JELENA-DOKIC.com
JELENA CORNER by Todd Spiker
OCTOBER 13, 2005


THE INVISIBLE GIRL


I hear they're getting ready to film "Mission: Impossible 3" with Tom Cruise (one of Jelena Dokic's favorite actors, according to her WTA bio).  Thing is, the truly "impossible" task might be locating Jelena's career.

Check that... simply finding Jelena at all might be just as difficult a task.  On the heels of some of the oddest circumstances of her career (and that's saying something) -- being a literal no-show at three Challenger events over the past few weeks -- it's quite reasonable to ask, "Where in the world is Jelena Dokic?"  Is she injured?  Is she kicking up her feet on a beach somewhere, blocking out the world while applying an extra coat of sunblock?  Is she still interested at all?   Heck, is she even visible to the human eye? She's been absent from the WTA tour since May (at a Tier IV in Prague), and has seemingly been going incognito on the entire continent of Europe this summer and early fall.

Seriously, what happened to the Fair One?  Remember when Jelena could
be referred to as that with either a straight face, or without a wistful recollection of what used to be (but, unfortunately, may never be again)?  You know, back when Jelena Corner was a weekly feature on JD.com and the Fair One herself had an actual presence on tour.  2005 began as the last few seasons had, with the general consensus being that the upcoming year HAD to be better than the previous one.  How could it NOT be, after 2004 ended with nine consecutive losses?

Ha!  What did we all know?  It appears as if the continuing demise of the player formerly known as Jelena Dokic is nowhere near it's end... unless the end is ALREADY here.  And, yes, I'm talking about THE END. Of course, we won't know for sure until Jelena actually returns... IF she ever does, that is.

Has a 12-10 won/lost record ever been more deceiving than the one Jelena has put together this season?  After seeing her year-end ranking fall in progression from #8 to #9 to #15 to #26 to #125, she's continued the trend in 2005 by falling as low as the #450's (currently, she's bouncing around weekly between #340-349) and earning less than $10,000 (after a career-best total of $1.2 million in 2001).

Where did it all go wrong?

Possibly right at the beginning, back in the days of Damir, where Jelena failed to pick up the pointers and hints that would later enable her to either effectively alter her game, or develop her own self-starting character traits that would help guide her through tougher times on and off the court.  Maybe only a house of mirrors could ever reveal all the reasons the now Invisible Girl has receded first from the tennis headlines, then seemingly from the entire sport itself.  Toss aside familial, coaching or health problems and the real root cause of Jelena's journey down the rabbit hole is locked somewhere inside the woman from Osijec.

What has become over time the all too typical in-match result was seen during Indian Wells qualifying back in March, when Jelena blew a 4-1 lead (and point for 5-1) versus Maria-Emilia Salerni, then collapsed in what turned out to be a 6-7/0-6 loss.  Don't remember it?  Not surprising, really -- it's too much like so many other losses the last few seasons to really stand out in anyone's memory banks.  Including, I suspect, Jelena's.

Signs of better things DID provide a little false hope for brief instances this season, though.  In May, Jelena qualified and won four straight matches in Rabat (her first four-match streak sicne Zurich '03).  In July and August, she qualified at the Martina Franca challenger and won four in a row again (including two matches in a single day!), battling back from a set down as well as a 3rd set deficit to defeat Ivana Abramovic in the 1st Round.  But in the 2nd Round, against Lourdes Dominguez-Lino, Jelena retired while down 1-6/1-0.  She hasn't been seen or heard from since (except for a "rare" on-time withdrawl from another challenger event -- maybe the end result of a few calls from some inquisitive WTA officials wondering what's been going on with her, you think?).

In between this season's few highs, the downward spiral showed little evidence of slowing momentum.  Jelena DID make the important step to move down from the main tour to play the challenger circuit, but was met with often mixed results that surely battered her already notably fragile belief in her game.  A loss to the world #647.  Seven losses to players ranked #100+.  The "high" win of the season has come only against the then-world #97 (Anne Kremer) in January.  (Of course, puttering around in the lower waters of professional tennis, Jelena's only played one player -- Na Li -- ranked in the Top 80 at the time of the match.)  Most recently, her no-shows at small events in Glasgow, Nantes and Jersey came after she'd appeared on entry lists and draw sheets, and was even ncluded in a day's order-of-play... only to never show her face and be replaced by a lucky loser.  Such blatant (or seeming) indifference might just be the worst sign of all for Jelena's future.

"I don't want to say that I didn't want to be on court, but that's what it seemed like," said Jelena about her 2004 season, back in March.  One wonders if she's been struck by the same thought the last few weeks.

So, again we're faced with the task of determining what to make of Jelena Dokic.  It seems like that's always been the impossible mission, hasn't it?  Her game struck many as being exciting, but it's one-dimensional qualities were often exposed when she faced an opponent who made her Plan A useless.  But she still won five titles (two Tier I's) and reached the Top 5.  Oh, for the days when a lack of a Plan B really meant something, huh?  As frustrating as they were then, they seem like "the good ol' days" in 2005.

Sure, Jelena's wildly divergent results and soap operish episodes served to wrap her in a cloak of mystery and intrigue (usually to her detriment).  She's never been anything less than a truly compelling figure, with as much fan interest generated by her tabloidy life as by her victories and obvious physical attributes.  But is that all her career will have entailed in the end?  Is she now forever cast as a "what might have been" figure?  Has her tennis epitaph already been written?

It doesn't have to be.  She's still only 22, as young as or younger than all of the players at the top of the sport at the moment, save for Maria Sharapova.  But time is short (and getting shorter) for a player who's been just as impatient off the court as she was on it through the years.  It seems appropriate in the "year of the comeback" on the WTA tour to mention that the final chapter of the story of Jelena Dokic could still include a "happy" ending.

Jennifer Capriati was arrested, then went on to win three grand slams.  Patty Schnyder effectively came under the influence of a svengali, then found herself in the Top 10 again in 2005.  Mary Pierce escaped her wacko dad, then eventually reconciled and won slam titles (and returned from long-term battles with injuries to become a slam force again this season).  Even Daniela Hantuchova has shown it's possible to go from a prime candidate for an intervention to a reinvigorated Top 20 player with her eyes on making the leap back into the Top 10 in 2006.

Of course, for every Hantuchova or Pierce, there's a Mirjana Lucic, too.

Let's hope that in the future whenever a young talent flames out and crashes her career in her early 20s, it won't be referred to as "pulling a Dokic."  As things stand in October of 2005, though, barring any future evidence to the contrary, it's difficult to mount any legitimate argument that she'll be recalled as anything but a cautionary tale of talent gone awry.  Hopefully, she'll find a way to confound the odds and re-write her tennis biography... but if she manages to do it, her return would rank high on the list of all-time resurrection efforts.  She has that far to go.

"I hope all goes well.  In any case, I still have to work hard, but so far I think I'm on the right track." -- Jelena, in April.

It's difficult to believe she'd express the same sentiments six months later.  Until she does, she'll continue to be the Invisible Girl... be it in theory, or reality.

All for now... for me, but hopefully not for Jelena.