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Sam Stosur desperately wants a major win. Now she has the confidence to achieve it.

SAM Stosur does not fear the only five women in the tennis world still ranked above her, or the re-dose of heady national expectation she admits she struggled to absorb this time last year. The French Open runner-up is not frightened of failing in another major final, or daunted by the effort she knows it will take to get so close again.

Yet Stosur carries a supply of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in her cabin bag when travelling the world. The great Australian hope ranked 48 places higher than any other – former No. 1 Lleyton Hewitt is a temporary 54th – is terrified of the altitude she can not avoid. She is troubled by something she does almost every week. Flying.

“Landing, I’m fine, but take-off’s a bit hairy, and I don’t like being over the ocean,” says the Australian Open’s
fifth seed, conceding that being a nervous frequent traveller is “not a good combination to have. It’s one of
those things: you’ve just got to psyche yourself out of those bad things and stupid things that go through your head, and then I’m all right.

The Xanax? “I’ve never taken it. It’s just in my bag in case I really freak out, but I haven’t needed it yet. I think just having it in my bag calms me down.”

Yet, over the next fortnight, Stosur’s nerve will be tested in a different, much more public, way. Her effort last year in reaching the Australian Open’s fourth round, losing 6-4, 6-2 to eventual champion Serena Williams, equalled her best in 10 campaigns, and despite a reprise of her modest January lead-in results – second round losses in both Brisbane and Sydney – the 26-year-old is seeded this year to reach a quarter-final against second seed Vera Zvonareva.

Her friend Alicia Molik is heading the cheer squad, declaring yesterday that “I think this is Sam’s Australian
Open”, and, physically, Stosur has never been better prepared. A little surprisingly, Stosur has shed more than four kilograms from her intimidatingly-muscled frame in just over a year, while recording exceptional results for strength and agility in AIS testing just before Christmas. Overall, she claims to be is feeling “100 per cent better” than this time 12 months ago.

Certainly, Stosur’s beloved coach of three years, David Taylor, has noticed an important change since around
the time of his charge’s top-10 breakthrough in March. Last season she won her second career title, on clay in Charleston, before storming through to the French final, only to suffer a devastating loss against a bolder first-timer, Francesca Schiavone. Still, Stosur closed a breakthrough year by reaching the semis of the prestigious WTA Championships in Doha, where she lost to Open favourite Kim Clijsters. There was, on the whole, plenty to like.

“She’s more self-assured, she’s definitely much more mature, and much more forthright in saying what she believes,” Taylor says. “I think she was a person who got influenced a lot by the people who were around her. Now she has a stronger opinion of what is right and wrong.

“But I’ve known her from 23 to 26 – so maybe that’s just a normal evolution as a person. And maybe having more wins, too. I think every player yearns for the respect of their peers; we all like to feel we’re respected at work, and I think she now has the confirmation of her belief that she is a good player. I think she always thought she was better than her results. And I think she was frustrated in her career before the last few years.”

If Stosur insists that not even her disappointing denouement at Roland Garros is a regret, then she agrees that she is a different person these days. The Queenslander is more interested and informed about the world around her, and usually insists on eating out at “nice” restaurants, regardless of the cost. She is learning about wine from Taylor over their regular dinners, even if the demands of professionalism means she talks about it more than she drinks it.

“For sure I’m more confident with myself now, I think, and the spotlight, and you have to do more things, and the more you get used to all that the more confident you get with doing it,” she says. “And I’m a little bit older, too, so you mature a bit more and form your own opinions a bit more and you stand up for what you believe in and not necessarily take it for granted what anyone told you.

“So ‘assertive’ is probably a good word. I know what I have to do, and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t fit into anyone else’s time frame or anything; I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do, and I think I have got better with time management, everything. It’s all part of it.”

Stosur is also more prepared to invest in herself, with an expensive hyperbaric chamber among her purchases of late. She can afford one, of course – athlete rich lists estimating she pocketed almost $3 million last year. For not just has her on-court improvement paid off, but her status as Tennis Australia’s poster-girl brings with it a range of lucrative endorsements, most visibly with the major bank that splashed the 26-year-old’s image around town 12 months ago.

That exposure, she has admitted, came as something of a shock to a famously laid-back figure used to existing – happily – under the radar. Then, all of a sudden, her face was everywhere. The big-server with the powerful forehand and impressive biceps had, suddenly, found fame. Or it had found her. And there was much adjusting to be done.

