Clijsters has good advice for Wozniacki

About six years ago, when Kim Clijsters first met Caroline Wozniacki at an exhibition in Hong Kong, Clijsters’ father, Lei, commented how much the Dane reminded him of his own daughter. That was well before Wozniacki grabbed the No. 1 spot and about nine months before his daughter won the first of her four Grand Slam titles, but perhaps Lei Clijsters noticed that Wozniacki had a similar sunny disposition to that of Kim, the same welcoming hugs even for her rivals and a mentality that stressed defense before offense.

“It was funny, you know, blonde frizzy hair, blue eyes, I remember he said that,” recalled the second-ranked Clijsters, who for the next 10 days at the BNP Paribas Open will try and seize the No. 1 ranking back from Wozniacki.

The top spot doesn’t matter that much to Clijsters anymore, because although she’s too modest to say so, owning the tour’s three most recent big titles — the 2010 U.S. Open, the 2010 year-end WTA Championships and the 2011 Australian Open — pretty much makes her the consensus best player in the world anyway.

Clijsters, 27, has been No. 1 before and likely will be so again, even though as a mother she has chosen to play a limited schedule. But a few weeks ago at the Paris Indoors, when she grabbed the top ranking from Wozniacki by reaching the final, the fire for being the world’s numerical best was at least briefly rekindled.

“I wasn’t really focused or worried about it, but when I was close during my match against [Jelena Dokic], I felt the nerves come . . . But it was really to just get there one more time at this stage in my career. I was proud of it when I achieved it, and now I’m not going to focus my energy on it much. I don’t think like [I’m the best], and I try to be the best Kim on court and see where it goes.”

Wozniacki is No. 1, so she cannot avoid the discussion of how relevant she is in her sport, even though she’s clearly tired of that topic and will become even more exhausted of it in the next three months. The tennis world knows she has yet to win a major, recalls how she couldn’t shut the door on Li Na in the Australian Open semifinals and remembers how Vera Zvonareva swarmed her in the 2010 U.S. Open semis.

But credit the 20-year-old with this: Even though she admittedly was sorely disappointed after letting go of a match point against Li, she went out in her next two tournaments and played like gangbusters most of the way. Wozniacki won in Dubai without dropping a set and scored two huge wins over veterans Jelena Jankovic and Svetlana Kuznetsova. Then, the next week, she reached the Doha final, dropping only nine games before she went down to Zvonareva 6-4, 6-4.

She’s been pretty resilient for a young player, much more so than Jankovic or Dinara Safina were when they failed to win majors during their stints at No. 1.

“I want to achieve both [winning a Slam and being No. 1], but if you ask people outside tennis if they want to be No. 1 in their sport they would say yes,” Wozniacki said. “If you ask a soccer player if they to win the Champions League, they would say yes. It’s nice to have No. 1 in front of your name, but I just try to just go into every tournament and want to win it, even though it’s not possible at every tournament.”

Wozniacki has been rightly criticized for not being aggressive enough at key moments in the Slams. (Case in point: how she pushed the ball around on her match point against Li at the Australian Open instead of taking a risk and ripping it.) But she’s not praised enough for being a standout defensive player with extremely sturdy legs.

Spaniard Arantxa Sanchez Vicario won four Grand Slams primarily as a defensive player, and Martina Hingis won five essentially by counterpunching. Wozniacki is taller and stronger than both of them, so if she can fix the technical glitches in her game that hold back the power on her forehand and serve, she might, in a few years, end up like Clijsters was when she first began winning Slams: more willing to power forehands when called upon, pop big serves into the corners and continue to move forward even when she wasn’t completely comfortable.

The Clijsters who first became No. 1 in 2003 was nowhere near the offensive force that she is today.

So there’s a lot of hope for Wozniacki fans.

“Maybe people who criticize my game and say I have no weapons — I don’t think says anything about me because I think the other girls should be offended,” Wozniacki said. “Because if I don’t have anything, why aren’t the other girls No. 1. A smart man once said, ‘You don’t have to play like No. 1 all the time, you just have to play better than your opponent.’ ”

Wozniacki is defending a run to last year’s Indian Wells final, so it won’t take too much for Clijsters to pass her in the rankings. All the Belgian has to do is reach at least the fourth round and then go one round further than the Dane.

Clijsters was in a great mood in the desert on Wednesday, happily chatting about any subject thrown her way. Her two major remaining goals are to win the French Open and Wimbledon. So, for the next few months, the pressure is clearly off and she is free to fiddle around with her game and bag some more impressive titles such as Indian Wells.

Back before she won the 2005 U.S. Open, the book on Clijsters was that she was simply too nice to win a major because she lacked a killer instinct on court. The same theory now is being tested on Wozniacki, who like Clijsters, appears to be every other player’s best friend on tour — including the ill, 13-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams, whom Wozniacki visited last week at her home in Los Angeles.

Clijsters’ advice to Wozniacki is the same advice she gave herself back when she turned the corner as an elite player: Put your blinders on, be yourself and let the sport come to you, rather than trying to meet other people’s expectations as to what type of player you should be.

“I’d tell her not to listen,” Clijsters said. “I got that same thing about being No. 1 without winning a Grand Slam. I know I’m working as hard now as I did then, but now I obviously know a lot more because I know things better about myself and that helps in bigger tournaments. That’s something that will come in time for her — and she does work hard, and hard work eventually pays off.”