“I know that it wasn’t a fluke, and I’m sure that I can do it again,” says Melanie Oudin at a press conference after a tough second round loss to Victoria Azarenka at the Bank of the West Classic in Stanford, California.
As usual, she’s referring to her breakthrough at the U.S. Open in 2009. It has been a hot topic ever since it happened, and even though it was nearly a year ago, she is still trying to measure up to the expectations that come with that type of success. To this date, those four thrilling upsets remain the defining moments of her career, but the instant notoriety it brought her has introduced a whole new set of challenges for the 18-year-old Georgia native.
Expectations. Yes, they can complicate matters, but when you take the Open by storm at the age of seventeen, there is simply no easy way to avoid them. People can’t help it. The minute you do something incredible, they want to see what you can do for an encore. For a young woman who has played the sport with an almost unconscious reckless abandon for much of her life, to proceed with this whole new element of psychological tension weighing her down is no easy task.
“The thing is that I’m not going to put pressure on myself and think about it too much, because if I do that I won’t play like I can play, when I go in there and I play with no fear, and I just go for it,” says Oudin.
While Oudin appears to understand that her life and her tennis career will never be the same again, she still sounds conflicted when she talks about the whirlwind year that saw her go from a virtual unknown to a media darling in the span of one fairy tale week at the U.S. Open.
“Last year I was in qualies of every single one of these tournaments, and just because of the U.S. Open I’m in the main draw, so it’s totally different than playing qualies,” said Oudin. “Playing main draw here (Stanford) first round, you get someone top-50. In qualies you get someone around 150.”
Oudin believes she is the type of player that needs a lot of matches to get into top form, but that is a luxury that a top-50 player rarely gets to enjoy. Oudin is at the spot in the rankings (currently No. 45) where she’ll more than likely play a higher ranked player in the first or second round in any tournament she plays. She’ll have to reconcile this fact in order to continue her progression. Without three qualifying matches as a warm-up for a first round match, she’ll have to tinker with her practice regimen (both mentally and physically) until she finds a way to get her confidence without the matches.
But, in spite of her current plateau, the poster child for “believe” does not believe in the sophomore slump. And she’s intelligent enough to know that she has to raise her game another notch or two, because she can’t sneak up on the unsuspecting competition anymore. “No. I don’t believe that it’s a slump,” she says. “I believe that, yes, the first year on the tour is the nicest because you have absolutely no pressure, no one knows who you are, and I really like playing under those circumstances. Now all of the sudden I’ve gone from the total underdog to someone who is supposed to win every single tournament. And so the expectations went from zero to a hundred.”
A lot has changed in a year for Melanie Oudin, and as the U.S. Open Series progresses, it is becoming apparent that Melanie needs to let go of who she was and embrace who she is at the moment. She’ll need to develop a higher level of professionalism, and she’ll need to do it quickly, or she’ll find herself once again having the opportunity to play those three qualifying matches before the first round of every tournament.
With Oudin’s intensity, footspeed, ability to control points from the baseline, and fitness, she certainly has a plethora of tools to continue to improve her ranking. But does she possess the maturity, and can she realize that the pressure, as Billie Jean King has so eloquently stated, is a privilege?
At the moment, Oudin seems puzzled, even frustrated by the fact that the public expects more from her than from other young Americans.
Instead of letting it bother her, Oudin should take it as a complement. The world is still her oyster. She’ll be in New York come late August, and nobody will be kicking her out of her hotel.
Sure, this has been a challenging year for Oudin, but it’s nothing that she can’t handle. “Sometimes it gets hard just to focus on the tennis part, with all the other stuff going on,” she said. “That’s another thing I’ve been learning this year, is how to handle just focusing on tennis.”
Chris Oddo is a freelance tennis writer and blogger who is based in San Francisco, California. He is a regular commenter at OTB under the moniker The Fan Child. You can follow his blog at http://thefanchild.blogspot.com.
