Tennis starlet Maria Sharapova's
overnight fame was years in the making.
Her star has risen so quickly that she
was the highest ranked female athlete
in the Forbes Power Celebrity 100, higher
than both Williams sisters. Can she
make it last?
In an isolated patch of rural Spain,
the midday sun broils the clay court.
The teenage boys training at the Equelitetennis
academy sweat through a series of drills
and struggle to focus on tennis rather
than stare at the superstar practicing
on the next court: Maria Sharapova,
a dazzling 6-foot-tall blonde in a sleeveless
T shirt and snug shorts who grunts each
time her racquet smacks the ball to
deliver a blinding, blurry serve.
Sharapova, all of 18 years old and
a lanky unknown a year ago, would rather
ignore the celebrity thing, too, but
these days she is the "It"
girl of women's tennis - and the world's
best-compensated female athlete, earning
close to $20 million a year on court
and off.
Her sudden fame since winning Wimbledon
last July at age 17, wielding speed
and power to topple perennial number
one Lindsay Davenport and the often
invincible Serena Williams, have made
her a hot property to Nike, Canon, Colgate-Palmolive,
Motorola and a bevy of other brands.
Hot property
A fragrance named after her will be
out in autumn. This is the payoff for
12 years of six-hour practice days,
constant travel and the exclusion of
anything close to a normal childhood.
Yet the Russian-born tennis star and
her crew - her father and her managers
at IMG - view it as a dangerous distraction
from what counts. After signing her
up for nine endorsement deals since
Wimbledon, they are closed for business.
They turn down millions of dollars in
new deals and limit her work for sponsors
to just three weeks a year.
Sharapova herself - who is a few credits
shy of a home-schooling high school
degree, won't attend college anytime
soon and doesn't have time for friends
or beaux eschews appearances at lavish
parties, awards shows and other diversions.
Her reluctance is risky, for a tennis
star's time at the top can be fleeting.
A bad knee injury in her next tournament
could end her career in an instant.
Fickle marketers might lose interest
when the next hot newcomer wins a big
upset. Why not rake in every dollar
while you can?
On-court success
Anna Kournikova, another leggy blonde
Russian tennis star once with IMG, made
a splash at age 16, then foundered,
never winning a major tournament. Yet
she parlayed her celebrity and sex appeal
into millions of dollars in product
endorsements. She stopped playing competitive
tennis at 21, two years ago, but still
earns upward of $4 million a year from
marketers.
In Sharapova's camp, though, Kournikova
is a cautionary tale: a talented, marketable
athlete who ultimately didn't fulfil
her potential, never ranking higher
than tenth in the world.
"That's why I play tennis - because
I want to be number one, not because
I want to be number 10," Sharapova
says in an interview, calm, self-possessed
and unaccompanied by any handlers.
"If you don't want to be number
one in the world, then there is no reason
for you to even start."
She is well aware, though, that looks
are as important as winning.
"Beauty sells," she says.
"I have to realise that's also
part of why people want me. I understand
it. It's fine. I'm not going to make
myself ugly."
Talent spotted young
Maria Sharapova was born in 1987 in
Siberia and moved to the Black Sea resort
town of Sochi a year later. She was
the only child in a family living well
enough to play tennis and go skiing.
Her dad, Yuri, worked in construction
and had a racquet in her hand by the
time she was a toddler.
At age 6 she attended a tennis clinic
in Moscow and met Martina Navratilova,
who advised that she start training
professionally. Soon afterwards Yuri
and Maria left her mother, Yelena, behind
in Russia and went to the US, travelling
to its tennis Mecca - Florida.
Maria says she can't recall even discussing
the move, only packing for it the night
before. The trip was funded by loans
from both sets of her grandparents.
"My parents weren't stupid,"
she says. "The conditions in Russia
weren't the best for tennis."
Difficult start
Her mother, unable to secure a visa,
wouldn't rejoin her until two years
later. If this separation hurt, Maria
doesn't show it. Soon after landing
in Florida, father and daughter showed
up at the famed Nick Bollettieri Tennis
Academy in Florida, which has moulded
such stars as Andre Agassi, Monica Seles
and Pete Sampras. But the trainers there
deemed her too young and advised Yuri
to return when she was a little older.
Then came two difficult years of knocking
around. Maria can't recall details but
says she and her dad made the Florida
tennis scene, where she got sporadic
instruction and he found ways to pay
the bills.
"You can never get a real straight
answer from either of them," says
Max Eisenbud, Maria's main handler at
IMG, who speaks with her daily.
"Yuri calls it survival. It was
just two very tough years. They don't
forget what it was like."
Early confidence
When the Sharapovas returned to Bollettieri
in 1995, Maria was 9 and raw, gawky
and spaghetti thin, but she was more
advanced than any other child her age.
"She had an air of almost naive
arrogance and privilege," Bollettieri
recalls. He had sold his shop in 1987
to IMG, which uses it as a profit centre
and feeder system for future clients.
