Mauresmo's stock can rise, fall in NYC

NEW YORK -- Amelie Mauresmo labored a dozen years before winning her first major tournament at the Australian Open in January.

After enduring a span of 31 majors to capture her first, it took her just two more to win a second.

Mauresmo's 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 victory in the Wimbledon final against Justine Henin-Hardenne expunged the labels she had accumulated despite 23 career titles and a No. 1 ranking: underachiever; big-match choker; best player never to win a Slam.

Now, at 27, she carries the tag of late bloomer. "It took me obviously longer than most players," says Mauresmo, citing the teenage Slam success of players such as Martina Hingis and Serena Williams. "But I still got there, and that's the main thing."

For the athletic Frenchwoman now sitting atop the tennis world, the U.S. Open offers a new crucible. The question isn't if she can win the big ones. It's how many.

"She's a little like Phil Mickelson," ESPN's Pam Shriver says, referring to the golfer who began to win major titles in his mid-30s. "She could still win one to two majors a year for the next few years and retire with seven or eight. But just as easily we could look back and say this was a career year and that's it. Neither would surprise me."

In other words, Mauresmo's performance in New York will offer a telling glimpse of where her fortunes are headed.

Mauresmo burst on the scene at 19 when she reached the 1999 Australian Open final. The tournament announced her arrival in more ways than one when she came out as a lesbian -- only to be called "half a man" by champion Hingis.

As she struggled with her sexuality publicly and strained relations with her family, her game seldom suffered. She routinely went deep at majors and has been ranked in the top 10 in six of the last seven years.

But it wasn't until November at the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour Championships in Los Angeles that Mauresmo finally unearthed the psychological steeliness that undermined her in big events.

"It really helped me believe that I could win those big tournaments -- big relief," says Mauresmo, who beat a succession of top-10 players for the title. "My whole game was much better after that."

She rode the momentum to her first major in Australia, though she benefited from three retirements, including a controversial abandonment by Henin-Hardenne in the final when Henin-Hardenne was losing 6-1, 2-0. Any doubts about Mauresmo's ability to win a major outright were erased at Wimbledon.

"It was good that I finally got to have that match point and win it," says Mauresmo, 5-9, who was born in the Paris suburbs and lives in Geneva. "The air is clear now."

Like practically every serious contender in New York, Mauresmo arrives with question marks. After her Wimbledon win in early July, she took three weeks off and then strained her right shoulder one week after resuming training.

The injury, which hampers her serve, forced her to withdraw from Montreal and means she has played only one tournament in six weeks, New Haven, where she lost in the quarterfinals to Lindsay Davenport. She hadn't hit a serve in 10 days before arriving on U.S. soil.

"It's not a lot," Mauresmo says of her preparation. "Obviously, I would have loved to have played in Montreal, and the time without competition is a little bit long. But that's the way it is. I have no choice. It's what my body allowed me to do."

She's hardly alone among the tour's walking wounded. Nearly every top player, from Henin-Hardenne to Maria Sharapova to Serena Williams, arrives in New York with limited play or a nagging ailment.

One possible advantage for Mauresmo is that she knows anything she accomplishes in New York is icing on the cake after winning two Slams.

"The question is, does she allow herself to just swing freely, because that's when she plays her best tennis," TV analyst Mary Carillo says.

"That's really how I take it," agrees Mauresmo. "By winning in Australia, I've allowed myself to lose. In the past, people were talking about how I still hadn't won a Grand Slam. It was starting to be a little heavy on me."

That ability to use pressure as a positive paid off at Wimbledon, where she survived three-set matches against Anastasia Myskina, Sharapova and Henin-Hardenne in the final rounds to become the first female champion from France since Suzanne Lenglen in 1925.

Like other gifted shot-makers, Mauresmo's game is a delicate balance of power, finesse, movement and aggression. That's one reason she has blossomed only recently. Attacking players with so many options often hit their stride later -- think Martina Navratilova -- since their games are not based on bashing from the baseline.

"Her game has a lot to rein in," Shriver says. "When you have so many options, it makes for tough decisions and it takes experience for it to come second nature in tight moments."

The medium-fast cement of the Open presents more tactical decisions than on the fast, low-bouncing lawns of Wimbledon, where the inclination to attack is more instinctive.

"On hardcourts, I'm asking myself too many questions sometimes," says Mauresmo, whose best finish in the Open was the semifinals in 2002.

Loic Courteau, who has coached Mauresmo since 2002, says the pressure-cooker atmosphere in France also has played a role in the late-career winning spurt. "In France, we have a few good young players, but there is too much pressure when they are young and we don't have big champions," the former pro and French Fed Cup coach says. "They need to grow up and accept this pressure, and it takes awhile."

For Mauresmo to become the first woman since Serena Williams in 2002 to bring home three majors in a season, she will have to find the right balance of aggression and patience and resist her temptation to lay back when matches get tense.

"I think it's finding the right thing to do," Mauresmo says. "You have to go forward; you have to go for the points."

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