[新聞] The (Re)selling of Maria Sharapova

看板Sharapova作者larrytaurus ( )時間7年前 (2017/05/05 00:10)推噓7(7推 0噓 1→)

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The (Re)selling of Maria Sharapova https://longreads.com/2017/04/25/the-reselling-of-maria-sharapova/ On the longevity of Maria Sharapova, who has built a brand beyond the bounds of her tennis stardom that has made her incredibly wealthy, but still striving for more. Sarah Nicole Prickett | Racquet and Longreads | April 2017 | 17 minutes (4,278 words) To be in the backseat of a car, the cyanotype night on some minor highway, and pass at a distance of one or two hundred yards a rectangle of total green under pooled white lights is to see North American heaven. A community baseball field, a high school football field. A tennis court, occasionally. Say you’re a tennis-playing child from an oil town in Siberia where there are no courts, and no oranges, and in photographs of home it’s always snowing or sleeting or for another reason it’s gray. Around the age of 6, having first picked up a secondhand racket on the clay courts in Sochi, off the Black Sea, you arrive in Bradenton, Florida, home of Tropicana Products and IMG’s Bollettieri tennis academy. Will you ever get over it, the way the green lies shining against the dark? Maria did not. Maria Sharapova was, for a brief lambent time between 2004 and 2006, when she was 17 and 18 and 19, the best female tennis player on grass. 6歲拾起二手球拍在索契打球，離開黑海前往佛州布雷登頓，是IMG Bollettieri網球學院所在地。莎娃曾是2004~2006間在草地比賽表現最好的女子網球選手，當時她是17, 18, 19歲。 She was trained by Nick Bollettieri at the IMG Academy on mostly hard courts, to hone her technique absent variables. She moved on clay, she said later, jokingly, like “a cow on ice.” But on grass she was a dancer, a ballerina. One other body moves like hers, and it is that of the actual ballerina Sara Mearns, who shares with Maria a fissive mix of rigor and bounce. Some of Maria’s best serves in the middle 2000s are unbelievable when seen in slow motion. The extension of the right, working leg, reaching à la hauteur. The high toss followed by a hyperbolic swing of the racket, almost dismissive of the ball. Richard Williams, a former chief sportswriter for The Guardian who happens to share his name with the father and former coach of Venus and Serena, wrote that a poem about Maria “might start with a description of the moment when she tosses the ball up to serve and, as it reaches its apogee, a line through her left arm and right leg forms a perfect perpendicular.” Which is to say, the girl knew her angles. 受Nick Bollettieri訓練，多在硬地磨練她的技能。曾自嘲在紅土上像冰上乳牛。但在草地上她是芭蕾舞者。莎娃在2004-2007一些發球，當你用慢動作看的時候，是難以置信的好。延展高拋，接著是大揮拍，幾乎沒看球。 Richard Williams，衛報前主要運動寫手，曾為莎娃發球寫一首詩。 Green clay and grass showed Maria to advantage in early photographs. The verdancy made wonder of her coloring, brought out the complementary flush of her cheeks, the gray-green in her cat’s eyes, the analogous streaks of gold in her long straight hair. She looked like a sixth Lisbon girl in Grosse Pointe, as if she’d been away at summer camp while the other five virgins were suiciding. She wore tank tops and little A-line skirts in white, or pink, or powder blue, obviously from Nike, and a simple gold-plated cross in the Orthodox style. No makeup. Quick-bitten nails. Goody-brand snap clips in her basic ponytail. Before each serve, she paused to brush back the newly escaped baby hairs with her ball hand, and the down on her forearm snagged the light. In 2003 she won no matches on the hard courts at the Australian Open nor on the clay at the French Open, but when she got to Wimbledon, to the grass, she beat the 11th-seeded Jelena Dokic and reached the fourth round, where she was beaten by fellow Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova. The tour made her Newcomer of the Year. A talk-show host began to compare her to Anna Kournikova, and she was ready, saying, “That’s so old.” 