http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/fashion/maria-sharapovas-campaign-to-establish-herself-as-a-brand.html

By Eric Wilson

When Maria Sharapova won her first grand slam title in 2004, at age 17, she made the cover of Sports Illustrated. The issue showed Ms. Sharapova at the moment she became a household name, proudly beaming on court at Wimbledon in a body-skimming white tank dress from Nike. "Star Power," the headline read.

"And do you think I knew what Sports Illustrated was?" Ms. Sharapova said recently, recalling the moment when her agent, Max Eisenbud, first showed her the magazine, expecting her to be as excited as he was. "I knew what Vogue was, but I didn't know what Sports Illustrated was."

Ms. Sharapova, over coffee at a SoHo hotel last month, laughed at herself, saying, "When you are young, you are a little naïve."

But you had to wonder: Was Maria Sharapova really all that naïve?

One does not become the highest paid female athlete in the world without recognizing that the greatest potential for earnings comes not from winning championships, but from endorsement deals, particularly with fashion and sportswear brands. Ms. Sharapova, now 24 years old and the seventh ranked women's singles player, made $24.5 million from June 2009 to June 2010, according to Forbes, about $4 million more than her nearest competitor, Serena Williams.

Last year, she renewed her contract with Nike in an expanded eight-year deal that is estimated to be worth as much as $70 million, the most ever for a female athlete, including royalties from clothes she designs for Nike. She also designs shoes and handbags for Cole Haan and endorses luxury brands like Tiffany and Tag Heuer, and the electronics company Sony Ericsson.

Expanding her reach into the unexpected, she is about to announce a new partnership with Jeff Rubin, the man who helped create Dylan's Candy Bar in 2001 and a chain of candy shops inside F. A. O. Schwarz stores (called F. A. O. Schweetz) in the 1990s, to develop her own brand of candy and sweets. Gumballs will be shaped like tennis balls, and gummy candies will be packaged in containers shaped like tennis-ball cans, according to plans drawn up by Mr. Rubin, who hopes to have them ready in time for a rollout at the United States Open in August.

The name of her brand? Sugarpova.

Despite recent progress in her professional comeback, which has been regarded somewhat skeptically since a shoulder operation in 2008 took her out of the game for most of a year, Ms. Sharapova is laying the groundwork for what her life will be like after tennis. Ever the ferocious (and vocal) competitor, her victory on a clay court at the Italian Open in Rome on May 15 may have set up a possible storyline for a Sharapova revival, as she entered the French Open this week as one of the tournament's favorites.

But it is her competitiveness off the court that has made for a more riveting match in recent years, as Ms. Sharapova fights for turf among those athletes who aspire to become brands - pushing both Nike and Cole Haan to produce more of her designs, creating the candy business and now expanding her online presence with a Facebook page with 4.3 million fans. (That's more than any other female athlete has, she pointed out.)

As she walked past the suits sitting at the white-linen-covered tables of the restaurant in the Trump SoHo hotel, in a loose, black-and-white flecked halter top and high-waisted black trousers that made her look even taller than her 6 feet 2 inches, a few early-morning diners looked up from their plates. Model? Actress? It was a few moments before her name could be recognized among their whispers. She hardly seemed to notice the attention, but then it would take a lot more than that to break Ms. Sharapova's focus.

"I've been very competitive by nature from a young age, whether it was eating a bowl of pasta faster than somebody else, or always wanting to be the first one in line," she said. When she was 13, training on scholarship at the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla., a reporter from "HBO Real Sports" asked her if she had the chance to win Wimbledon or make $20 million in endorsements, which would she choose? She looked into the camera and said, without hesitation, "I would choose to win Wimbledon, because then the millions will come."

Retelling the story, Ms. Sharapova said: "I looked at the guy - and I remember this - I thought to myself, 'Are you stupid? Maybe I'm not getting things. How could he even ask me this question. You can't buy Wimbledon. It's not purchasable. You have to earn Wimbledon. Second of all, if you win Wimbledon, of course you are going to get this money. I mean, it's Wimbledon.' I'm thinking this and then I find myself saying this - not the first part, not the fact he is asking me a stupid question - but the second part that, of course, if you win Wimbledon, then the money is going to come. Looking back on that, I thought, 'God, I had guts. I was brave to say that.' "

Obviously, she was correct. In her own words, she now has "money that will feed my great-grandchildren." (For those following her love life, Ms. Sharapova said she is looking forward to starting a family with her fiancé, Sasha Vujacic of the Los Angeles Lakers)

It was during her painful and frustrating rehabilitation in Phoenix, however, that her perceptions about her success began to change. A chronic shoulder injury that surfaced in 2007, and required an operation the following year, forced Ms. Sharapova to face the reality that her career on the court will someday be over. And where will she be without an opponent to face?

Coincidentally, she had read an article in USA Today that shocked her, about the financial problems facing former professional athletes. Willie Davis, the football legend, had lost millions during the recession with the closing of a California bank in which he was a large investor. A surprising number of football players had filed for bankruptcy protection a few years after the end of their careers.

Restless and ready to work, Ms. Sharapova called Mr. Eisenbud, who has managed her career since she signed with the talent agency IMG at age 11, and told him to contact all her sponsors. Their contracts typically limited each company's access to Ms. Sharapova to 10 or 12 days each year.

