Maria (Not So) Full of Grace
It would seem to have been a dandy start of the year for Maria Sharapova. She landed yet another huge endorsement (this time with Land Rover, thank you very much). She had the best spring hard-court run of anyone this side of Roger Federer, winning Indian Wells and reaching the Miami final. And she debuted a provocative (Madonna-meets-Margaret Court) look that, oh my God, included a corset. And what’s more astounding than morphing an old-fashioned relic into a hip look? No wonder the Florida Sun-Sentinel said she seemed “relatively unaffected by her status as a tennis megastar and global brand.”

But, unfortunately, there were problems on the Good Ship Sharapova. No, it wasn’t just that there were minor wardrobe malfunctions when she debuted her outfit or that it again emerged that Maria wasn’t always signing autographs or, incredibly, that she was 0-11 in her line-call protests.

Rather, it was noted that she took a bathroom break to turn around her second-round match against China’s Na Li and was roundly booed when she repeated the tactic three times in the semis against Tatiana Golovin. “It takes a special 18-year-old to deal with being booed by fans who see you as a cynical veteran, ready to use gamesmanship to undermine a younger opponent,” wrote the Independent.

Worst of all, during their semi (which Sharapova won after Golovin sprained her ankle after she had broken back to 4-4 in the third set), a seemingly imperious Maria stayed on her side of the net, jumping in place and practicing her strokes while Golovin lay on the ground receiving treatment.
“I guess that’s the way she is,” Golovin told Tennisreporters.net. “It’s a match, but you know, we all know each other.” Asked what she would have done in the same situation, Golovin said, “I would have run to the other side of the court, of course.”

After falling to Svetlana Kuznetsova 6-4, 6-3 in the final, a strangely chipper Sharapova dodged the question as to why fans were booing her, certainly a career first for the ‘05 Wimbledon champ. “The crowd,” she said. “Why would they bother me?…“I don’t pay attention to that.”

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