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(great article on Nancy from today's NY Times. OF course, her losing first round in Madrid takes some of the glow away, but still...)


Carla Suárez Navarro Gives Spain Hope in Women’s Tennis
Published: May 9, 2009

With Rafael Nadal roaming the world’s baselines, this is a golden age of Spanish tennis. But that only applies to the Spanish men. The women reached their peak more than a decade ago when Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and Conchita Martínez were regularly challenging for and winning significant titles.

Suárez Navarro, ranked 23rd, is one of two top 40 women to use a one-handed backhand.
There has been no sign of a genuine successor, and it has now been nine years since a Spanish woman reached the semifinals of a Grand Slam event in singles.

It is a surprising state of affairs. Spanish sports are still on a roll — Nadal, the national men’s soccer team, the basketball star Pau Gasol. Though women’s participation in sports lags behind men’s in Spain, the gap is narrowing, with the increase in the number of Spanish female Olympians as an example.

Tennis is in the midst of a boom and Nadal is the formidable extension of a long line of outstanding Spanish men’s players, including Carlos Moyá, who also reached No. 1 in the world after learning the game on the Mediterranean island of Majorca.

But Sánchez Vicario and Martínez — and all the attention they drew to women’s tennis in Spain — did not set the table for another women’s champion. At least not yet.

“We are giving it all we have,” Carla Suárez Navarro said.

Suárez Navarro, 20, is Spain’s most promising player since the Big 2, and she bears a certain resemblance to both. Like Sánchez Vicario, Suárez Navarro is short and sturdy and reliant on speed to counter the power of her taller opponents. Like Martínez, she has a stylish one-handed backhand that came naturally.

“Her backhand is her best shot; it reminds me a bit of Justine Henin’s,” Sánchez Vicario said while taking a break last week from caring for her 2-month-old daughter, Arantxa. “She’s not tall, but she’s very talented. For me, she is the only younger women’s player in Spain who can really achieve quite a bit more. She needs more consistency, but we’ll see how far she can get. So far, she’s the only one who looks like she might have it what it takes. I wish I could see more names.”

With Henin, the former Belgian star, now retired, the 23rd-ranked Suárez Navarro and 21st-ranked Amélie Mauresmo are the only players in the top 40 who use a one-handed backhand. It allows Suárez Navarro to produce the sort of shifts in rhythm and spin — including quality drop shots — that are all too rare in the upper reaches of the women’s game in this power-hungry era.

“Whenever I finish a match, people always come up to me and talk to me about my backhand and even thank me for my backhand,” Suárez Navarro said. “My first coach, Alfonso Pérez, had a one-handed backhand, and so did his sister. And they taught me that way, and since I had the strength to do it, I guess they never tried to change it.”

Like Nadal, Suárez Navarro grew up on a Spanish island, but her home was considerably farther south. She was born and raised on the Atlantic Ocean archipelago of the Canary Islands in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where her mother, Lali, was a physical education teacher whose expertise did not include tennis.

“Neither my mother nor my father played,” Suárez Navarro said. “Nobody in my family played. I guess it was meant to be for me.”


Rest of article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/sp.../10tennis.html