Wozniacki no stranger to marathons
Lips dry and cracking, tongues hanging, skin slick with sweat.
Marathon tennis on a humid day — rain coming out of its pores, delaying the start of the match and thrice interrupting it — so that Karolina Pliskova and Caroline Wozniacki spent two hours and 56 minutes contending their Rogers Cup quarter-final on Friday.
That’s tennis time. In real time it was more than five hours from warm-up to the return that Pliskova smacked off the tape, ball plopping back inside her court: Break, set, match to the Dane.
And what’s 2:56 to Wozniacki anyway? She ran 3:26 in the New York City marathon three years ago. (One and done, thank you very much, no interest in repeating that ordeal.)
“You can’t really compare,” a weary Wozniacki said.
“It was definitely a little easier.’’ The tennis, she meant. The marathon was “very, very, very hard.”
“Obviously this is my job and this is what I do. I know what to expect. A marathon, you have no idea what to expect.”
Also, it was tied in to a charitable commitment in the city where she keeps a Union Square pied-a-terre, home-away-from in Monaco, so she couldn’t weasel out.
The 27-year-old’s extraordinary physical fitness — coupled with a devastatingly effective backhand — carried Wozniacki back from 1-5 in the first set, through a grinding second frame that she actually dominated in every which way except the tiebreak result, and finally to the exhausting conclusion of a third frame: 7-5, 6-7 (3), 6-4 over the top seeded player.
Wozniacki will play American Sloane Stephens, who defeated Lucie Safarova of the Czech Republic 6-2, 1-6, 7-5 before the rain returned. Stephens saved three match points in the third set.
Pliskova, thundering server from the Czech Republic who only took over No. 1 a couple of weeks ago — this was her first tournament as the highest ranked woman on the planet — failed to exploit her strongest asset, lured into the long-rally baseline counter-punch tennis at which her opponent excels. Gritty defender that she is, lithe and agile, Wozniacki didn’t expose many cracks to Pliskova either, significantly superior on service points won, return points won and aces, if not winners.
“The biggest mistake was in the first set,” Pliskova observed afterwards, correctly but a tad dismissively. “That’s why I lost.”
Perhaps. Although it’s too easy to under-credit Wozniacki, who had drifted out of the women’s tennis limelight until the past year, overly familiar as a habitual tour presence — 25 career titles — yet never Grand Slamming a championship.
On this lengthy afternoon, however, Wozniacki unpacked an assortment of kill-shots and thinking woman’s tennis, even as she better handled the vagaries of weather, unruffled by the multiple rain delays; indeed, taking heart from the stoppages because rain delays, she said, have been kind to her this year — a year in which she now leads everybody in matches won.
Mostly, she tapped into a wellspring of stamina and will, honed over more than a decade on tour and lifting her into the semis of a tournament she last won 10 years ago, in Montreal.
For the appealing Woz, often compared in sheer geniality to the beloved Kim Clijsters — and affectionately known as Miss Congeniality — comeback has turned into the operative word in the past year, trending further upwards now as the season has shifted to its hard-court bracket in North America, her forte.
Friday’s match — she’d dropped only seven games en route to the quarters — was impressive and warmly received by a vocal fan contingent up at York University, con- tinuing the season swell in a resurgent career. Newcomer of the year in 2008, first woman from a Scandinavian country to reach a top-10 ranking, No. 1 atop the global female field and 2010 and 2011 — held that status for 67 weeks — secondhighest earning female athlete, runner-up at the 2009 and 2014 U.S. Opens. Then a head over heels plunge, in part attributable to injury — three months in an ankle cast last year, arm woes — but the plummet had started well before 2016.
The finals and semifinals shrank away, the self-confidence dipped, the ranking dove to No. 74 in ’16. Now here she is, elevated again to No. 6, a force to be reckoned with, 2-2 in matches against Pliskova in 2017 but first time she’s beaten a reigning No. 1.
“Staying healthy has really been key,” she said. “Probably changing my approach a little bit, too, to my workouts and stuff, just to really focus on my body, has been a big thing. And yeah, then it kind of started going my way, started playing better and get the confidence.”
Of course much of Wozniacki’s tennis tenure has coincided with Serena Domination, which somewhat explains the dearth of major titles. They’re best friends, by the way. Which is interesting because Serena Williams doesn’t really have gal-pals on the women’s tour, apparently never needing more of a sorority embrace than the arm-around provided by blood-and-guts sister Venus.
There’s a nice little anecdote that explains the genesis of their friendship, or at least the deepening of it; about how Serena came to the sobsister rescue when Wozniacki was unceremoniously dumped by golf pro fiancé Rory McIlroy — by phone, after the wedding invitations had been mailed out. Williams called and called and called. “If you don’t pick up, I am going to fly to Monaco. If you don’t answer the door, I am going to knock it down.” So now they’re BFFs. Wozniacki may have been crushed by McIlroy but she apparently threw herself physically and emotionally into intense preparation for that marathon mere months later. “I don’t want to have my name stuck to him forever,” Wozniacki told the New York Times recently, of being yoked/unyoked with McIlroy, who certainly had the more spectacular breakup career.
But Wozniacki is having a pretty dandy bounce-back life too, personally and professionally.
The tennis speaks for itself. Social media selfies speak to her blossoming romance with San Antonio Spur David Lee.
Pity. If she were looking for a nice Danish boy, we happen to have one of those right here in Toronto. Plays goal for the Leafs or something?