From Information https://www.information.dk/kultur/2018/01/slaget-ingen-set-komme (paywall)
Anders Haahr is a tennis fan and author of Én bold ad gangen (One ball at a time) about Caroline Wozniacki's 2009 run to the US Open final), writes about men, women and gender, tenni and commentates tennis on Danish Eurosport. He commentated Wozniacki's match along with Michael Mortensen on Danish Kanal 5.
Caroline Wozniacki's biggest win, the Australian Open, in a way summed up her entire career, and was a centimetre away from never happening.
It's Wednesday afternoon in Melbourne, 30 C and the sun is shining down on Rod Laver Arena, where Caroline Wozniacki is playing tennis in the second round of the Australian Open.
She's playing against world number 119, the Croatian Jana Fett, whom Wozniacki neither knows nor has heard of before this match, one of the many extremely talented tennis players who play on the edge of anonymity on outside courts and small provincial tournaments where they try and scrape enough money together to pay the plane ticket to the next tournament where the breakthrough is most likely not going to happen.
This is actually Fett's big chance. She's played excellent tennis for two hours and is ahead 5-1 in the third and deciding set, ahead 40-15 on own serve, two match points against the world star Wozniacki. Fett hits her first serve hard down the T. Wozniacki sees the ball is in. She's not close to reaching it.
You can manage to think a lot in a half second. Wozniacki manages to consider how she should spend the next week-and-a-half. Should she fly directly to St. Petersburg, the location of her next tournament? Should she hang around Melbourne, practise a bit under the summer Australian sun, or go back to her apartment in Monaco, spend a few days with her dog Bruno, away from the travelling tennis circus?
Then the line umpire calls, 'out!'. It turns out Fett's serve was a centimetre out. Wozniacki is still in the tournament. She wins the next two duels, wins the game and, a little less than a half hour later, the match 7-5 in the third set, after what the tabloids call a 'Crazy Comeback' Ten days later, she wins the biggest title of her career at one of the most meaningful tennis tournaments in the world, and one of the biggest accomplishments ever by a Danish athlete.
It could have been a match that changed the narrative of Fett's career. In stead, it changed the narrative of Wozniacki's. She explained herself that, as she hit herself deeper into the tournament with one more convincing win after the other, she felt like she had nothing to lose, that she was playing "with house money", a casino expression for gambling with money given to you.
The expression wasn't a coincidence. During the whole tournament, Wozniacki, along with her father Piotr and her fiancé, the retired basketball player David Lee, visited the casino at the Crown Hotel along the Yarra river in the middle of Melbourne, where they were staying. As Wozniacki herself might say, she gambles conservatively when she's at the table. We might say she plays conservatively on the court.
Time after time she's been in big matches with the big win in sight without going all in. Her game seemed to be negatively defined: she refused to lose. She got the most impossible balls back over the net. Her defence was grotesquely optimistic, while her offensive shots were marked by worry, their only goal being not to go wrong.
Wozniacki went a long way with that, and, at the start, it went well at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. Day by day she increased her winnings until, at one point, she was up $1,300. The symbolism was almost too heavy when she said before the final her luck had changed, and she was now down $200.
Freedom and light feet
Wozniacki has twice before been in a Grand Slam final, both times thanks to a combination of sensible play and good draws which helped her to meet unseeded players in the semi-finals. Both times she met an absolute top class player in the final‒first Kim Clijsters, then Serena Williams‒and was thrashed in two sets.
Saturday in Melbourne she faced the world number one, Simona Halep, a small Romanian from the harbour town of Constanta by the Black Sea, the daughter of football-happy dairy manager, and herself easily to keep a tennis ball in the air with her feet twenty times. Halep, like Wozniacki, had twice before been in a Slam final and lost. 168 centimetres isn't much for a tennis player, but Halep possesses the quickest, lightest feet on the WTA Tour, and a timing on her shots that allows her to change direction at will.