綠土和草地讓早期的莎娃取得成就。在每次發球前，她都會撥兩頰的細髮。 2003澳網、法網皆未獲一勝。但同年溫網她打敗第11種子 Dokic，晉級第四輪，於後才在該輪比賽敗給同胞 Kuznetsova。莎娃獲得當年度最佳新人。脫口秀主持開始拿Kournikova跟她比較，她說：「聽膩了。」 At Wimbledon one year later, the turf looked like home. Before beating Serena for the first and second-to-last time in her career, Maria ended her warm-up a few minutes early, getting permission, like a bored kid in trig class, to go to the bathroom. Already the boys were crowding on the hill for a free show. She was nervous to be seen. She had only to look in the mirror to see the face of a winner. For days it had been raining; it was in the rain that she’d defeated Lindsay Davenport—“stunned” her, according to the papers— to arrive at the final, and now the sun had come through. Her whites were perfect. Her top was thinner-strapped than usual, shoulders so tanned. Her thigh-slit skirt, a new variation on a favorite style, conspired with ankle socks to make her legs look longer than possible. She wore semiformal opalescent drop earrings, and she had the gold cross, the snap clips, and she had altogether the mien of a 22-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow arriving to collect her Oscar in a gum-pink ball gown. 一年後的溫布頓，草皮如同她的家一樣。有幾天都是下雨的，她打敗Davenport而晉級決賽，報紙用讓她「震撼」二字形容。（譯者：當年決賽對手為小威，是唯二贏小威比賽之一。） Helen Wills, in her instructive memoir, Tennis, describes a match between two of her fellow lawn stars, Suzanne Lenglen and Molla Mallory, that was unbeatable “for pure dramatic quality.” Lenglen, known in France as “the goddess,” was the most famous female player of the game and would remain among the most memorable. Mallory was then the closest to Lenglen in talent, in hard-hitting style, and in flapperish glamour. Yet when the two met at Forest Hills in 1921, says Wills, “the contrast at once struck the spectators. The players were both dressed in the conventional white, but the similarity ended there. The bronzed tan of Mrs. Mallory emphasized the pallor of the Frenchwoman. Mrs. Mallory’s determination was evident to every one as she strode along. Mlle. Lenglen danced at her side. The air was electrified, the audience expectant.” To the spectators at Wimbledon on July 3, 2004, there could have been no more electrifying contest, no more striking contrast, than that between Serena and Maria. Black and white. Master and novitiate. Serena, smoky-eyed and leonine, all cheekbones and brawn, a woman unmistakable for any other. Maria, new-skinned and from the neck up evangelical-looking, a girl your eyes would only just graze were she clothed and brunet, also maybe not six feet tall. Nine minutes into the first set, Maria easing ahead of Serena two games to one, the commentator John McEnroe said, wowed, “You forget she’s 17.” Men in the stands, heterosexually doing just that. Some women too, feeling moved. Near the end of the second set, challenged and hanging on to her edge, Maria lobbed back a ball with such celerity and airy precision that Serena didn’t even chase it and Tracy Austin chuckled and said, “Don’t wake her up.” Meaning “her” as in the girl, meaning the girl was following a logic like there was no one before her. “That is certainly dreamlike tennis,” said the BBC’s “Voice of Wimbledon,” John Barrett. 2004.7.3的溫布頓決賽，對於觀眾來說，沒有比威莎對決更帶勁的比賽，這兩人也呈現明顯對比。黑人與白人，大師和初學者。小威是顯而易見的，而莎娃是新臉孔。第一盤的前9分鐘，莎娃以2-1領先。馬克安諾驚呼：「你忘了她17。」第二盤將近尾聲，莎娃在輸掉該盤的邊緣上挺住，以一個準確的高吊球讓小威沒法追。 Austin咯咯笑地說：「別叫醒她。」意思是這女孩有個邏輯是沒人在她前面。 John Barrett道：「這的確是夢幻般的網球。」 