The Tennis 128: No. 27, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario

Arantxa Sánchez Vicario

I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. Whee!

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Arantxa Sánchez Vicario [ESP]
Born: 18 December 1971
Career: 1986-2002
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1995)
Peak Elo rating: 2,419 (1st place, 1994)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 29
 

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Things were not looking up for women’s tennis at the beginning of 1994. The tour lost Monica Seles when she was stabbed in April 1993. Jennifer Capriati flamed out and went back to high school. 37-year-old Martina Navratilova was embarking on her final season.

The WTA tour had no title sponsor. One official admitted, “Everyone thinks women’s tennis is in trouble.”

Steffi Graf ran roughshod over the tour while Seles was sidelined. She hogged the last three majors of 1993, and she won her first 54 sets in 1994. Stop me if you’ve heard this song before: When there’s a single dominant player atop the rankings, it means the field is weak. When an untouchable pair battle for number one, it means the rest of the field can’t compete. When there’s no clear top player, it means that no one is good enough to seize the opportunity. Naysayers have been practicing their spiel on women’s tennis for a century.

Prognosticators figured Graf might well go undefeated until the 21st century, or at least until Seles came back. While they waited, the public would get bored, the tour would wither away. Management firm IMG even went so far as to lay the groundwork for a rival circuit to replace the WTA entirely.

Allow me to skip ahead a bit. The women’s game was fine in 1994, just like it was fine in 1984 and 1974. Barring nuclear war, a Golden Slam for Alexander Zverev, or an international pickleball league headlined by Roger Federer and Serena Williams, it will be fine in 2024, too.

By the end of the year, fans would know the names of Lindsay Davenport, Martina Hingis, and Venus Williams. Mary Pierce, once on a path parallel to Capriati’s, would upset Steffi and reach the French Open final. Graf’s results, in the end, would look about as good as they did in each of the previous three seasons.

The German would not, however, repeat her three-major haul of 1993. She’d win the Australian and no more. Pierce surprised her in Paris, Lori McNeil knocked her out in the first round at Wimbledon, and she fell a few points short of a fourth US Open title.

Seles was sorely missed, to be sure. But the level of competition was just fine.

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The woman who filled the gap was Arantxa Sánchez Vicario. She hardly emerged out of the blue. The Spaniard had shocked Steffi to win at Roland Garros in 1989, and she finished ’89, ’91, and ’92 in the top five of the world rankings.

At the same time, her second-place finish at the end of 1993 felt a bit hollow. She won four titles, none of them in the second half of the season. (Her fourth was at Hamburg, the event where Seles was attacked.) She lost multiple matches to Graf, of course. She also dropped decisions to Amanda Coetzer, Natalia Medvedeva, and Helena Suková–twice.

Arantxa took her number two ranking much more seriously than the rest of the tennis world did. Chris Evert came the closest to giving Sánchez Vicario a suitable amount of respect. “Unless Martina is on a grass court or Arantxa on the clay courts,” she said, “I don’t see anyone out there who can beat [Graf].”

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An Arantxa forehand at the 1989 French Open

Evert was one of the first players to learn not to look past the diminutive Spaniard. Evert’s last career match at Roland Garros was a 1988 third-rounder against the 16-year-old Arantxa. The newcomer beat her in a straight-set slugfest. The average rally required more than twelve strokes. Sánchez Vicario got so many balls back that Evert–one of the steadiest players in the game’s history–piled up more than 50 unforced errors.

Sánchez Vicario wasn’t afraid of Evert in 1988, she wasn’t intimidated by Graf in the 1989 French final, and she was hardly about to concede the entire season to the German in 1994. After losing to Steffi twice in the early going, she spent time with both sports psychologist Jim Loehr and Pete Sampras’s trainer, Pat Etcheberry. “They know what it takes to be a champion,” she said, and it was starting to look like she did, too.

