Hard-working Safina was most improved

The WTA Tour season came to a close Sunday when Venus Williams won the Tour Championships singles title, and $1.3 million U.S., before rather sparse crowds in Doha, Qatar.
 
There is still more tennis to be played; a number of smaller women's events on the ITF Circuit offering between $10,000 and $100,000 in total prize money will take place right through to the end of the year.
 
But the major leagues are taking a break. And with that, we offer up the annual Open Court Awards.
 
Player of the year: 1. Venus Williams; 2. Jelena Jankovic; 3. Serena Williams.
 
Jankovic might be the year-end No. 1. And Venus won only one Grand Slam this year - her old standby, Wimbledon. But between Wimbledon, the Olympic doubles gold medal with sister Serena, and Sunday's WTA Championships title, Venus ends up with the most impressive collection of hardware.
 
Jankovic was consistent. And unlike the Williams sisters, was for the most part able to play through injury. She deserves to be No. 1 if only for this fact: she seems to be one of the few players not afraid of the Williams sisters.
 
Most improved: 1. Dinara Safina; 2. Vera Zvonareva; 3. Aleksandra Wozniak.
 
Safina seemingly was headed down the path taken by big brother Marat - i.e. talent to burn (although not quite as much) but the temperament to sabotage it at every turn.
 
She showed that girls are so much smarter than boys; Safina pulled herself together, got extremely fit, worked extremely hard, and surrounded herself with a new support group that believed in her.
 
The result? A year-end No. 3 ranking, a French Open final, and all sorts of reasons to expect just as much, if not more, in 2009.
 
It's always possible the presence of that support was what spurred her to make those improvements; women tennis players so often seem to play for others, not for themselves. But whatever the reason, she became a charming addition to the top five.
 
Zvonareva, another Russian, had even bigger emotional issues. Even Sunday, in the second set against Williams in the Tour final, she lay on the court in the second set, sobbing, chest heaving, and played the remainder of the game with tears rolling down her cheeks.
 
But you can put that down to exhaustion after a superb week, and the heavy schedule she played late in the season to qualify for the elite eight in Doha.
 
For the most part, Zvonareva kept things under control; she also added a lot of aggression to her game, hitting full out on every ball, and ends the year at No. 7.
 
As for Wozniak, no need to chronicle her rise in 2008. She began the year ranked No. 130, losing in the qualifying at the Australian Open. She ends it at a career-high No. 34, with a Tier II WTA Tour title (Stanford, Calif.) in her pocket - as well as $277,000 U.S. in earnings.
 
Sore loser of the year: Serena Williams.
 
Okay, we get it: she's extremely competitive. But her morose excuses when she loses - even against sister Venus, whose graciousness when the tables are turned only underscores Serena's lack of class - cast a pall over her achievements.
 
It's about that Rudyard Kipling line as the players enter Centre Court at Wimbledon; about meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those two imposters just the same.
 
She gave her sister the most cursory of hugs after losing to her in the Wimbledon final - barely even looked at her - was ridiculously gleeful after beating her in the U.S. Open quarters, and barely shook Venus's hand after losing to her in Doha last week.
 
"Today I couldn't serve, I couldn't hit a backhand, I couldn't hit a forehand, I couldn't even volley. This is definitely the worst match I've played this year by far," Serena said after that match, making you wonder how in the world she won the first set 7-5.
 
Newcomer of the year: Denmark's Caroline Wozniacki, 18.
 
She started the year at No. 64, finished No. 12, reached at least the third round of every Grand Slam event, and won three titles: Stockholm, New Haven, Conn., Tokyo. Now the hard part begins: backing it up. Remember the 2007 U.S. Open, when youngsters Agnieszka Radwanska, Agnes Szavay and Tamira Paszek announced their arrivals on the big-league scene? Of the three - we nicknamed them the "Zed Girls" - only Radwanska was a consistent performer in 2008.
 
Medical misdiagnosis of the year: Maria Sharapova's shoulder.
 
You'd think these multimillionaire athletes would have access to the finest in diagnostic care. But Roger Federer's mononucleosis took forever to figure out. And Sharapova, who struggled with a shoulder problem for the better part of 18 months, found out only after the Rogers Cup that she had been playing with a tear in her rotator-cuff tendon - since April.
 
"You can imagine that I was not very thrilled to hear that my medical team did not see this tear in my shoulder back in April," Sharapova said. She officially shut it down for the season in September, and drops to No. 9 in the year-end rankings.

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