When it turned out to be no dream, she really had done it, Maria rushed up into the stands to find and be kissed by her father, Yuri Sharapov. Her agent, Max Eisenbud, was in the player box crying his eyes out, he’d later say. Cameras rolling, high-ranked officials waiting, the winner tried phoning her mother on an unbranded cell phone, and finding herself short of reception she pantomimed adorable frustration to laughter in the stands. She held the Venus Rosewater Dish to her face like a golden reflector on a studio shoot. 莎娃贏得比賽時，確定不是夢，她衝向人群中的爸爸，Yuri親她。她經紀人Max Eisenbud 後來說他在哭。照相機閃個不停，高官們在等，莎娃嘗試打電話給媽媽，但是打不出去。拿著Venus Rosewater獎盤拍照，她的臉在盤子反射下閃閃發光。 She was being a bit of a brat, being indulged. “I’m only 17,” she said again and again in postgame interviews. No one would lessen the extraordinariness of her win by thinking she was one minute older. Asked about those million-dollar endorsements, she said she hadn’t had the time to think about it, but joked she would love to endorse a chocolate brand. The sweetest thing she could think of, next to winning. The July issue of Vogue Italia was now on stands, and in it were glam shots of Maria, styled like a rich kid in Mommy’s closet, wearing, in one picture, Byzantine costume jewelry and a real fur coat over a belly-baring green-and-white jersey emblazoned with the words: TRUTH IS NOBODY CAN OUTPLAY ME. 在賽後訪問她有點自大地，一再地說：「我只有17。」並沒有人對於她的勝利給予指教。對於百萬贊助，她沒有時間思考，但打趣地說她想有一個巧克力的品牌。這是她可以在勝利後想到最甜美的事情了。 Two years later, HBO’s Real Sports aired a segment on Maria Sharapova, now ranked fourth in the world. Included in the segment was a clip, circa 2000, in which a reporter asked a tweenage Maria what she’d rather have, a Wimbledon win or $20 million in endorsements. With Eisenbud sitting next to her, and without appearing to think about it, Maria said she would want to win Wimbledon “because then the millions will come.” She would eventually, in 2011, tell a reporter for the New York Times Style section that at the time she was thinking how stupid a question it was, how obvious the answer, but had she been articulating those thoughts, she would have said Wimbledon. You have to earn Wimbledon. She could have said Wimbledon, of course, or Wimbledon. I’m not in it for the money. Even had she answered the same thing with a different conjunction—id est, Wimbledon, and then the millions would come—the answer would not be remarkable. What Maria did say, using the conjunction because, made it sound like money was the reason, not the reward, for winning and for wanting to win. She also said will in the clause where in the predicate, echoing the reporter, she had used the subjunctive would, and though it’s less telling to the ear, more likely an error by a kid whose first language was Russian, the tense switch made the sentence an excellent verbalization of a low ball being dispatched at midcourt by a big swinging volley, her signature move. 兩年後的HBO推出一個莎娃短輯，當時她排名第四。在短輯中，約莫2000，一個記者問青少女的莎娃，贏得溫布頓或是2000萬贊助，會想要哪一個。經紀人坐在旁邊，莎娃毫不考慮就說：「贏得溫布頓，因為贏得時候就會有百萬贊助。」在2011，在紐時專欄上她說那是個蠢問題，答案也顯而易見，但還是說了她的想法，她可以說當然是溫布頓，或者溫布頓。我不是只為了錢。即便當時不是出色回答。用連接詞「因為」讓這件事好像是錢財來的有原因，並不是因為獎賞，是因為勝利和想要贏。用「would」好像她是一個第一語言是俄文的小孩所犯的錯誤。 Replay the tape of the 2004 Wimbledon women’s final from an au courant perspective and there’s something a lot less winning about Team Maria. Eisenbud is wearing wrap-around sunglasses, so there’s no way to see if he’s crying. Maria’s father keeps kissing her face, and almost her mouth, until she looks impatient or actually uncomfortable. The emphasis on her unadvanced age registers as a message not to commentators, not even to competitors, but to brands: Maria could sell to the daughters of America, and to the dads who get weird when their daughter’s friends come over after school. She could and did sell Hondas in Japan and Land Rovers in America, digital cameras for Canon and, of course, flip phones for Motorola, which sponsored her 18th birthday on April 19, 2005, and made