KEY POINTS:
She's not everybody's favourite. In fact, few people seem to like Maria Sharapova.
Most dislike her grunting and shrieking when she hits a tennis ball; noises which (if you watch with your eyes closed) suggest that she is starring in a bad porno flick. Or even a good one.
Others don't like the routine she slavishly follows - the bouncing ball, the hair flick, the long gaze at the opponent - when serving. Some say she is a bit of a princess, all blonde and big eyes but a nasty turn of phrase when she wants to get the claws out.
I think she's got, as the Americans say, sand. All right, she might not be an intellectual giant and she might be prone to gushing and a little bit of an overbearing manner at times but it is usually when she is being taxed about some issue or other, including her grunting.
Some don't like the fact she sometimes gets coached from the sidelines, often by her father Yuri, who seems a tad eccentric. He appeared at his daughter's straight-sets demolition of world No 1 Justine Henin at the Australian Open looking like a cross between a soldier in Iraq, with his camouflage hoodie, and one of those bag ladies you see on the street, gesticulating and talking to themselves.
It is still a mystery why Yuri drew his hand across his throat in a throat-slitting gesture after his daughter saw Henin off. Sharapova lives with all this because she is a fighter. She isn't the strongest - that'd be Serena Williams; or the most consistent (Henin) or the most talented (probably Williams again). But she's got guts. And she's focused in a way the Williams sisters, for all their undoubted talent, aren't.
She scraps all the way. She beat Henin, who was looking for a record 33rd straight victory, 6-4 6-0 - dominating the final set when the Belgian tossed in the towel in a way that Sharapova would never do.
It's at last year's French Open that I remember her most. She lost in the semifinal but beat Switzerland's Patty Schnyder in a quarter-final in difficult circumstances.
Schnyder is a tricky player with some deft shots but, when she plays the patient game, depends on retrieval and absence of errors. If you hit it, she'll get it back as she waits for the opponent's error. If you hit the ball out of the Rod Laver Arena and on top of a passing tram, Schnyder would still find a way to get it back.
Schnyder is also mildly famous as the woman whose parents were so worried about the effect her coach was having on her - he directed her whole life, from morning to night, including an insistence she drink litres of orange juice every day - that they called in a private detective. Schnyder ran off with the detective and married him; which kind of made it 0-40 on the parents' serve.
Anyway, Sharapova was serving to Schnyder when some dipstick from the crowd called out during the serve. Schnyder backed off, holding up her hand to halt the serve - but Sharapova delivered anyway. The serve was called good.
The Roland Garros crowd, already on Sharapova's case for some perceived gamesmanship, went septic. They booed and hissed and hollered and hooted.
Sharapova's response? After looking like she was about to burst into tears, she recovered. She grinned at the crowd; she waved at them and she blew kisses every now and then, acting for all the world as if she thought they loved her - even as they hurled insults and cheered her every misfortune. She won after saving two match points.
Now, I'm sorry, but that's ballsy. Defying a universe which is expressing total disapproval - and still beating the opponent - takes some doing. She had also just recovered from a shoulder injury and had no real need to play at Roland Garros, especially as it is on clay, the surface on which she famously described herself as being like "a cow on ice". Women's tennis has been blighted in recent years by the number of injuries on tour and women missing from top events - but Sharapova fronted when she didn't have to; especially when you think she makes about $40 million a year.
No, I like her chutzpah. She does go a bit gamesmanship every now and then but that's just a gender thing. We like our sportswomen to be humble and genteel little flowers, don't we? We don't mind the men pulling strokes but the old gender perception comes into play when women do it.
And she's not scared to poke it back at the media when they question her about everything from her grunting to Yuri's strange and wonderful ways.
As she said at a previous Australian Open, when she was beaten by Henin: "I know you are reporters and I know this is your job, but, you know, take your notepads, take your pencils down, take your grunt-o-meters down, the fashion police, put everything away and just watch the match, you know, from just the fans' perspective. I seriously think that the quality of the match today was great."