Arantxa won three straight events in April 1994, beating Navratilova and Gabriela Sabatini at Amelia Island, Iva Majoli at home in Barcelona, and Graf in Hamburg for the second consecutive year. The title match at the German Open showed just how tough the Spaniard could be. She trailed 5-2 in the second set, saved a match point, and ultimately pulled out a 3-hour, 3-minute, 4-6, 7-6, 7-6 victory. It was Steffi’s first loss of the season.

The French Open was a breeze by comparison. Pierce knocked out Graf in the semis, but Paris’s adopted daughter didn’t hold up under the pressure of the final. Sánchez Vicario won that one, 6-4, 6-4.

“It is hard to beat me,” Arantxa said.

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Many of the warnings about the imminent death of women’s tennis weren’t really complaints about the level of competition. Even though Sánchez Vicario’s pesky, defensive style of play didn’t appeal to everyone, she forced Graf to raise her own game. The Hamburg final was just one of many classics contested by the two women.

What pundits–and, alas, sponsors–griped about was the supposed lack of personalities. Seles had the potential to be the greatest of all time, and she knew it. She had the charisma to pull off a sometimes breathtaking level of self-assurance. Capriati’s precociousness was a front-page story in itself, and tabloid coverage made the game more visible, at least as long as she was competing.

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Seles and Sánchez Vicario at the 1991 French Open

Arantxa didn’t have any assets that compared, at least in the eyes of the English-speaking media. Her family, including men’s tour players Emilio and Javier, was almost freakishly well-adjusted. She was friendly and well-liked by most of her peers. She was confident but rarely arrogant.

Yawn, right?

As late as February 1995, when Sánchez Vicario was trading weeks atop the rankings with Graf, the Los Angeles Times could call her “the least known No. 1 ever.”* Sportswriters wrote columns about how no one wrote about her.

* In fairness, she was only the seventh number one in WTA rankings history, and at the time, people thought she was the sixth. (It wasn’t recognized that Evonne Goolagong had held the position for two weeks in 1976.) You could be awfully famous and still come in behind Evert, Navratilova, Tracy Austin, Graf, and Seles.

In late 1994 and 1995, Arantxa accepted more and more press commitments to support WTA events. She was often the top seed, if not the main drawing card. “I like for people to know me off the court,” she said, “as a person with interests, who goes to museums and the theater and listens to music.” Pleasant as she was, international celebrity required a bit more color than that.

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For serious tennis fans, there was plenty to like, no matter how many column inches the Spaniard did or didn’t get.

Bud Collins dubbed Arantxa the “Barcelona Bumblebee.” An early coach, Juan Núñez, called her a rabbit. She liked that one, buying a stuffed Bugs Bunny for her racket bag.

Sánchez Vicario summed up her strategy in 1990: “I wait, and the opposition of me exhausts herself with aggression. She must then do things my way.” Graf served for the 1989 French Open title at 5-3 in the third set. Arantxa’s belief never wavered: “I was gonna run down everything.” She did just that, winning 16 of the last 19 points.

The 1989 Roland Garros final

The rabbit metaphor was a good one. Arantxa’s energy was the stuff of legend. She played a record 167 matches in 1993. Of the eight 1994 tournaments where she won the singles title, she added the doubles crown at seven of them.

All the talk about her indefatigability was true, but it left the Spaniard feeling a bit underappreciated. “I would like people to see me as a complete player,” she said in 1995. “I have shots, I go to the net, I can serve. No one sees this. I am sad and wonder why the only thing people say is that I am fast.”

Pundits could underrate her strokes, but no one questioned Arantxa’s heart. Natural as it was to associate her with speedy, undersized creatures, people around the game converged on another animal when they described her.

“She’s feisty and fiery and laughs back at the public when she misses an easy shot,” said longtime tour gadfly Ted Tinling. “But beneath all the fun and the giggles, she’s a lion.”