her a Centre Court cake. Sports Illustrated cast her as the only athlete in the 2006 Swimsuit Issue, photographing her in Turks & Caicos. She was what a tennis player should look like. According to the Times of India, she wanted, or said she wanted, what every female athlete should want: to be a Bond girl. By some lights she was already a Cold War fantasy, the final achievement of secret eugenics in Russia, a sleeper agent shaped like a dream. When a slavering men’s-magazine writer went to impress on her his love of Dostoyevsky, asking who her own favorite countryman of letters might be, Maria non-answered, “Well, Pushkin is the most famous.” At times her brain served no purpose but to train her eyes on the very top spot, not top as in scoring but as in selling, misnomered or not as top-earning. She had only to win enough to play on and she would become the most popular and hated, the true-born first lady of the sport—the Ivanka Trump of tennis. 回到2004的畫面，Max戴墨鏡，所以不知道他是不是在哭。爸爸一直在親，直到莎娃有點不耐煩或不舒服。莎娃的價值對品牌來說是個好消息。可賣日本的Honda、美國的Land Rover、 Canon的數位相機，當然還有摩托羅拉的翻轉手機，該品牌贊助她18歲生日和中央球場的蛋糕。運動畫刊在2006泳裝特輯只拍攝她一個運動員，她穿著Turks & Caicos。她曾是網球選手應該看起來的樣子。有次訪問，該名作家喜好杜斯妥也夫斯基，問莎娃喜歡哪個俄國作家，莎娃卻答：「普希金很有名。」她將成為最受歡迎，同時也最受討厭的網球界的依凡卡．川普。 Maria is now 30, the age at which women stereotypically stop celebrating birthdays. Like a model who gets into acting, or an actress who “wants to direct,” she has become a designing woman who captivates sportswriters, a mogul on the make taking crash courses in “executive education” (like adult learning, but for the superrich) at Harvard Business School. At every game, by contract, she wears outfits by Nike, which she helps design, and are sometimes accessorized with Tiffany’s jewelry. In 2005 she told Vogue, “I want to be classy, but I also want to be edgy. If somebody’s wearing black, I want to wear red. I always want to be different,” and in 2011 she told The New York Times, “I want to be different. If everyone is wearing black, I want to be wearing red.” In 2015 she tweeted a picture of herself holding up a T-shirt with the motto “girl’s best friend” over a pair of running shoes, captioning it “I thought diamonds were a girl’s best friend?!” with the hashtag falseadvertisement, the hashtag justdoit, the hashtag withdiamonds. That’s just how she does it, by keeping Nike and Tiffany’s equally happy, and by keeping her image girlish, not too grown or too worldly to ruin memories of her as a teen. 莎娃已三十，是個女人們典型地停止慶祝生日的年紀。她去哈佛商學院進修。她每次比賽穿著她幫忙設計的Nike服裝，有時也會配戴Tiffany的珠寶。 2005在Vogue雜誌中她道：「我想要高雅但也同時要前衛。有人穿黑我就想穿紅。我永遠想要與眾不同。」 2011在紐時訪問中她說：「我永遠想要不同於他人，每個人穿黑，我就想穿紅。」 2015她的推特文有張照片是，她拿著印有「女孩的最佳朋友」的T恤，而不是一雙跑鞋，註解：「我以為鑽石才是女孩的最佳朋友」，後頭有著#falseadvertisement，#justdoit，#withdiamonds。這就是她讓Nike和Tiffany一樣開心的方法，藉由較女孩的形象，而非太過成人來破壞她青少女美好記憶。 The “personal life” section of Maria’s Wikipedia page comprises four neat, scandal-free lines about her relationships with men. Engaged in 2010 to the NBA’s Sasha Vujacic, she wore an approximately eight-carat cushion-cut diamond until spring 2012, and in the summer, when breakup rumors surfaced at a press conference, she seemed annoyed the media hadn’t noticed sooner, saying, with a short little laugh, “I was waiting for someone to actually ask me that question.” She does not, as a rule, refuse comment, except to avoid contaminating her meta-brand by a political statement. On the subject of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws, she told a New York Times reporter in 2013 that “time will address this issue,” noting both her pride in being Russian and her possession of gay and lesbian friends. A year later, with the Olympics in Sochi and with the issue not yet addressed by time, Maria informed reporters that she had said “everything I wanted to say there about it.” 