the new hit girl; The most exciting female tennis player in the world, Maria Sharapova, talks to Dodie Kazanjian about her meteoric rise to the top.(Interview)

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian

Standing on the curb, Maria Sharapova waits for her car to arrive. Gazelle-thin and six feet tall in ivory warm-up pants and a pale yellow jacket, she reaches upward with both arms and forms an elongated S, her fresh, young face raised to the sky. The hotel valet arrives with her silver Range Rover. "Have you got your license?" says her father, Yuri, the ever-present guide and protector of this seventeen-year-old tennis prodigy. Maria jumps in behind the wheel, and they

drive off for her morning practice at the South Bay Tennis Center in Torrance, California.

By now, just about everybody knows her brief but dramatic life story-how her father borrowed $700 and brought seven-year-old Maria from Russia to Florida in 1994, enrolled her in the Bollettieri Tennis Academy, and worked at odd jobs to support them both until he could afford to bring her mother over two years later. It was Yuri, of course, who put her together with the legendary tennis teacher and guru Robert Lansdorp. Lansdorp, whose former pupils include Pete Sampras and Lindsay Davenport, has worked with Maria since she was eleven and is often cited as the secret weapon behind her astonishingly rapid ascent to the tennis stratosphere: 55 match wins in 2004, including Wimbledon and a blitz of commercial endorsements that have made her one of the highest-paid female athletes in the world.

"There's no doubt in my mind that Maria's going to be number one in the world," Lansdorp tells me as we watch her practice her backhand slice. (She started 2004 ranked number 32 in the world, and ended at four.)

From where I sit, she seems to be enjoying herself, hitting every ball with exuberance and loud shrieks, and sometimes breaking into giggles. This is quite a contrast to her behavior in tournaments, where she projects an aura of unsmiling, concentrated ferocity. Yuri interrupts the session to bring her a cell phone. "Who is it?" yells Lansdorp. "Juan Carlos Ferrero? Rafael Nadal? I'll tell you the truth, she likes boys now." Maria, dying of embarrassment, runs over to where we're sitting and says, "What are you talking about? She's taping all this!" She turns to me and says, plaintively, "He makes stuff up."

Max Eisenbud, her assiduously hovering agent, is the point man in Team Sharapova, the group of fifteen people who handle the star's worldwide engagements. He drops us off at Creme de la Crepe, a tiny restaurant in Hermosa Beach. "I like practicing my French when I order," Maria says. She addresses the waitress in an experimental yet uninhibited ...