The best day of the week

When I was in grade school, my friend Ken and I played a lot of tennis together. Most of the time we played we played games we invented like "Still Bouncing" or "Clean Winner Game". The Clean Winner Game has morphed into a little event known as Jana Slice Team Doubles, named after Jana Novotná ... the best tennis player to ever choke away a Wimbledon final and then cry on the Duchess' shoulder during the trophy presentations (see #8 on the link). When we were not playing those games we were usually emulating our most favorite and least favorite tennis players. we would walk like them, talk like them, serve, hit shots, etc in their exact manner. From this I developed my favorite tennis players. Some are favorites because of how much I liked to watch them play, others because of how much fun it was to emulate/mock them on the courts.

Without any further adieu, I bring you my favorite women's tennis players of all-time (the men will follow next week):
Ana Ivanović -- Current world number one and number one cutest tennis player in the world (and 2008 French Open Champion). Ana is a favorite because of her all-out playing style, good looks, amazing fist pumps, and great interview skills. On a side-note, my mom does an amazing impression of her giving an interview. If we still emulated players (aka we still were in the same city to play tennis) Ivanović would be a favorite to emulate for her fist pumps.

Jana Novotná -- the queen of slice reigns supreme in our hearts for her slicey-dicey style of play, chance of choking, and her mannish good looks. The name sake of our tennis game, Jana was one of our favorites to play as so we could chip and charge and fake cry whenever we lost a point. Bonus points for the phrase "I feel like Jana Novotná in the 1993 Wimbledon Final" being used whenever you started to let a lead slip away.

Arantxa Sánchez Vicario -- the Bumblebee and all around annoying tennis player from Spain. This pusher galore was a favorite to play, especially when the opponent decided to be Jana Novotná. Those two go together like peanuts and butter. An amazing lobber, Arantxa would lob with both singles players at the baseline ... and on an offensive ball. Bonus for naming her dog Roland Garros, after the site of the French Open. Double bonus points for being really ugly and leading to Ken and I to believe we heard Jana Novotná ask a line judge "are you sure she's not a man" when they played one time (the camera panned to Arantxa at this point and she just smiled and shrugged).

Anna Kournikova -- for obvious reasons and for the following. It was fun to walk around like we cared more about our looks than tennis, hit the ball as hard as we could and not care if it went in or not, and you could double fault all day and just be in character. On a side note I hate Enrique Iglesias.

Maria Kirilenko -- relatively unknown (but a top 20 player), I like Kirilenko because she is attractive. Sue me. I couldn't emulate her shots right now because she is rarely on tv enough for me to know what they are. But she is pretty.
Honorable Mentions (or fun people to emulate): The Williams sisters (I am not big fans, but they are fun to emulate), Maria Sharapova (Djokovic already showed how fun this one is), Conchita Martinez (look up this hottie), Irina Spirlea (drop shot and bumping into opponent on change over time!), Amanda Coetzer and Chanda Rubin (not to emulate per se, but call people "the next Chanda Rubin/Amanda Coetzer" has been fun), and lastly, Monica Seles (the grunt and two hander were fun to play with)