維基百科上私人生活部份有四段無醜聞描述的感情。 2010和NBA球員Vujacic訂婚，她帶著約8克拉的鑽戒直到2012的春季，當年夏天分手傳聞在記者會上浮現，她對媒體不那麼快知情而顯得不耐煩，伴隨簡短的笑而說：「我還在等人真的問我。」對於普丁反同志法，她在2013紐時訪問中說：「時間會傳達這個議題」，是她身為俄羅斯人和擁有同志朋友的驕傲。一年後索契冬奧，時間仍未到，莎娃向訪問者說：「她說了她該說的。」 Never off message, she seldom admits to being unrelatable. To sell the perforated-leather ballet flat she “insisted” Cole Haan include in its Maria Sharapova collection of sportif accessories, a co-branding effort begun in 2009, she remembered that, yes, she is tall enough to go without heels: “ I came in [to the design meeting] saying, ‘You know what? I’m six-foot-two and I don’t care about anyone else.’ I’m going to be selfish and say I love ballerinas.” Usually the pitch is softer and broad. To sell the floral-fruity fragrance Avon Luck, for which she became the avatar in 2014, she remembered “when my mother gave me my first fragrance,” though she did not seem to remember its name. To sell the semiluxurious line of sun-protection products, Supergoop!, that she has co-owned since 2014, she remembers that while training in Florida “the application of sunscreen became a ritual.” In a behind-the-scenes video for Evian, circa 2012, Maria promotes the brand’s ethos—“live young”—by making believe that after a long day at practice she comes home to “moments of laughter that are really playful that you don’t think about.” 她堅持Cole Haan，2009開始合作的品牌，在莎娃系列裡賣穿孔皮革的芭蕾舞鞋。她很高，不需要高跟鞋，憶道：「我走進會議，說：『你知道嗎？我是6呎2吋高，而且我不在意其他人。』我很自私地說我喜歡芭蕾。」在賣Avon Luck的花果香水， 2014開始代言該品牌，她回想「當媽媽給她第一瓶香水」，雖然她似乎不記得名字。 Supergoop!防曬品，2014共同擁有該牌，她憶起當在佛州訓練的時候，「塗防曬是種儀式。」約2012 Evian幕後花絮，莎娃推崇該牌「活得年輕」的精神，相信在一天的訓練後回家是未想過的快樂。 Her biggest solo project, no less an effort to sell us on the idea that she’s having fun, is Sugarpova, est. 2012. A half-eponymous, cutely packaged, and uninventive confectionary brand specializing in gummy lips and tennis ball gum, Sugarpova sells at airport gift shops, exurban mega-malls, and other outlets. “I’ve always had a sweet tooth,” Maria confessed to People magazine, to Jimmy Kimmel, to each of a dozen other media outlets. To Vanity Fair, she explained that when she came to America as a child, she was amazed at the variety of gummies sold in shops, a possibly apocryphal story whose moral is clear: Only someone born to be an American would take the preponderance and number of different-flavored and -branded candies as inspiration to make more candy. The first time she did not mention her sweet tooth in an interview about Sugarpova was on CNN’s Quest Means Business, where instead she said, “I wanted my own brand.” Maria was, for 11 straight years, 2005 to 2015, the highest-paid female athlete alive, and she is still, reportedly, the richest in history. 她最大的個人計畫是2012開始的Sugarpova。半個同義詞、可愛的包裝的糖果品牌，有雙唇形狀的軟糖和網球形狀的口香糖。 Sugarpova在機場禮品店、遠郊的大賣場，和其他outlet中販賣。她向時人雜誌、Jimmy Kimmel，和其他媒體承認：「我喜歡吃甜的。」在Vanity Fair訪問中她說她孩童時來到美國，她看見商店里各種不同的軟糖而感到驚豔。這故事說著：只有美國人會吃不同種類和品牌的糖果，受到啟發才會做更多的糖果。第一次因Sugarpova受訪，她未在CNN提及她嗜甜食，從2005到2015，連續十一年，目前也還是最高收入的女運動員的她，僅說：「我想要有自己的品牌」 Serena is the second-richest, and the winningest. A Nike ad for television, “ Unlimited Greatness” (2016), charts the rise, fall, rise, and…rise of Serena Williams with keywords like “struggling” and “legend.” The penultimate four words are “greatest female athlete ever,” the “female” erased to leave the ultimate three. Contrast this with another memorable minute-long Nike ad featuring a female tennis player, “I Feel Pretty” (2006), in which the staff and guests at the Waldorf Astoria and the players, officials, and fans at the U.S. Open take turns singing the titular song (from the musical West Side Story) while eyeing Maria Sharapova with suspicion, envy, lust, dislike, occasional wide-eyed admiration, and mock obsequiousness—that is, until she hits the ball with her infamous pre-orgasmic shriek