Opponents knew they were up against someone at the top of the food chain. “Arantxa loves to intimidate,” said Pam Shriver. “Her aura can be scary out there. Inch for inch, I think she gets more out of her game than any competitor. If she was a pitcher, she’d throw the brushback at your head.”

Pam would know. She faced Sánchez Vicario once–on grass, the Spaniard’s weakest surface. Shriver lost, 6-0, 6-1.

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After winning the 1994 French Open, Arantxa went into her typical mid-summer swoon. She lost in the fourth round at Wimbledon to Zina Garrison, then dropped hard-court finals in North America to Graf and Conchita Martínez.

She wouldn’t take over the number one ranking until the following year, but a run of tournaments at the close of 1994 made it clear she belonged at the top of the list.

Sánchez Vicario and Graf faced off for titles in Toronto and at the US Open, high-caliber clashes that could revivify the deadest of tours. In Canada, Arantxa saved four match points–one of them with a 20-shot rally–before outlasting Steffi in a third-set tiebreak. In New York, the Spaniard won what Sports Illustrated called “the finest U.S. Open women’s title match in a decade.” It took a 14-point final game to finally put away Steffi for a 1-6, 7-6, 6-4 victory.

The 1994 US Open final

She had proven she could win on hard courts, and two months later, she did the same on carpet. In Oakland, she held off a cast of once and future greats–Navratilova, Garrison, Lindsay Davenport, and Venus Williams*–to win her eighth title of the season. The final was another nailbiter, as she overcame the 38-year-old Martina, 1-6, 7-6, 7-6.

* This is the Venus-Arantxa match portrayed–with ample artistic license–in the recent film King Richard.

After Arantxa reached her second-straight Australian Open final, where she lost to Pierce, she finally claimed the number one ranking in February 1995. She struggled to defend her position, failing to win a tournament until Barcelona in April. When Graf beat her for the French Open title, Sánchez Vicario lost her precarious perch at the top of the ranking table.

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The Spaniard was never one to go down without a fight. She had always neglected the grass court season, echoing Manolo Santana’s famous line that “grass is for cows.” She saw Martínez break through at Wimbledon in 1994, and her own hard-court major suggested she could compete on any surface. At Wimbledon in 1995, she easily beat Garrison–her conqueror the previous year–and edged past Conchita in the semi-finals.

Waiting in the final, of course, was Steffi Graf. It was their 34th career meeting. The one previous time they faced off at the Championships, Graf won in straights.

The pivotal game of the match took place at 5-all in the third, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But I’m more struck by Sánchez Vicario’s previous service game, at four games apiece. She won that one at love. Graf didn’t get a single ball back in play. A decade into her career, the pesky dirtballer had finally gotten herself in a proper grass-court mindset. She sealed her 5-4 advantage with a clean ace.

5-all was a different story. Sally Jenkins called it “arguably the best single game ever played on Centre Court,” comparing it to the famous Borg-McEnroe tiebreak 15 years earlier. It spanned 20 minutes, requiring 32 points and 13 deuces.

The 11th game of the 3rd set of the 1995 Wimbledon final

Graf earned her first break point on the 12th point of the game; she didn’t get the serve back. Next break point: Arantxa got to net first and saved it with a backhand volley winner. Break point number three: Sánchez Vicario won a battle of crosscourt forehands.

The Spaniard showed off her aggressiveness, but she wasn’t quite aggressive enough. On the sixth break point, Graf finally beat her with an inside-out forehand. At 6-5, Steffi held to love to win the title.

Somewhere in the middle of that marathon game was probably the peak of Arantxa’s career. Long a force to be reckoned with on clay, she had beaten the best player in the world on hard courts. She was inches away from doing the same on grass, something she couldn’t have imagined just one year earlier.

No, she didn’t pull out the victory. Even the heart of a lion doesn’t beat forever. Win or lose, though, it was a standard Sánchez Vicario performance. Nobody ever gives Arantxa credit for saving the ailing women’s game, but while experts grumbled about the lack of compelling personalities, she delivered one thrilling match after another.

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