Oudin learning to navigate instant fame

She wasn’t the face of American tennis. She wasn’t the darling of media both old and new. And her family secrets were safe. Not like now.

The innocence she brought to the Open, the quality that won her so many fans, is hanging on by a string.

Thursday, for instance, as Oudin traveled between New York appearances, it was as if it suddenly struck her that this tennis thing is also a business.

She asked her coach: How much money did I win?

Brian de Villiers asked back: How much do you think you won?

Her guess: $70,000.

Try $175,000.

“She had no idea. That is not what she’s doing this for,” de Villiers said.

But a fortune potentially awaits Oudin and, with it, all the opportunity and complications that money can bring. Just minutes before her match against Wozniacki, she was signing papers for an endorsement deal worth six figures with BackOffice, a data mining company, according to the Sports Business Journal. More, presumably, is on the way for a personality that so captivated tennis fans.

“I’m pretty confident the future is going to hold some pretty good things,” said Oudin’s agent, Sam Duvall, of Blue Entertainment Sports Television. “We should have a couple more [deals] next week. Problem is, you don’t want to overload her with too much stuff right away. At the same time, there are companies that believe in her and want to commit.”

Overload is the operative word here.

Before Oudin began play at the Open on Sept. 1, she practiced anonymously on the back courts at Flushing Meadows. Within a week, she was directed to the main practice courts so the United States Tennis Association could better guarantee her security.

New York would seem a place where a person could get lost easily enough, but not Oudin as she started beating Russian after Russian.

“I couldn’t believe it, all the people coming up to her in the streets,” de Villiers said. And with the attention came a necessary wariness. “I really have to keep an eye on her, especially now, when she walks around in a crowd, walks around the (tennis) grounds. She loves to do that.”

By the first weekend of the Open, people in all the right places were noticing.

Her style was irresistible. Undersized (5-foot-6) and over-amped, Oudin was the human backboard, returning everything her opponent gave her.

In her on-court, post-match interviews, her words came out in giggly geysers of joy, completely unscripted and unpretentious – “I just can’t beee-lieve I won!”

“A breath of fresh air,” tennis great Billie Jean King called her in a blog.

Famed tennis coach Nick Bollettieri told one New York writer, “She should be copied by every American junior. She brings hope to American tennis because she shows you don’t have to be a giant to be successful.”

After the first weekend of the tournament, 15-time Grand Slam titlist Roger Federer was looking for her. “My mind just kind of froze getting to meet him,” Oudin said.

She made the rounds of all the morning shows, all the national news shows. The requests didn’t stop with Wednesday’s loss. That next morning, Oudin appeared on “Good Morning America.” Then she visited rock star Rob Thomas’ video shoot, fitting since one of his songs bears the same message Oudin wore on her shoes all the way to the Open quarters: “Believe.”

She also planned to meet Justin Timberlake at a fashion event in New York. And she has a scheduled appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show Monday in Los Angeles.

Whew.

The hectic off-court schedule begged the question of whether it all had been too much, and an ultimate reason for her lackluster showing against Wozniacki.

“She said she wasn’t (worn out). I think she was,” said Oudin’s mother, Leslie. “I don’t think she moved quite as well. It seemed like she didn’t have quite as much fight in her. She had so much going on, a lot of distractions.”

Ugly side of success

Oudin and her family provide a new, poignant case study on the give and take of sudden fame.

In the beginning, the Oudins were treated to nothing but the kinder side of celebrity.

Eleven-year-old sister Christina lit up in front of the cameras, while explaining that even she had signed a couple autographs. Twin sister Katherine, a senior at the Walker School in Marietta, wrote a series of guest columns for The New York Times. During Melanie’s matches, their happy faces were beamed coast to coast. Remote feeds captured the excitement of the viewing parties back at Oudin’s home courts, the Racquet Club of the South in Norcross.

The flip side showed itself the morning after Oudin’s loss, when SI.com reported the contents of the divorce proceedings between Oudin’s parents, since sealed by a Cobb County judge. Included were allegations by her father that Leslie Oudin had an affair with de Villiers. In those documents, she denied the allegation.

Having coached Oudin since she was 9, De Villiers admitted Thursday that there was a brief period at the beginning of this year when the situation forced him to temporarily stop working with her. By spring, he had returned out front as Melanie’s coach.

De Villiers said his relationship with his player is sound, that they “have dealt with (the issues of the divorce) and that’s that.”

What the coach and family regretted most was how the allegations sullied the storybook tone of Oudin’s Open performance.

“This is supposed to be about Melanie, not anything else,” rued her mother.

Plan going forward

What about Melanie?

With her next world ranking likely to jump from No. 70 to top-50, she is scheduled to return to competition at the end of this month in Tokyo. By then, she hopes to have recovered from a hamstring injury that she took to the Open. In October, she’s scheduled to appear in another tournament in China and hopefully will earn a spot on the U.S. Fed Cup team competing in November in Italy.

As always, there’s work to do on her game, lest her Open performance be judged a fleeting thing.

Their plan? “Going to keep working on that serve, going to make her stronger,” de Villiers said. “And because of the injury, we haven’t been able to train physically. Let that heal, and then get back to that part of it pretty hard.”

And there’s work to do on adjusting to Oudin’s newly won fame.

“I don’t think of myself as a celebrity at all,” Oudin said after the Wozniacki match. “I’ve never thought of myself like that. I just love to play tennis.”

“She’s a girl who wants to be No. 1 in the world but doesn’t necessarily want all that comes with it,” said Duvall, the agent. “That is going to be learned. Nobody knows how to deal with it. Right now, it’s exciting for her, but it has been a lot. We’ll sit down and talk about what she wants to do, what she likes, what she doesn’t like and figure out a plan.”

This much Oudin has learned already: “You don’t realize how much more it is than just playing tennis.”