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A Woman With A Reputation Will Jana Novotna be remembered only for wilting under Wimbledon pressure?By Franz Lidz
Novotna has worn a choke collar since the 1993 Wimbledon final, when she was within a point of taking a 5-1 lead over Steffi Graf in the third set, only to double-fault her way out of victory. "I didn't expect Jana to choke like that," 1977 champ Virginia Wade told a BBC audience. "Jana's the biggest choker I've ever seen!" seconded Novotna's former doubles partner Gigi Fernandez, who was in the booth with Wade that day. It was all too much. During the presentation ceremony, Novotna rested her head on the duchess of Kent's shoulder and wept. Two years after swooning and sobbing, "No-No Novotna, the lady from Choke-oslovakia," as she was called by a San Francisco sports columnist, squandered an even more commanding lead in the third round of the French Open. She had six match points for a 6-7, 6-4, 6-0 win over unseeded teenager Chanda Rubin but blew them all, and then missed three more at 5-4 before losing the final set 8-6. Novotna only made things worse by telling the press, "I didn't really feel I had the match under control." At 5-0, 40-0 in the final set! Say what? Last summer Novotna stood once more at the threshold of a breakthrough. The scene was again the final at Wimbledon; the opponent this time was 16-year-old Martina Hingis. Novotna outhit and outran Hingis and won the first set 6-2. Hingis squared the match with a 6-3 win in the second before Novotna broke to a 2-0 lead in the deciding set. Novotna was a point away from 3-0 when Hingis took over, sweeping the next five games and winning the set, match and championship 6-3. This time the culprit seemed more a strained abdominal muscle than a mental clutch, but the pattern, alas, was all too familiar. While no one disputes Novotna's artistry -- she's the last pure serve-and-volleyer in the women's game -- she may at times be too smart for her own good. "You can be too intelligent," concedes her coach, Hana Mandlikova. In situations that call for instinct and simplicity, Novotna gets gummed up in thinking and complexity. "In this game the mind is very difficult to control," says Fernandez. "Jana is not especially gifted in that area." Novotna stoutly disagrees. The 1993 Wimbledon debacle, she says, was strictly a failure of her game plan. Her game is that of a risk-taker who goes for winners without fail. In that final Novotna stuck to the same charging-and-chipping strategy that had upended nine-time champ Martina Navratilova in the semis. "I wanted to win myself, instead of waiting for Steffi to lose," she says. "Unfortunately, she started playing better and I did not. Does that make me a choker? How many chokers get to the Wimbledon finals?" For a player whose game is sometimes ruined by tension, Novotna, 29, looks the picture of placidity while lounging around a tennis club in East Sussex, England. "I don't think I'm a choker," she says a bit wearily, "but I've got a label on my back that says, 'At the most important point of a big match, Jana will choke.' The label is almost impossible to get rid of. I could win three straight tournaments, and people would still say, 'Yes, she's playing well. But remember the Wimbledon final when she choked?'" In a sport populated with doughy women, the 5'9", 139-pound Novotna may be the best-conditioned player on tour. She is also an overachiever who, despite a fragile forehand, has pushed her way toward the top through sheer grit. "She's not naturally gifted," says Mandlikova. "Everything she achieves is through hard work." Which brings us back to the concept of choking. "When you choke, it shows you're trying hard and you care," says tour veteran Nicole Arendt. "You put yourself on the line, and if it doesn't work, you lose. It's one thing to choke, another to tank. When you tank, you don't care anymore." Novotna had to learn to care. "Growing up, I never thought that someday I'd be Number 1," she says. "I had no dreams, no goals. I picked up tennis for fun." She was a gymnast until the day her 6'5", 220-pound father, Frank, picked her up at practice in Brno, her hometown in what was then Czechoslovakia. "My coach said, 'Oh, my god!'" Novotna recalls. "'You're going to be a big girl. There's no future for you in gymnastics.'" So at the advanced age of eight, Novotna retired from the sport. Her mother, Liba, suggested tennis. "I liked the sport, but I didn't want to play every day," Novotna says. "But when I did play, I had an incredible desire to win." When she lost, she cried. At 12 she cried so much that Liba told her, "Tennis is very fair: You can win or lose. You cannot have both. So, do one or the other and learn from both, and don't cry if you lose. If I see you cry once more, I'll never let you play again." The tears stopped. "I was still crying," Novotna confides. "It's just that nobody saw me, and gradually I stopped altogether." The duchess of Kent's dry cleaner might demur. Novotna was a decent junior player but certainly not a phenom who caught the public's imagination. "Perhaps I succeeded because I never had any pressure," she says. Nor did she have a killer instinct. "Steffi was born with it," Novotna says. "Monica Seles, too. I had to be taught to want to win at all costs." Teaching her to kill was Mandlikova, a Czech whose semibrilliant career featured victories in every Grand Slam except Wimbledon. They met eight years ago at Wimbledon, where Novotna had reached the quarters. At the time, she was 14th in the world and holding. Complacency had settled in. "I could have quit tennis and bought a house back home and been comfortable," Novotna says. "But I had this fire within me. I wanted to do better and needed someone who could make something of that fire. I wasn't lazy, I just needed someone to push." Mandlikova came to shove. "Jana was too nice for a top player," she says. "She wasn't aggressive or decisive enough." For four years Novotna resisted Mandlikova's efforts to change her. "We had so many disagreements!" says Novotna. "It's only in the last four years that I've stopped fighting and found a happy medium of being very concentrated on the court and enjoying myself off it." Except for a nine-year-old West Highland terrier named Flippy, the 36-year-old Mandlikova is Novotna's best friend. Both women spend much of the year in the Czech Republic -- Novotna in Brno and Mandlikova in Prague -- and often drive to European tournaments together. "I don't like to fly," Novotna explains. "In planes I feel like I have no control." Novotna's fear of flying is rivaled only by her fear of Graf, who has won 26 of their 30 matches, including all but one of the last 16. "I left Czechoslovakia for the first time when I was 14," Novotna says. "I got to the tournament, and the only player I'd heard of was Steffi. I played her in the first round and lost in three sets." She has been losing ever since. With her nemesis sidelined at last year's Wimbledon, all that stood between Novotna and the winner's trophy was Hingis -- until the injury that had forced Novotna out of the doubles began causing her pain in the second set of the final. By the third set Novotna was limping slightly, and the nerveless Hingis bounced her around the court. This time Novotna did not need a shoulder to cry on. There was no disgrace in this defeat. She may not have risen to the occasion, but she hadn't collapsed. "I still want to win at least one Grand Slam tournament," Novotna says. "As long as my body holds up, I'll try." At last year's awards ceremony Novotna playfully snatched the women's singles trophy from Hingis and brandished it aloft in mock celebration. "Jana deserves to win this title," Hingis said. This year, maybe she will. No one disputes the artistry of the last pure serve-and-volleyer in the women's game. "I don't think I'm a choker," she says, "but the label is almost impossible to get rid of." Issue date: June 29, 1998
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