Maria Sharapova showcases her Midas-like PR skills with US Open withdrawal

Maria Sharapova

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

On the surface, there isn’t any problem at all. Maria Sharapova is ranked No. 3 in the world, she has a career Grand Slam to her credit, she is supremely comfortable in her own skin, and she is the richest female athlete on the planet. That’s as close to an ideal tennis player’s life as you can get.

But dig a little deeper, and the complications emerge. As her recent withdrawal from the upcoming US Open shows, her life has started looking less like a professional athlete’s career and more like a theatre artist’s performance. And it’s no ordinary performance either; it’s a display so heavily teeming with contradictions and mystique that it can make your head spin.

The list of contradictions surrounding the Russian is as long as it is intriguing. For starters, Sharapova has a legion of devoted admirers all over the world, but it’s incredibly hard for any serious student of the game to be a ‘fan’ of hers. If you admit to being a Sharpaova fan, will you be accused of falling prey to her good looks like the rest of the ‘superficial’ world? Being a Sharapova fan is simultaneously the most natural and the most embarrassing thing in the world for a tennis follower.

Her game is a study of opposites. As I had noted in one of my earlier posts, Sharapova’s style of play shouldn’t technically lend itself to consistent results, and yet she is one of the most consistent players on the tour, almost unfailingly reaching the late stages of tournaments when she’s fully fit. Even more surprisingly though, once she reaches the business end of a tournament, her power-packed game which is designed to defeat anyone when it’s on, almost invariably comes up short against the very best of women’s tennis. You’d expect a player with such low margins as Sharapova to be a constant threat to the top players, and perpetually susceptible to the odd upset against a lesser player. The reality, though, is the exact opposite.

Sharapova’s famed mental strength is another mysterious little oddity. Against nearly every player on the tour, she makes up for her technical deficiencies with a tough, never-say-die attitude, and almost wills her way to victory. But when she faces one particular player – you know who I’m talking about – she turns into a jittery mental wreck, unable to put the ball in the court. Against Serena Williams, Sharapova’s biggest strength turns into her most damning weakness, and no one knows why.

Off the court, Sharapova is a model of professionalism – she trains harder than anyone else, never indulges in treacherous mind games, and never gives excuses for her losses. But on the court, her incessant grunting is hard to be described as anything other than gamesmanship; it is – there’s no denying this – an act that both intimidates and distracts her opponents.

Sharapova is a thorough diplomat, and she frequently uses her icy stare to make any feeble attempt at provoking a ‘spicy’ line out of her freeze before it even reaches the reporter’s lips. And yet, when Serena Williams made a few ill-advised comments about the Steubenville rape case - an incident that had as little to do with Sharapova as NASA’s Mars exploration program – the Russian couldn’t help but launch into a public tirade against her famed rival. Sharapova’s fierce reaction came completely out of the blue, and at one point even threatened to turn Wimbledon into a personal grudge match between the warring ladies (it’s probably just as well, then, that they both lost before they came anywhere close to their projected final matchup).

Things have just been getting progressively murkier since then. After Wimbledon, Sharapova announced the appointment of American legend Jimmy Connors as her coach. The decision seemed like a head-scratcher to everyone initially; how could the in-your-face methods of Connors possibly suit Sharapova’s quietly headstrong personality? But the tennis world found a way to make its peace with the partnership – if Sharapova trusted Connors to help her, who were we to argue?

One match later (a loss to Sloane Stephens), Sharapova promptly fired Connors. At that point, the question had to be asked: is she deliberately trying to confound the tennis world?

Maria Sharapova watches the action during Wimbledon

Now, with the announcement of her pullout from the last Slam of 2013, comes the mother of all contradictions: despite not participating in the tournament, Sharapova has been the most talked-about tennis player in the lead-up to it. That, of course, is thanks largely to the clever marketing campaign for her candy brand ‘Sugarpova’, in which she briefly let the world believe that she was going to officially change her name to ‘Maria Sugarpova’ for the duration of the US Open.

Contradictions, contradictions everywhere, and mounds of money to bag. Isn’t that what all of this is about? The incongruities in her game and mental fortitude aside, everything about Sharapova seems like the product of a carefully constructed marketing strategy. Her brand endorsements, her frequent high-profile media appearances (what business does she have, really, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party?), even her choice of boyfriends – they all scream “I’m news, baby!”. And that can’t be an accident.

In retrospect, Sharapova’s war of words with Serena Williams before Wimbledon perhaps shouldn’t have been as unexpected as we found it to be. When you spend your whole life keeping a tight lip about personal issues, the one time you do engage in even a small confrontation, it’s bound to grab eyeballs. And that’s exactly what Sharapova, and her brand, got – even if the whole incident made her look a little less dignified.

The cause of Sharapova’s withdrawal from the US Open – a right shoulder bursitis – has been in existence since June, and the injury directly affects the exact same area on which she underwent a major surgery in 2008 to fix a chronic shoulder problem. So it’s highly unlikely that Sharapova and her team were unaware the past couple of weeks that she was in serious doubt for the US Open. It doesn’t take a genius, then, to figure out why she resorted to the name-changing hoax: since she’s likely to skip the rest of the season, this was the best possible way to milk her identity as a tennis player to promote sales of the candy.

And once again, she and her team have got exactly what they wanted: all of a sudden, Sugarpova is all anyone can talk about in the tennis world, and Sharapova is laughing all the way to the bank.

Everything that Sharapova touches turns to gold; you’d be forgiven for thinking she literally has the Midas touch. But nobody is born with the Midas touch; Sharapova’s entire public life today is the product of some seriously good PR skills. And her astute PR awareness is not exactly surprising: when you are anointed as the face of a globally followed sport at the age of 17, you tend to take your image rather seriously.

Should we find fault with any of this, though? Anyone with tennis’s best interests at heart shouldn’t. Sharapova may be constantly serving her own selfish interests with every move she makes (and who doesn’t?), and she may be earning a ton of money through slightly less-than-classy ways. But there’s no going around the fact that she has, along with her male counterpart in the PR mastery department – Roger Federer – put tennis on the map.

Both Federer and Sharapova are global icons the like of which hasn’t been seen since the days of Bjorn Borg, and the game is all the richer for it. An individual sport like tennis will always have a niche audience, but Federer and Sharapova have, at least for the time being (like Borg did in the 80s), transcended that limitation. When Federer plays a series of exhibition events in South America he nets an obscene amount of money, but he also helps expand the geographical reach of the sport. And when Sharapova makes heads turn with her fashionable gown on the red carpet, she reminds people that it is possible to combine athletic success with glamour.

How do you solve a problem like Maria? It’s simple. You don’t.