The academy charges $46,000 for nine
months of training, tutoring and room
and board. IMG offered Maria a full-ride
scholarship, placing her alongside girls
who were 10 years older.
"I never had the experience of
actually being around other kids every
day," Sharapova says. "I was
never in, like, a normal school, never
in kindergarten."
But she adds: "It's hard to miss
it when you've never really had it."
Her training was handled first by Bollettieri's
team and later by groundstroke specialist
Robert Lansdorp, who had worked with
Sampras. But Bollettieri says, "Make
no mistake about it: There is only one
coach, and that is Yuri Sharapova."
Conservative approach
to sponsorship
By age 11 Sharapova had signed with
IMG. Eisenbud and Gavin Forbes, who
runs the agency's tennis division, started
out slowly, securing her a modest Nike
deal that kept her in sneakers and workout
gear while trying to shield her from
hype and expectations. At 13 she won
a 16-and-under championship.
Two years later she was the youngest
player to reach the finals of the Australian
Open Junior championship. Still her
agents were turning down deals instead
of seeking them out, banking on delayed
gratification.
"It was never really about the
money," Eisenbud says. "We
were all in agreement that something
big was going to happen, and we needed
to be clean."
By 2003 Sharapova, then 16, had won
her first adult pro tournament, in Japan.
A month later she had her first endorsement
pact, a one-year deal to hawk NEC in
Japan. By this time IMG had invested
some $500,000 in Sharapova with little
financial return. Exposing her only
gradually, Eisenbud booked her on the
little-watched Late Late Show on CBS.
Exceeding expectations
IMG agents began to talk to marketers
about their client but held off on trying
to land deals. They figured she would
need three more years, reaching age
19, to win a Grand Slam tournament like
Wimbledon. Just a year later she won
at Wimbledon. Courtside that day, as
the TV cameras rolled, the elated youngster
tried to call her mother on a cell phone.
An IMG marketing executive, Alan Zucker,
watching at home in suburban Cleveland,
called his contact at Motorola to make
a pitch: Sharapova didn't use a Motorola
phone at that moment, but she could
have. One month later Sharapova had
her first global endorsement deal. The
estimated $1 million a year pact was
Motorola's first big celebrity contract
in a decade.
The day after Wimbledon Yuri Sharapova
sat down with Maria's two IMG agents
and pored over a 12-month calendar to
plot the days when she would be made
available to work with her corporate
sponsors, limiting the time to three
weeks. They since have signed 10 new
endorsement contracts and say they are
full up for now.
Her likely take: $15 million a year,
though some say it surpasses $20 million.
Other distractions creep in. In May
Motorola threw a party for Sharapova's
18th birthday at a downtown Manhattan
nightspot, attended by 700 friends and
well-wishers and packed with red-carpet
paparazzi. The tabloids run adoring
photos of her, but she tries to ignore
them.
"They just don't even make sense.
They're so useless," says Sharapova.
Selective opportunities
She turned down cover shoots for the
leering laddie magazines Maxim and FHM
but accepted one for Italian Vogue.
She still devotes six hours a day to
tennis and travels for months at a time,
leaving little room for personal relationships.
"That's a hard thing," she
says. Yet she insists tennis isn't the
be-all, end-all. "I've always thought
there are a lot of other things, new
things, that I'd like to do," she
says, maybe something in the fashion
business.
"Tennis obviously is going to
make my money at this point, and that's
what I've been practicing for. But it's
not my life."
Even some of her handlers believe she
will quit sooner rather than later.
"I don't think Maria is going to
be playing tennis when she's 28,"
says her coach, Lansdorp.
Winning strategy
Sharapova is clear-eyed about the fact
that she must keep on winning. Many
of her marketing deals reach full value
only if she attains certain goals such
as winning another Grand Slam match
or rising to the number-one ranking
in the world. In recent months she has
stalled at number two.
Last month, playing on a sprained ankle,
her first significant injury, she got
bounced out of the French Open in the
quarterfinals. All of her success could
be temporary, she concedes. She is spending
cautiously, limiting binges to shoes
and the occasional dress.
In May she made her biggest purchase:
a $2.7 million, 4,700-square-foot home
in Bradenton, where she will live with
her parents.
"I know it's really hard to make
money and that it's really easy to lose
it," she says. "I'm still
only 18 years old, and you never know
what could happen. I might get injured
and, hey, I'm stuck."
Life outside of tennis
On many days she wakes up tired and
drained, "and I feel in my head
that I don't want to see a tennis ball
anymore." It's just fatigue, she
says, not burnout, though she feels
she can quit whenever she likes.
"Off the court, my father does
his own thing, and he lets me do my
own thing. He understands I'm 18 and
have another life," she says.
But "he knows that I'm under control.
I know that I'm under control."
Her handlers, no doubt, hope to keep
it that way.
