“It was painless to work with her,” said Joe Pytka, who directed the superstar’s famous Canon commercial. “There was a discipline to her.”
This week, Maria Sharapova, Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan will be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. Look for special features throughout the lead-up on TENNIS.com
It’s ironic that someone born in a Communist nation like 2025 International Tennis Hall of Fame inductee Maria Sharapova could best be defined by these two words: all business.
Throughout much of the 20th century, when Russia was known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), there existed an official cultural doctrine called “Socialist Realism.” Its premise of was that art, literature and other forms of expression would showcase communism in its most idealized way. Its heroes were the men and women of the working class, collectively harnessed in the service of a greater cause. Materialism: no. Austerity: yes.
A Perfect Storm for Russia, Tennis, Capitalism
Fast-forward to the 1990s, shortly after Sharapova’s birth in 1987. The USSR had splintered. Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, embraced capitalism. Yeltsin loved tennis, helping to support an atmosphere where a game, previously disdained in the USSR as a ruling-class toy, was granted legitimacy by the nation’s leader as a full-fledged sport.
By the late ‘90s, increasing numbers of Russian tennis players began to hit the pro tennis radar. Among the notable: Anna Kournikova, who in 1997 reached the semifinals of Wimbledon at the age of 16. Kournikova’s looks also generated headlines. “Only the Ball Should Bounce,” read a tagline for one ad she was featured in. But while Kournikova briefly cracked the Top 10 and earned two Grand Slam doubles titles, her failure to win a singles tournament created a credibility gap between expectation and performance.
In 2002, Sports Illustrated writer Jon Wertheim profiled a promising teenager from Tashkent named Simonya Popova. “Fortunately for the WTA,” wrote Wertheim, “Popova has pulchritude and attitude in equal measure. Her midriff-baring outfits, so small they appear to come from Gap Kids, highlight her ample decolletage. She has already agreed to pose for the tour’s annual swimsuit calendar. When she turns pro, an image consultant hired by her agent will travel with her.”
Popova was fictitious, a satire that highlighted the WTA’s challenge of balancing the authenticity of competition with the artifice of marketing. “Women’s Tennis: Athletes or Objects?” was the title of a 1999 article I wrote.
A Contrast with Kournikova
A year after the “Popova” story, Sharapova burst onto the scene. Ranked 186th in the world at the end of 2002, she’d soared to 32 just 12 months later. In 2004, the star went supernova when 17-year-old Sharapova won Wimbledon.
Unlike Kournikova, Sharapova’s commercial viability was heavily predicated more on results than expectations. As a Harvard Business School case study titled, “Maria Sharapova: Marketing a Champion,” explained, at the age of 13, asked by HBO’s Real Sports program to choose between winning Wimbledon and making $20 million in endorsements, she replied, “I would want to win Wimbledon, because then the millions will come, and it will be $20 million.”
It proved far more. According to the Harvard study, within six hours of winning Wimbledon, Sharapova’s management team had received nearly 700 e-mails. For eleven straight years, from 2005 until 2015, Sharapova topped Forbes magazine’s list as the world’s highest-paid female athlete—starting at $18.2 million that first year, peaking at $29.7 million in ’15. Welcome to “Capitalist Realism.”
There were, of course, traditional tennis-related agreements with Nike, Prince and, later, Head. But no tennis player has ever been featured in more ads for other products than Sharapova, a portfolio that included Porsche, Evian, Tag Heuer, Motorola and Canon.
“They very deliberately chose brands that reinforced [her best brand attributes],” said Anita Elberse, author of the HBR piece. “There was a lot of emphasis on performance.”
One example was an ad for Canon PowerShot camera that employed the tagline, “Make Every Shot a Power Shot.” Among the more memorable Canon spots was one featuring Sharapova in playful dialogue with a dog.
“It was painless to work with her,” said Joe Pytka, who directed that commercial. “There was a discipline to her.”
A Sweet Moment
Sharapova even made a foray into manufacturing with Sugarpova, a candy company that launched in 2012 and within two years was available in 30 countries. At one point, Sharapova floated the idea of changing her name to “Sugarpova.”
“She was always in on the joke for everything,” said Anita Stahl, who teaches in the feminist studies department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and in the spring of 2019, taught a class titled, “Picturing Maria Sharapova.” “You felt Maria was in on it, and that she knew her market value.”
By 2021, one year after she’d retired, Sugarpova had ceased to operate.
“The readers of advertisements are always playing a game with themselves,” wrote Daniel Boorstin in his 1961 classic, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. “Momentarily they enjoy the pleasurable illusion that an extravagant expectation has been satisfied. Then they enjoy the revelation that they have seen through the illusion: the fairy princess is not really a fairy princess at all.”
But so what if the Sugarpova venture ended? As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their classic critique of capitalism, The Communist Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