and an awed silence falls. (Intended to be subversive, the message was somewhat undercut by the fact that 57 seconds of the ad show Maria being “pretty,” albeit determined and pointedly not vain, and six seconds show her being “powerful.”) The punchline, delivered by an announcer, was tongue-in-cheek—“this is pretty good stuff already”—but bespoke a real understanding: Maria was pretty, and pretty good, but Serena was great. She has now beaten Maria 18 straight times (and 19 times total), most recently in the quarterfinals at the 2016 Australian Open, where the defending champion walked on court to Katy Perry’s “Roar,” the onetime contender to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.” If Maria is not the Ivanka Trump of tennis, she is at least the Taylor Swift, and Serena the Beyoncé, which is to say that the legend of “a skinny little girl” beating “a great champion with enormous physical strength” is no longer “just an amazing win ” that “struck a chord with the world,” as Eisenbud put it, but an upsetting demonstration of the tennis world’s elitism and racism. 小威則是排在莎娃之後（收入）。 2016，Nike的電視廣告「Unlimited Greatness」，用「奮鬥」和「傳奇」等關鍵字說著小威的起伏生涯。其他字為「有史以來最偉大的女性運動員」，抹去了「女性」。相比2006「I Feel Pretty」的廣告，對莎娃有著懷疑、嫉妒、不喜歡的推崇，嘲諷乖乖牌。直到她吼叫而靜默。威莎H2H紀錄為18/19-2 （2016AO八強賽紀錄不算的話是18） On March 7, 2016, Maria took the podium at a downtown Los Angeles hotel to make a surprise announcement to the media. Some had thought she was retiring, prompting her to begin by quipping she’d never announce her retirement on “ this fairly ugly carpet.” Instead the news was more than surprising: Maria, one of the cleanest-living players, the one who drank nothing but Evian, had just been informed she’d failed a drug test. Shaken but still in character, attempting to stage-manage the story, she explained that the drug in question, meldonium, had been prescribed by her doctor for “several health issues” in 2006 and that, having taken it unquestioningly since, she failed to notice when on January 1, 2016, the drug was banned. “Russian tennis phenom Maria Sharapova instantly made…meldonium famous,” one story began, as if wondering whether there’s anything Maria can’t sell. Doctors were called up to say that meldonium not only reduces heart stress but also hypes blood flow and streamlines metabolism, with little-known and likely negligible effects on performance (and just a few known side effects). John McEnroe gave the most honest opinion in the tennis world, implying that if the drug had been around in his prime, many others—possibly even himself— would have taken it too, as athletes “have been looking since the beginning of time for an edge.” Still, he found it “hard to believe that no one in her camp, the 25 or 30 people that work for her, or Maria herself had no idea that this happened.” In its decision to suspend her for two years, the International Tennis Federation took the opposite angle, declaring Maria “ the sole author of her own misfortune.” When she was fortunate, her successes had been credited in part to Team Maria, or to Brand Maria, and no story would be complete without reference to her father, her agent, her coaches. The video shot live from the downtown Los Angeles hotel made her look lonesomer than she ever had on court. 2016.3.7，莎娃在洛杉磯的飯店宣佈藥檢失敗。宣佈之前，有些人認為她要退休。她卻說她退休之時絕對不會有這麼醜的地毯出現。她說，米屈是在2006因為有幾次健康問題而開給她，且毫無疑問地服用，直至2016一月份列為禁藥，她被通知藥檢失敗。俄國網球明星莎娃讓米屈有名，讓人不禁懷疑有什麼是她不能賣的。醫生們上線解釋米屈不僅減緩心臟壓力，且促進新陳代謝，對於運動表現有小小幫助。馬克安諾給了最為忠實的意見，暗示如果這藥物曾經在他和其他球員的時代出現，他也有可能有服用過。他發現，難以置信的是，有25或30個人在她的陣營服務，竟然沒發現變成禁藥的事實。在禁賽兩年的決定中， ITF說莎娃是造成她不幸的唯一始作俑者。 