Fortunately for the WTA, Popova has pulchritude and attitude in equal measure. Her midriff-baring outfits, so small they appear to come from Gap Kids, highlight her ample décolletage. She has already agreed to pose for the tour's annual swimsuit calendar. When she turns pro, an image consultant hired by her agent will travel with her.
"Simonya is to marketability what John McEnroe is to self-promotion," says her agent, Max Eisenbud. "We're talking off the charts."
Better still, unlike the Williams sisters, who have become increasingly opaque figures, reluctant to let down their guards for an instant, Popova is a beacon of candor. "I have no secrets," she says. "I'm like Hingis when she started out. I'll say anything." Indeed, with only a modicum of baiting, she is inclined to, well, Popov on a variety of subjects. "If women's tennis is all that, how come we still make, like, 40 percent less than the men at events outside the Grand Slams?" she asks. "Did you know that 26 men have won more than $500,000 this year, but only 12 women have?" And don't get her started on Kournikova. "I hear Anna wants to write a biography, but can you publish a book if you don't have a title?" she says. "Seriously, Anna's nice. It's just that she's, like, so jumped the shark."
Kournikova did, however, write the career blueprint that Popova -- and dozens of other young players from the former Soviet Union -- have followed. In the late '70s and early '80s, her parents, Sergei and Raisa, both gym teachers in Tashkent, were so poor that they went weeks eating nothing but borscht. After their fourth son was born, Raisa vowed that her fecund days were over. "She was going to get tubal litigation, or whatever you call it," volunteers Simonya. Raisa didn't, and Simonya was born on Oct. 22, 1984.
By age eight it was clear that she had preternatural hand-eye coordination and a one-in-a-billion aptitude for hitting a tennis ball. Given her skill, her physique and a face that could launch a thousand endorsements, Popova was nicknamed Predopredelena (the Destined) by Uzbekistan Tennis Federation officials. Two years later she was delivered to IMG, the Cleveland-based management behemoth. The whole Popov family left Tashkent for a three-bedroom condo, provided free of charge, at the IMG-owned Bollettieri Academy. ("From one gulag to another," jokes Sergei.) Simonya began taking classes at the academy and was soon speaking fluent English. (She now quotes Lil' Romeo and Romeo Montague with equal proficiency.) Her tennis flourished. Says Bollettieri, one hardly given to overstatement, "The first time I saw Sim, I thought of Flo-Jo: the speed, the grace, the determination. I said to myself, Nick, you got a world Number 1 on your hands."
Though she is still two months removed from her professional debut, Popova is hip to the realpolitik of the WTA tour. Like many stars, she has already made a fuss about wearing the tour's sponsor patch on her shirt, lest it reduce the value of her apparel deal. Popova has also let it be known that, like Kournikova, she won't lodge at designated tournament hotels. She'll take a suite, preferably at a Ritz, though an Inter-Continental will do. ("And not one of those add-a-desk-and-call-it-a-junior suites," she adds. "I'm talking the claw-foot tub, the polished rocks in the ashtrays, all that stuff.") With IMG's behind-the-scenes finagling, she has been guaranteed that she won't have to play her first match at tournaments until Wednesday, something of a status symbol among top players.
Time, of course, will tell if Popova's abundance of confidence is justified. But with skills to compete with the Williams sisters and a celebrity force field to rival Kournikova's, Popova is precisely the player longed for by a tour that's losing its mojo.
If only she existed.
Issue date: September 2, 2002
sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2002/09/04/popova/
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