“There’s always learning curves and I hadn’t had that kind of spotlight on me before, and I definitely didn’t handle it well at Hopman Cup and Sydney, but eventually you just deal with it, you play better and you find that confidence in your game on court, and it was like once I got through a couple of matches I could really focus on what I was doing,” she recalls.

“The more experience you have dealing with the hype and the spotlight and all that, the better you are for it. You play tennis to get as good as you can and as high as you can, so that’s all part of being a tennis player. You have to deal with it.”

There was also an upside to falling one match short of becoming the first Australian woman to win a grand slam singles title in three decades, as Stosur discovered upon returning home to the Gold Coast for a post-Wimbledon break. She was recognised everywhere, from grocery shopping to trying to hit with her brother at the local courts.

“Yeah, it still kind of cracks me up,” she beams. “It’s always like ‘well done’, or ‘we didn’t sleep for two weeks
because of you’ or just funny things. Everyone’s always really nice about it. I guess because I don’t go home very often, because of always being on tour, you don’t actually realise how much Australia is behind you. You read about it and people tell you, but when you go back it all kind of hits you.

“I remember I was in the line at the supermarket just getting some bread and butter and I was buying a bucket or something and the lady was like ‘oh, are you Sam Stosur?’ I’m like ‘yes’ and before I knew it her son came over and wanted a signature and then all of a sudden everyone around you starts looking at you and it’s a little bit embarrassing sometimes. It’s funny.”

But not unwelcome, and the support may have helped to assuage the disappointment of a French Open outcome that remains her career highlight but also the great opportunity not-quite-taken. “I’ve been asked about it lots and lots of times, and I guess it’s much better being told you played a good match rather than ‘you completely crumbled and it was a disaster’, so it definitely makes you feel better when people say that.

“And I know right now sitting here that I gave it my best and I’ve always said Francesca played a fantastic
match. And she won it, I don’t think I lost it, so that definitely makes it easier to deal with. But you still want that W next to your name.”

Stosur’s biggest improvement has been in her consistency, and Taylor sees that as a mental triumph above all. “Like us all, we’re not perfect human beings and we all have flaws, and those flaws often come back up in all our life day-to-day and it’s no different with an elite athlete. So sometimes she struggles to have that conviction at the right moment but it’s obviously gotten a lot, lot better, but it’s always something that she’ll have to keep addressing,” he said.

The pair talk constantly, with self-assessment an inevitable, yet difficult, process. There are fewer tears these days, but one of Taylor’s least favourite aspects of coaching is both necessary and the most meaningful of all. With experience he has learnt it is better not to put off until tomorrow what should be done today. The wounds may be fresher, but Stosur has never been unwilling to join in a painful post-mortem.

“[It's] really focusing on the times when you’ve let yourself down and you have to talk about it, and then it’s really hard because ‘why didn’t you do that? were you scared?’ You’re really starting to talk about the flaws you have in your personality, you have to make them better, and you have to be someone for the two hours of that match that maybe you’re not normally like and it’s not easy,” says Taylor.

“Trying to analyse and find out why you didn’t do something that you should have done, it’s very difficult. And under pressure, it’s not easy to make great decisions.”

Still, Stosur is confident she is making better choices, and the result is fewer of the extremes of performance and emotion she experienced before. Her improvement has not just been over weeks and months, but within individual games during matches. For example, not dwelling on what has just happened “and then playing a terrible three points and stuff like that – I think I’m a lot tighter with myself on court”.

And individual strokes? “My serve keeps getting better, my forehand’s still becoming more of a weapon and I’m continually trying to work on my movement and the mental side of things. So it’s like everything, slowly, comes together and you get a little bit better. I don’t think there’s anything that’s terrible or I drastically have to work on individually, but it’s a matter of bringing it all together right at the right time.”

There is no better moment than this one, 33 years after Chris O’Neil was the last local player to take home the national title. At 26, Stosur is among the more mature half of the current top 20, but keen to point out that “old doesn’t necessarily mean ‘done’ “. There are fewer teen prodigies these days, and more seasoned players finding a way through mid or late career. In Schiavone’s case, to a major title; in Stosur’s case, to something very close.

“I really wouldn’t be picky which one it was,” said the host nation’s first top-five women’s seed since 1974, when asked to nominate the major she would most like to own. “But for sure if I win one and it’s the Australian Open, I don’t know how you would really top that. It would be pretty special.”

In the meantime, Stosur keeps working and preparing, her goals clear, her capacity to achieve them better than ever. If flying is the scary bit, then there is no need for anxiety when the time – like now – comes to arrive.

From www.smh.com.au