By Art Spander
Special to CBSSports.com
WIMBLEDON, England -- She was the star of the show three years back in New York.
Maria Sharapova won the U.S. Open and the timing was perfect -- Nike was running a commercial that featured her as a woman of means, with accompaniment by the song I Feel Pretty from Westside Story.
Yep, Sharapova is going home early again but her passion to improve is as strong as ever. (Getty Images)
These days the only music that fits Sharapova is the blues. She has learned the hard way about an athlete's vulnerability, that at any moment she can be betrayed by her body.
That, as we've heard so many times, you're only one injury away from the end of a career.
Sharapova's career is still going, but her stay at this year's Wimbledon is over. In what accurately can be described as a comeback, Sharapova hasn't come back far enough.
Given a gift seed of 24 because of her presence rather than her recent record, Sharapova was beaten Wednesday in the second round, 6-2, 3-6, 6-4, by Gisela Dulko of Argentina.
Tennis is a tough sport on young women. Virtually all the great ones of late -- Steffi Graf, Kim Clijsters, Lindsay Davenport, Serena Williams, all except the remarkable Martina Navratilova -- have been hurt. For Sharapova, who won this tournament, who won the Australian, who won the U.S., it was a rotator cuff tear in her right shoulder -- disaster for a right-hander.
She missed the Beijing Olympics. She missed the U.S. Open a couple of weeks later. She kept hoping the shoulder would heal, but it did not, and in October, like so many major league pitchers who have incurred the same injury, Sharapova underwent surgery.
Now she's undergoing the process of re-establishing herself, a complex process when you've been away for months, as was Sharapova. Now she not only needs to find the forehand, she needs to find the confidence.
"You just move forward," was Sharapova's philosophical comment about the loss. "This is not an overnight process. It's going to take time, as much time as it needs, as much time as I need on court to get everything together."
Time, that precious element. Football and basketball are governed by a clock. Teams run out of time. Athletes run out of time. Sharapova is only 24, but she has been playing for years. She used to look behind her at all the new faces entering the game. Now she must peer ahead, toward the players in front of her, toward the possible decline of her game.
This was only Sharapova's fourth event since rejoining the tour. Missing so many tournaments, she had fallen to 60th in the rankings but received a seeding because of her history.
Dulko, ranked 45th, had won just three games in two matches against Sharapova. But in this match, Dulko kept Sharapova off balance with drop shots, while Maria -- as would be natural for someone unable to play for a while -- struggled with the two essentials, the serve and the forehand.
Sharapova won Wimbledon in 2004, but that seems a lifetime ago rather than five years. If understandably arrogant when she was on top of the sport, not only because of what she did on court but with the Canon and Nike promotions off the court, Sharapova seems humbled and chastened by her fall.
There was purity in her observations. She wasn't trying to fool the media. Or herself.
"I had so many easy balls, and I just made unforced errors from those," a candid Sharapova conceded. "I don't know if that's because I haven't played. You know, I've had those situations before, and those balls would be pieces of cake, but today they weren't. But it's OK."
Pieces of cake. An American idiom, presented by a Russian. Who in effect is an American. She's lived in Florida for 17 years and speaks flawless English, flawless in pronunciation, without any hint of an accent.
The injury, the recovery, the agonizing work of rebuilding have given Sharapova a new appreciation of many things, from trying to find perspective to finding joy in just hitting a tennis ball again.
"First of all, you think of injuries as basically preventing you from playing your sport," was her reflection. "But if you look at the bigger picture, there are so many things that can happen that can limit you to doing things in life or even having a life.
"If you put things in perspective when you get injured, yes, my career is a huge part of my life, and that's what I do on a daily basis. So is it frustrating when that goes away for a while? Absolutely. But if you have a good head on your shoulders, you know that there's a life to live."
Just being at Wimbledon, reminded Sharapova, is an accomplishment. When you can't compete for months and then are given the opportunity to appear in the most famous of tournaments, there is a certain satisfaction.
"I had the pleasure of playing on Centre Court again," she said. "I didn't play on it last year. Losses are tough, more here than any other tournament. But it's all right. I have many more years ahead of me."
The shoulder is fine now. It sounds as if the head is, too.
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