Erakovic served NZ tennis well
‘You don’t realise what you have until it’s gone,’ goes the famous saying and in the case of New Zealand tennis that’s how it will be following the retirement of Marina Erakovic.
The country’s highest ranked female singles player is Paige Hourigan at 577 and our top male in singles is Rubin Statham at 586. Without being disparaging to those players or anyone else who’s played for New Zealand over the last decade, but there was never anyone who came close to achieving what Erakovic did in singles.
New Zealand does have three world-class doubles players in Michael Venus, Artem Sitak and Marcus Daniell, but when it comes to singles the cupboard is pretty bare.
Sadly, that’s been the case for a while, but when Erakovic was out there, there was someone flying the flag for the country, giving New Zealand tennis fans someone to root for.
In some ways Erakovic’s success hid a number of failed programmes by Tennis NZ to produce another top 100 player.
People came in from overseas with ideas on what way Tennis NZ should go to develop players. Have a centralised programme, leave it to the regions, have a base in Europe, have a targeted programme working with half a dozen players.
All of the above was tried but none of it worked and while Erakovic kept winning WTA matches and performing well at the ASB Classic every year it didn’t seem to matter that much to most tennis fans.
But now she’s gone, the stark reality that New Zealand has skipped a generation for bringing through players should hit home.
Thankfully, Tennis NZ’s high performance manager Simon Rea is making progress, but it could be a few more years before the work comes to fruition and there’s another player coming through with the potential Erakovic showed.
In time, those who so often rubbished Erakovic for losing in the first round of a grand slam or at the Classic, will hopefully look back fondly at the time when New Zealand at least had someone in the singles draw at Wimbledon or the US Open.
Erakovic got to 39 in the world and won one singles title, Memphis in 2013.
She won’t go down globally as one of the all-time greats, but the key word there is global.
Because she played the biggest sport for women in the world.
According to Forbes, eight of the highest paid female athletes in the world are tennis players, with Serena Williams topping the list. For the record, the only two on the list who don’t play tennis are Indian badminton player PV Sindhu at No 8 and American motor racing driver Danica Patrick, one place below her.
Erakovic never won a Halberg award and had to fight even to use High Performance New Zealand’s facilities at the Millennium Institute in Auckland.
Her achievements were rarely properly recognised and she was wrongly compared to other New Zealand stars, who played in sports of far less international significance.
For most of Erakovic’s career, she never got the credit she deserved, but now hopefully – and also sadly – that will change.