Few of her peers and competitors came to her defense. Serena was graceful, noting her ex-rival’s “courage and heart.” Caroline Wozniacki, who happens to be Serena’s best friend, was rather less so, and stressed that “as athletes, we always make sure there’s nothing [we take] that could put us in a bad situation.” Caroline and Serena were, in this formulation, the athletes, or the real athletes, and Maria was not. According to Kristina Mladenovic, “all the players were saying”—and apparently had believed, or had wanted to believe—“she’s a cheater.” The New York Post ran a helpful explainer titled “Why Everyone in Tennis Hates Maria Sharapova.” On the third day of Wimbledon, the Daily Mail ran a piece titled “Maria Sharapova isn’t missed because she is ‘totally unlikeable.’” Another ex-boyfriend, the Bulgarian tennis player Grigor Dimitrov, said at the China Open that the sport did miss Maria, but then, seeming not to miss her himself, added that she’d deserved the two-year suspension. A day earlier the Federation had announced that Team Maria had won an appeal, and that the suspension was now reduced to 15 months. Tour officials began openly debating whether the major tournaments should grant an unseeded Maria the opportunity, via wild cards, for a comeback. The Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart became the first tournament to do so, a perhaps unsurprising move as Porsche was the last of four major sponsors, after Nike and TAG Heuer, to suspend working with Maria mid-scandal and the second, after Nike, to begin again (Evian and Head Rackets continued supporting her without pause). Caroline Wozniacki, again saying what her best friend cannot, called the decision “questionable,” the result “disrespectful,” the rules “twisted.” 小威替她說話，說她勇敢且忠於己心。 Wozniacki是小威好友但卻說：「身為運動員，我們都會確保自己服用的東西不會使自己身處險境。」 Mladenovic則說：「很多球員都說她作弊。」 New York Post的標題是「為什麼每個球員討厭瑪麗亞」英國每日郵報在溫布頓第三天的標題是：「因為莎娃不討喜，所以她不被想念。」 Dimitrov則在中國公開賽時道：「這運動需要她，但她需要受兩年禁賽。」似乎Dimitrov不想念她。 ITF宣佈莎娃團隊上訴而獲勝判，禁賽減至15個月。對於莎娃復出是否應獲得外卡，兩名官方人員熱議此事。保時捷公開賽是第一個賽事提供外卡給莎娃，或許不那麼讓人意外，因為保時捷是她主要的贊助商。 Nike 和 TAG Heuer 在禁藥醜聞中宣佈停止合作，在Nike宣佈繼續合作後，保時捷於後亦宣佈繼續合作。 Evian 和 Head Rackets 則未中斷合作過。 Wozniacki則說外卡決定令人質疑，結果令人失望，判決扭曲。 Casual or younger observers, like uncharitable or younger competitors, find it easy to forget or ignore how much Maria has done for tennis, can look eye-rollingly at all her endorsement deals and think she’s done more for herself. Her career is a “cash cow.” Her looks, attitude, and asocial focus make her an “ice queen.” These angles show less than half the story. After she started slipping on grass, after she switched up her serve and damaged her shoulder and refined a game that had long relied on her power strokes but now required a much lighter and facile touch, Maria became one of the winningest active players on clay, second only to Serena as usual, a transmutation summed up by ESPN’s Nick McCarvel as “perhaps the most astonishing narrative of an already Hollywood-esque career script.” Even compliments like these, though, suggest that her wins are scripted, her incredible on-court presence staged, her whole career rigged. “Few people seem to realize,” wrote NBC’s Joe Posnanski in 2014, “that Maria Sharapova is an all-time great tennis player.” The reason he gave was “her almost-pathological inability to beat Serena Williams,” who may have an equally specific desire to punish the girl who embarrassed her at the world’ s most prestigious tournament, and worse, who stole the audience’s love. For all her “periodic letdowns” and “weird funks,” he explains, “Serena…is never off her game against Sharapova, never lets down even a little against Sharapova.” 年輕的觀察者都會忽略莎娃對網球的貢獻。看著她的贊助都會想那是為了她自己而已。她的職業是金雞母，她的外觀和態度是冰山美人。在草地上滑倒、肩傷後改變發球，不再只依賴強力抽球。 ESPN統計，現役球員中，她在紅土上表現僅次於小威。 