required. A sign, eye contact will tell the story. But it's harder to deal with the sort of relationship between me and my husband than the general coaching relationship, so I wish I can cooperate well with my husband like I did at the beginning of the year."
Ah, the beginning of the year. Life must have seemed so much simpler then. Li Na is not just one of the most unlikely Grand Slam champions in recent times, she also seems to have had an unnaturally difficult time accepting her new, lofty place in the pecking order. And the goblins remain the same, it seems. After the disaster in Beijing, she said, "China is special. This is the biggest tournament in China. Of course I wanted to do well. But sometimes if I really want to do well, I put more pressure on myself. [But] it's not only the pressure I give myself. It's also from outside."
Li seems trapped, but others have been in that position and found a way out of their dilemma. I doubt that Li will fire Jiang, the way she did last spring. On the other hand, I'm not sure I would have wanted to be a fly on the wall when the pillow talk began last night.