IN HER room at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, Amélie Mauresmo is as close to France as she would want to be. The mother country is out there, across the Channel, but better to draw the curtains and forget about home for a while.
What happens in France, or Paris to be more precise, every spring is a little too hard for Mauresmo to bear. The French Open, in which she craves ultimate success so much, has attended to her most abject disappointments, a series of losses that bruise deeply. Two weeks ago, when the Williams sisters disappeared from Roland Garros on the same afternoon in the fourth round, the French focus fell four-square on Mauresmo, who promptly folded the next day against Elena Dementieva, of Russia, in the quarter-finals.
“It is hard to explain,” Mauresmo, 25, who beat Amanda Janes, the Great Britain No 2, in the Hastings Direct Championships yesterday, said, “because the public, the media and, of course, myself — everybody wants me to do well and to hold that trophy one day. I don’t have all the answers to this problem or how to handle the pressure.
“Three years ago everybody could picture me holding the cup and I lost in the first round (to Jana Kandarr, of Germany). I don’t have the answers, but I’m trying.
“Maybe I should ask Tim Henman. I would like to know if he has a special way to get ready for Wimbledon. Mentally, he seems to have a way to cope. I don’t read the newspapers during the French because in the past I have and maybe they don’t quote you exactly what you said and it can go to your head at that time of the year quicker than anywhere else. It is all these little details that make such a difference in the end.”
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For Mauresmo, who was seeded No 4 for Wimbledon yesterday, the little details began to swell in importance in 1999 when, having saved a match point against Corina Morariu in the first round, she went all the way to the Australian Open final, losing to Martina Hingis. There was an alluringly muscular swagger about her that was made all the more fascinating given her smiling, wide eyes and soft accent. A couple of her fellow competitors, Hingis included, came into the press room and made insensitive comments about Mauresmo’s “masculinity” from which they should have refrained.
The reaction to the news that Mauresmo was going out with a girl who ran a chic bar in the South of France and realised the extent of their relationship’s marketing potential caught her unawares and placed her on the defensive for the best part of a year. “It became too much,” she said. “I didn’t have anyone between me and the media, so everything came right at me and I was just 20. Now I have had time to build a structure, to make sure I ‘m comfortable with everything, but it was a long and difficult time.
“Since I reached that final I have been a public person. I have got used to it. I enjoy sharing a lot of what I do and what I feel, the good moments and the bad moments. Although now I want to put my private life on to one side, I still like to share and I don’t mean just the joy of winning titles, as I did in Berlin or Rome this year, but my experiences on the tour, how it is to grow up in this world.
“What happened to me then (in her private life) is now a long way down in the picture. People now focus on my game, what I do, how I work, what is my organisation to get better — and also they have discovered a personality, someone who is sensitive, who wants to live.
“Probably what people see of me on the court is not 100 per cent the real me. Tennis is not a real world anyway. I am truly myself when I am at home, with people I like — my friends, my family. I am almost me when I am in the tennis, but a few things are different.”
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What is certain is that Mauresmo’s style is a wonderful complement to the double-fisters and screechers infiltrating the higher echelons of the game. If artistic impression were to be the difference, her sweeping ground strokes, slices and spins would win handsomely over the rest. But, as Mauresmo knows, this is a game played more inside the head — what shot to choose, when, and the mental strength to go with it — than elsewhere.
“I like to think I play pure tennis,” she said. “And I think the English public have a good feel for that. It is a relief sometimes to get out of Paris — not to be ‘the one’. For me, I think the step is to win one of the three grand-slams outside Paris. That might make the process there easier. I would love it to happen here at Wimbledon.
“With the game I have, especially on the grass, I have to go for it. My game changes a little — shorter preparation, bending the legs more, coming forward, more slice, more serve and volley. It is really great fun.”
Which it would be for Mauresmo to cross the Channel in a couple of weeks, knowing that she had finally won everyone’s acceptance.