Ana Ivanovic: growing up, she had to dodge bombs to practice her tennis game. Now her explosive strokes are giving the competition reason to run and hide

"As a girl I never played with dolls," 19-year-old Ana Ivanovic says. "For my 5th birthday my father bought me a small tennis racket, and a month later I started playing. I fell in love with it straightaway." Of course, when you live in Belgrade--as Ivanovic did--nothing's simple. She learned to play the game in an empty swimming pool that had a carpet laid down in place of tuff. And there were darker moments: "In the beginning of the NATO bombing [in 1999], it was scary," she remembers. "We didn't know what to expect. People weren't working; schools weren't open. A few weeks later we went back to practicing tennis. But it has made me appreciate what I have now."

What Ivanovic has had since joining the WTA tour in 2004 are a booming serve and powerful ground strokes, and the two qualities have made tennis-world insiders take notice---attention Ivanovic proved well founded when she reached the final of the French Open this past June. Serbia has never had much of a tennis tradition, but almost despite itself, these days the country is well represented in the top-10 rankings. "It's hard to say how this happened," she says. "We didn't have good facilities, and the tennis association didn't support us as much as it could have--kids actually still practice in that pool." If Ivanovic keeps hitting winners, that makeshift facility may soon be a thing of the past.

Bill Vourvoulias is a New York City-based writer and editor.

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