Maria is four years past the age at which she expected to retire, but she is also five years younger than Serena, leading some to believe she will once more, if only once more, beat the greatest. She has faced few other serious rivals. Unfortunately for Eugenie “Genie” Bouchard, the 23-year-old Canadian player who was widely, prematurely hyped after rising to the Wimbledon finals, but losing to Petra Kvitova, in 2014, and by early 2016 was outside the top 50, it takes more than natural blondness and preternatural guts to be titled “the new Sharapova.” Maria has a 4–0 record against Genie and was said to crush her, in straight sets, after taking “a stern phone call” from her dad, at the 2015 Australian Open. She is 6–4 against Caroline Wozniacki, who was world No. 1 in 2010 and 2011 and ended 2016 as world 19th, while Maria climbed back to second place in 2012 and 2014 and ended 2015 as world fourth, only weeks before failing her drug test. No drug could account for her longevity. Generally speaking, another thing hard for casual observers to see is the big deal with “doping,” given how many Oscar-winning actors get liquored up for nude scenes or sobbing close-ups, how many award-winning graduates of Ivy League colleges take Ritalin, how many beauty-pageant winners take weight-loss pills. Sport is meant to be the purest meritocracy, but purity at large has a deserved reputation for being mythic. 距離她設定自己退休年齡已過了四年，但她也年輕於小威五歲。這讓一些人相信她會再拿一座大滿貫，如果她可以再次打敗小威的話。不幸的是，Bouchard，23歲加拿大選手，在2014溫布頓決賽敗給Kvitova， 2016初則是世界排名50名以外，需要一段十日才能說她是新莎娃。莎娃對Bouchard的H2H紀錄為4-0。莎娃對Wozniacki的H2H紀錄為6-4，瓦牆2010、2011曾為世界第一， 2016年終排名為第19位。同時莎娃在2012、2014回到世界第二， 2015年終排名為第四，是在幾周後藥檢失敗的排名。沒有一種藥是可以讓她職業生涯這麼長。通常來說這也讓一些人覺得禁藥是一個大問題。運動原意是純潔的精英集合，但是純潔不意謂著迷思。 If she is permitted to try winning again at this year’s Wimbledon, Maria may find that her deals with Evian and Head are extended for a few extra seasons, but by now it’s absurd to think of her playing for endorsements. She has a solid shot at continuing with Nike in any case, designing tennis whites like Michael Jordan designs shoes. She has godlike amounts of money, enough money, she has said, to feed her great-grandchildren, and she has a mansion near Bradenton, which she considers home and occupies alone. Retiring to wealth, however it may have appealed to the 19-year-old Maria, complaining that her family “never had the nicest house, the nicest car, the nicest clothes,” is now not the narrative choice. Returning in service to a dream is a likelier story, even if it is a cliché. The only gift for a girl who has everything is a chance to prove she deserves it. When Maria first fell in love with the grass at the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club it was 2002, and she had competed in the tournament as a junior, and had lost in the final. “I was one of the last people leaving the site,” she recalled to a newspaper reporter in 2014, on the 10th anniversary of her win, “and it was quite late and nearly dark. It’s a bit eerie really to leave when there’s nobody there and the tournament has finished…. As we were driving away I remember looking back and thinking how special it was. I was probably upset because I’d lost in the final. I was thinking about the match and all the what-ifs, but I looked back and thought how beautiful it was, how I couldn’t wait to come back.” 如果今年她可以打且想要溫布頓冠軍的話，莎娃會發現Evian 和 Head的合作會延長幾個賽季，但現在去想著她為了贊助而打比賽是很怪的一件事。她和Nike有很穩定的合作關係，持續設計網球鞋。她的財富如同她說過的，足以扶養她的子孫們。她在布雷登頓附近有豪宅，是她認為的家。因財富而退休對於現在的莎娃來說是不太可能的選項，但可能會發生在19歲的她，抱怨著她家沒有好房、好車、好衣服。為了夢想而復出是比較可能的原因，即便這很老掉牙。對於她唯一的禮物是給她機會證明自己。當她2002第一次愛上草地，青少女的她打著比賽，最後在全英俱樂部輸了決賽。 2014她回憶：「我是人群中最後幾個中，其中一個晚離開球場的。那時很晚也很黑了。當沒有人在，比賽也結束了，這麼晚還不離開有點毛毛的。當我們開回去的時候，我往後看，回想著這經歷很特別。我當時可能覺得很沮喪，因為我在決賽輸了。我想著這場比賽，都是『如果怎麼樣…』，但我回頭看，認為這一切是多麼美，我多麼迫不及待地想回去。」 ------------------------- 翻完了請多指教不經一事不長一智 -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc), 來自: 140.127.213.206 ※ 編輯: larrytaurus (140.127.213.206), 05/05/2017 00:12:55