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

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.