View full sizeGisela Dulko with her new crush, the first-place trophy for the Mexican Open.The Australian Open's over, so ... who's going to win Roland Garros?
We tend to get so focused on the four major championships that we view all the other tournaments on the schedule as mere prelude. But if winning a major is the only yardstick for success in professional tennis, there must be a lot of bitter, angry players on tour.
This is one good argument --
-- for the endless morass of tournaments spread across the globe and calendar. No, tennis is not organized in the logical, linear fashion of pretty much every other professional sport. And no, the typical fan can't make sense of it. But it does allow for lesser players to have their moments in the sun, too. (Lesser players, of course, being a relative term, for even the 100th-ranked player in the world is one helluva athlete.)
Which brings us to Gisela Dulko, a long-time second-tier player on the WTA. With her long braid and short skirt snapping in unison, she has mostly garnered public attention over the years through her looks. The
phenomenon in the late '90s gave rise to a plethora of Next-Generation Annas aiming for their own pin-up calendars, and Dulko was one of the gang. Somewhat diffident, she never seemed entirely comfortable in this role, but she was blond and she wanted to be noticed as much as the next girl, so she went along.
Then last year she began to show serious tennis fans that she should be taken seriously as a player, too. She and Flavia Pennetta flashily won the WTA Championships in doubles and finished the year ranked number one. They were a striking, sugar-and-spice team, with Dulko as nervous and wide-eyed as a bunny and Pennetta as confident and showy as a bullfighter.
Dulko, it seemed clear, was the weaker of the two. The proof hit like a pie in the face during the Australian Open doubles final, when truncheon-wielding Victoria Azarenka and Mini-Me Maria Kirilenko -- in some ways a mirror image of their opponents -- sprinted out to a commanding set-and-break lead. Nerves -- the number-one seeds were going for their first major title -- seemed to get the best of Dulko, who pecked at the ball and skittered around the court as if it were a bed of hot coals.
View full sizeGisela Dulko, sex symbol? Sure. But she can play some serious ball, too.But then, at the last possible moment, she remembered her mantra -- "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and
doggone it
, people like me." Her game suddenly fell into place. Poaching judiciously, cranking stomach-dropping lobs into the corners, she showed that she was every bit as responsible for that number-one ranking as the bigger, more demonstrative Pennetta. Frustrating Azarenka and Kirilenko with expert teamwork,
.
Now the confidence Dulko has gained from winning in doubles has led to singles success as well. On Acapulco's slow clay courts last week, the 26-year-old Argentine won her fourth career WTA singles title -- her first in nearly three years. And she was as thrilled as if she'd just won Wimbledon.
"Wow, what an honor!" she said, when told she was the
-- a somewhat surprising fact, considering Argentina gave us
and regularly produces excellent claycourters. "It's great just to win a tournament but to do that too is unbelievable for me," she said. "A lot of good things have been happening to me this year, and I'm just trying to enjoy it all."
She deserves to enjoy it. It's not just that, in the talent department, Dulko's office is down the hall from the best of the best. She's also a wee thing. And more than ever in women's tennis, that matters. Even the great Justine Henin has admitted
and felt she had to do anything -- within or even beyond the rules -- to gain an edge on court.
Dulko is 5'7", which is pretty tall for a civilian woman, but it's only average for someone sporting a WTA uniform. Far worse, she's built like a reed hut. She can only bend with the gale-force wind coming from the Serenas and Kims; she can't push back. It's a constant uphill road for smaller players like her. Dulko has to rely on smarts and consistency -- she's not going to blast the ball past anybody. She might have been a Top Tenner if she'd played 30 years ago, but, stuck in her own era, her career best is No. 26, and she's currently at No. 56.
So, while Gisela Dulko's win in Acapulco might not have registered as more than a brief blip on the news radar, tennis fans everywhere should recognize that it was no small feat.
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