"I don't care what's in the contracts," she told him. "Tell them I'll do whatever they want, whatever they need."

She was determined to set Brand Maria in motion well before she was through playing tennis.

In a sense, her victory at Wimbledon came too early in the career of an athlete who was interested in blue-chip endorsements - one who, like the Williams sisters before her, was most interested in fashion.

Ms. Sharapova often complained to Nike that the outfits they provided were not suited to her frame. She brought a sketch pad to tournaments and filled her hotel rooms with fashion magazines. She asked Anna Wintour, who has a keen interest in tennis players, for career advice - whether she thought it was a good idea for her to design a collection. ("Be careful," Ms. Sharapova remembers Ms. Wintour saying. "If you end up failing, you won't have many more chances.")

She had also seen the example set by a fellow Russian, Anna Kournikova, who was famous for her boyfriends and for modeling in an ad campaign for shock-absorbing sports bras. She decided she would prefer to appear in a small feature in Vogue wearing a cool pair of shoes than on the cover of Maxim in a bathing suit. (Ms. Sharapova did consent to modeling for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 2006, for which she appeared in several polka-dotted bikinis of the itsy bitsy variety.)

She was so sophisticated about protecting her image, Mr. Eisenbud said in a separate interview, that he had even noticed her begin to peel the labels off water bottles at appearances in clubs, or wherever she might be photographed.

Her first big deal resulted from an unscripted moment at Wimbledon. After she won, her father slipped a cellphone into her hand so she could call her mother. She dialed the number, over and over, but the call would not go through. Eventually, she gave up, apparently unaware the whole episode was shown on television.

Motorola, which was about to introduce its Razr series, signed Ms. Sharapova the next month. Commercials for Land Rover and Canon followed, and as her career advanced, Ms. Sharapova saw her name begin to appear on actual products, like sunglasses and a watch for Tag Heuer, and jewelry for Tiffany.

For her collaboration with Cole Haan, introduced in August 2009, she insisted the company include a ballet flat. ("I came in saying, 'You know what? I'm 6 foot-2 and I don't care about anyone else,' " she said. "I'm going to be selfish and say I love ballerinas.") The $138 shoes are now among the top-selling items for the entire brand.

Meanwhile, designing clothes had been a much slower goal to achieve.

"When I was younger," Ms. Sharapova said, "Nike would put me in the same clothes as maybe 10 other girls in the tour. We all looked like clones. I want to be different. If everyone is wearing black, I want to be wearing red."

Two years after she won at Wimbledon, at the United States Open in 2006, her second grand slam title (she later won a third, at the Australian Open), she wore a little black dress with a round crystal collar that was inspired by Audrey Hepburn. It generated enormous publicity, but the dress, a collaboration between Ms. Sharapova and the Nike team, was never produced commercially.

"They could have sold a gazillion of those dresses," Mr. Eisenbud said. "In a perfect world, I bet Nike would love her to wear something white and plain. That sells better."

It is not as simple as that. For one thing, the custom-made black dress would have cost $600 or more to reproduce at retail.

A pale yellow dress with corsetry-inspired stitching that Ms. Sharapova wore at the French Open on Tuesday was different. It was not something she just happened to pull out of her closet that morning. Her outfit was decided more than 18 months ago, along with what she will be wearing at Wimbledon, the United States Open and other major tournaments throughout the year, with careful consideration of color trends, fashion forecasts and minute details like the time of day Ms. Sharapova is likely to play and the color of the red clay at the French Open.

As part of her new deal with Nike, the company last year finally began producing and selling a line based on her on-court attire, and dressing several up-and-coming players, like Julia Goerges of Germany and Anastasia Pivovarova of Russia, in Maria Sharapova looks.

For example, the same dress Ms. Sharapova is wearing this week, its crisscross taping inspired by the lines of the Eiffel Tower, has been at Nike.com and Tennis Warehouse for $120 for several weeks, something that took months of planning to achieve and represents a substantial investment on the part of Nike since it began to coordinate what players wear with what will be in stores.

Mr. Eisenbud said it took more than a year just to convince retailers that Ms. Sharapova and other players would actually wear the clothes as promised. But if customers respond as he thinks they will, the line could develop into something more substantial.

"Could she one day have a brand Maria Sharapova at Nike like Michael Jordan's?" he said. "I don't want to come across as an egomaniac. There's only one Michael Jordan. But if we did a good job with the Maria Sharapova collection, could all the young girls, in 10 years, want to wear Maria Sharapova? That's what I want to find out."

Derek Kent, a spokesman for Nike, noted the company's history of creating products with input from athletes, from the runner Steve Prefontaine to Mr. Jordan, but the degree to which they can become brands themselves is a more sensitive subject. "With every athlete relationship, it's always unique," Mr. Kent said. "One side may want certain things. That's part of the negotiating process."

At the risk of a stupid question, it seems relevant to ask Ms. Sharapova, at 24, if she had the chance to win Wimbledon again, or have a brand on the scale of Air Jordan, which would she choose? Just before the start of the French Open, she responded by e-mail right away:

"The answer is I would win Wimbledon over anything," she said. "Wimbledon is not something you can buy. A brand is something you can build."