Sania factor allows WTA to dream of wider focus

Talk of the nose-ring is passe, Martina Hingis is back on the circuit and Svetlana Kuznetsova has moved on. An eventful year followed Sania Mirza’s most-famous win at Dubai over a reigning Grand Slam champion and a quiet first-round exit to Hingis at the same venue last week seems to have completed the circle. The Indian teenager’s popularity spilled over to this edition, when tickets for her second-round match were booked solid by expats, Hingis’s resurgence notwithstanding. She left the scene too early but the organizers are not reading too much into that and say Dubai is not likely to forget Sania quickly.


To be sure, validation comes from the WTA — whose Mirza-monitoring, frankly, is restricted to a routine realignment of weekly rankings in the 30-39 bracket. So is she just another player on the Tour?

‘‘Sania is one of the exciting young people coming up in this generation’’, says John Dolan, the frizzy-haired WTA senior communications manager whom you’d normally catch accompanying Sharapova or Henin Hardenne to press meets. ‘‘She’s had a fantastic season and is obviously talented. We get mountains of clippings on her, even more than Sharapova sometimes.’’

‘‘She brings something very different to tennis because of her followers’’, Dolan adds. ‘‘Tennis is usually a quiet game but because of the passionate and very noisy following she enjoys from her supporters, Sania has brought a new feature to the way tennis is viewed.’’

He is most impressed, he says, by the way Sania handles the pressure. ‘‘That’s most striking — her terrific poise under pressure for what she is doing back home, something very difficult for her age.’’

While Sania blends into the circuit — which, Dolan says, has never looked this strong at the second rung — the governing body too is expanding its cultural profile from her participation. ‘‘The WTA is lucky right now to have someone like her — representing a different ethnicity, who has the ability to inspire many others from her part of the world. The Williams sisters represented a certain minority on the Tour and have done a great deal to inspire hundred others. Mirza has the ability to do the same,’’ he says.

Dubai tournament director Salah Tahlak, who recounts how over 500 people stood and watched Sania after the Kuznetsova effort last year, acknowledges her crowd-pulling qualities. ‘‘She was our winning card both these years and sets up a good ambience for tennis. She had just won at Hyderabad so we gave her the wildcard, but frankly the crowd was unexpected,’’ he recalls.