Ivanovic wades into the deep end

The world never seems to stop churning out little girls who become young women who can maul helpless tennis balls until, until -- well, until they make even Maria Sharapova look decrepit.

So here’s Ana Ivanovic, 19, 6 feet tall, brunet, Serbian, jovial, talks so fast you wonder how she breathes, and bound for her first Grand Slam final.

Granted, Ivanovic emerged from a belittled half of the draw that included fifth-seeded Amelie Mauresmo, who suffers a French Open phobia, third-seeded Svetlana Kuznetsova, who suffers a screaming abdominal muscle, and second-seeded Sharapova, who suffered in the shoulder, on the clay and opposite Ivanovic.

Granted, she will probably undergo a fine mulching in the final from three-time champion Justine Henin, who routed Jelena Jankovic, 6-2, 6-2, in Thursday’s second French Open semifinal.

But still, Ivanovic’s very act of making Sharapova look old and slow at 20 in a 6-2, 6-1 breeze in the other semifinal brims with meaning because ...

“Well, to tell you truth, I grew up playing in a swimming pool,” Ivanovic said.

And there you are.

At the 2007 French Open, a Belgrade swimming pool has hurtled into lore. It bears the name Jedanaesti April. It counts among the training grounds of half the French Open women’s semifinalists.

Point of information: They did drain the water first.

Jedanaesti April illustrates the facility hardship that combined with late-1990s NATO bombings to make this Serbian tennis crescendo -- three of the eight male and female semifinalists -- so implausible. It also accents the imprint of Monica Seles, who hailed from the Serbian part of the former Yugoslavia and appeared on early-1990s TV commercials, including one that caught the eye of a young Ivanovic.

“I’m so proud of both girls,” Seles, 33, said from the United States, praising their “sacrifice” and adding, “I think it’s a great beginning and I know we’ll see a lot more of them in the future.”

Starring in the sacrifice would be the pool, which Ivanovic described about 45 minutes after playing tennis so cleanly and sharply that the scorecard’s unforced-error reading -- 11 -- seemed bloated.

“It’s a club where they had an Olympic swimming pool,” she said, “and then it was very expensive to keep it warm during the winter, and there were not many people using it.

“So they emptied the swimming pool, and they put carpet inside, and they placed” -- then she laughed -- “two tennis courts and that’s where I grew up practicing.

“And it was impossible to play crosscourt, because it was this far from the wall,” she said, holding her hands close together. “So we had to keep playing down the lines. And that was the courts we had during the winter.”

Ivanovic practiced in the disused pool more than did Jankovic, who relocated to Florida to the Bollettieri Tennis Academy. But Jankovic has moved back, and did tell of hitting in December in minus-15 weather on a cracked court “that we have like a basketball, how you say, basketball net or something on top of your head, and then behind, you have a soccer goal.” She practiced in gloves, a coat and a winter hat.

The toughness born of such toughness probably can’t trump Henin. The champion in 2003, 2005 and 2006 has roared through this place in the minimum 12 sets, zero of them requiring tiebreakers, and only one a 7-5 gruel (second round, Tamira Paszek).

But the swimming-pool toughness did crush Sharapova, who looked like anything but somebody who won Wimbledon in 2004 and the U.S. Open in 2006. She didn’t even grunt all that audibly.

The match began with the Court Philippe Chatrier half-empty and the French still trying to arrive.

“I would have loved to be having lunch then too,” Sharapova said. “I don’t blame them. I’d rather be having a chocolate croissant than being down 3-0.”

She got it to 3-1, but went down 4-1 in a barrage of service winners and down 5-1 when she pushed a second serve long. She committed 30 unforced errors all told and reminded everyone this marked her first French semifinal as well.

“And once you start off slow, and I started off slow in the beginning of the first set, and the second set, I mean, the train’s already in London,” she said.

Serbian men’s semifinalist Novak Djokovic turned up and watched his friend Ivanovic, only six months younger than Sharapova though trailing in familiarity and fame, ace the Russian star down the middle to close the match.

As a tyke, with Seles already aglow in the world, Ivanovic saw a TV commercial for a local tennis school, memorized the phone number and begged her parents.

By 1999, at 11, she thought she might have to stop, what with NATO warplanes dropping bombs in a successful bid to shoo the despotic Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic.

“And also, after that, we had troubles to travel,” Ivanovic said, “because we had problems to get a visa to another country. And we didn’t have flights from Serbia. We had to go to Hungary, so we’d take a bus for six, seven hours, just to catch a flight. So it was very tough, and I thought it would be impossible to succeed. But then, luckily, I got managers,” and she got the chance to move to Switzerland.

She reached one French quarterfinal in 2005 -- beating Mauresmo along the way -- and one fourth round at Wimbledon in 2006, but otherwise had not surpassed the third round in nine previous Grand Slams. She lists no coach but works with Sven Groenefeld of Adidas, who says Ivanovic’s self-reliance moots the need for day-to-day coaching. She had only one previous title, in Berlin on clay.

A French semifinal against a big name seemed steep.

But then, she had trained in a swimming pool.