“Little Princess” Li Na
Twenty-six-year-old Li Na is China’s tennis player in the women’s singles. At the age of 22, she won the Guangzhou Open Tournament championship in the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), a first in China’s tennis history. In 2006, she became the first Chinese player to be ranked in the world’s top 30, and ranked in the top-eight and top-16 in the Wimbledon Tournament and the US Open, respectively. In the Australia Open the following year she again ranked in the top 16, and she was 16th in the overall world ranking for a while. This year, Li is the only Chinese player qualified for the women’s tennis singles at the Beijing Olympics, and she is currently ranked 35th.
As China’s most successful singles player, Li Na has set a series of records. However, the girl who began practicing tennis at the age of eight, disliked, and even hated, playing tennis for quite a while. “Except tennis, I know nothing else in my life,” said Li. On the eve of the 2002 Pusan Asian Games in the Republic of Korea, Li Na abruptly announced her retirement, citing “injury and illness,” as well as “a strained relationship with the national team.”
Her difficult relationship with teammates and coaches is one of the more noticeable features of Li Na’s style. Though undeniably talented, she is generally perceived as stubborn, moody, aloof and self-centered. As far back as her early training in her hometown of Wuhan, in Hubei Province, Li was nicknamed “trouble” for her bad temper. A reporter for Sports Illustrated, a well-known U.S. sports magazine, once said that Li Na’s pet word was “I,” because her every sentence during the interview began with it. He concluded, however, that her character was well-suited to high-level competition, allowing her to be confident and aggressive on the court, not to mention the fact that all top players have enormous egos.
However, that oversized ego sometimes leaves Li Na out of step with the traditional “collectivism” of Chinese sports. In the opinion of some coaches and sports officials, Li Na often disobeys orders, is hard to manage, and is too individualistic and liberal. Therefore, her strained relationship with the national team was probably unavoidable. After she retired in 2002, she enrolled at a university in Wuhan, and made a comeback in April 2004.
“I have learned many things and made many friends during my two years of campus life, and my contact with them changed my ideas on tennis,” said Li Na. “I came to realize that playing tennis is a job, and that if I can think of it in that way it will be easier.”