Tennis is often described as a combination of boxing and chess, a hard, physical duel that demands strategic thinking. The game follows patterns. Halep's doesn't. When she's at her best, she gives the impression of total freedom. She often goes onto the court with no plan. She sees what happens and adapts, plays herself free.
Her path to the final had been rough. In the third round, she played almost four hours against the American Lauren Davis. Halep was behind 10-11 and 0-40, three match points against her, before she fought back and when the deciding set with the grotesque result 15-13. Never before in the tournament's history had a women's match been contested with more games.
As if that weren't enough, she played one of the best, most intense matches in years when she defeated the winner of the tournament in 2016, German Angelique Kerber, when, after blowing to match points, later survived two before finally winning 9-7 in the third set.
So Halep was the betting favourite going into the final. She was up to then the star of the tournament. Oddly, the Romanian is playing without a clothing sponsor. As number one in the world in a sport with global reach and advertising revenue in the millions, the Romanian‒whose contract with Adidas wasn't extended‒had to order her No Logo clothes over the internet.
Totally uncomfortable
Wozniacki stepped into the final nervously. The nerves disappeared after the first rally. Her father and coach, Piotr, was the last to talk to her in the dressing room. He said:
"I'm really proud of you, whatever happens. Just go out there and show them your heart. Give it everything you have. Win or lose, I'm here afterwards."
Caroline Wozniacki started aggressively. She played quickly, and she played bravely. She hit half of her groundstrokes down the line, the the court is shortest and the net is highest. It wasn't because she felt relaxed and calm.
"At no point did it feel good," she said after the match.
It was an uncomfortable match. But, in contrast to earlier in her career, Wozniacki accepted the discomfort. She didn't crawl back to safety down behind the baseline. Or, well, she did. After winning the first set, she let Halep take the initiative and lost the second. After being ahead 3-1 in the third, she lost three games in a row.
Time after time, there were glimpses of the Wozniacki who refused to lose, but didn't dare gamble big to win. And time after time, we saw something else.
Behind 3-4 in the third set, Wozniacki played to 0-30 on Halep's serve by first ripping a cross court forehand and then doing the same after with a backhand. She got break point with a hard forehand down the line hit on the full run and with full risk.
The final was played in tropical conditions, 31 C, but it felt more like 40. The air was heavy and humid, even in the late evening hours. It was way past 10 PM when Wozniacki held serve to 5-4. Previous to that, there were two and three-quarters of an hour of one of the best finals of recent times: gripping, exhausting tennis that ended up sending Simona Halep to the hospital, where she was treated overnight for dehydration and had both feet MRI scanned before she was discharged in the morning.
Meanwhile, Wozniacki toured around all sorts of TV studios with the Daphne Ackhurst Memorial Cup in her hands, a trophy awarded since 1934 in memory of the tennis player of the same name who won the tournament five times between the wars before she died at the age of 29 from en ectopic pregnancy. It had been handed to her by Billie Jean King, who, in 1973 gathered 62 women tennis players in a hotel room in London, locked the door and said it would first be unlocked when all agreed to stand together in the fight for women's professional tennis.
"She's the one who gathered the dollars together," as Wozniacki recently said about King. "And then they played for a dollar."
"A strongly independent women, who fought for what she believed in, and that was equality."
Together with the trophy, Wozniacki received a cheque for the same amount of money the men played for the day after: Australian $4 million, 20 million Danish crowns.
Wozniacki got match point after a rally that summed up her career. Halep ran the Dane from side to side. Her fifth shot was an angled inside-out forehand that Wozniacki just managed to get her racquet on. The ball floated high and softly back to Halep, who hit a full volley shot cross court, but Wozniacki managed to reach it there, hit a forehand a bit too hard, so she didn't really have time to get to the backhand Halep hit to the other side.
Wozniacki reached it, of course, but she did more than that. She threw herself into the shot, into the two-handed backhand that had always been her strength, want all in with a short, angled backhand that Halep never saw coming. Which none of us saw coming. Which had never come before, except, it did now, finally.
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