Hong Kong's number one tennis player Zhang Ling targets big showing at her home event
The city's No 1 player knows she has to seize the moment as big guns come to town
Lynn Zhang Ling knows all about the gulf between the public's perception of a tennis professional's life and the actual day-to-day realities for most players on the circuit.
What we see and read about mostly are the days and nights of glory and the feasts of riches for those at the top end of the game. What hardly rates a mention is the events that provide the pure bread and butter of a living for the likes of 25-year-old Zhang and others ranked in the game's farthest reaches.
There are smaller tournaments in Hong Kong that the girls can play, but this takes things to a different level
Hong Kong's number one is also the world's number 347 and the grind of qualifiers are simply a fact of life that adds a few extra days of matches before an event begins, should they even make it into the main draw.
Lucky breaks are most often few and far between and that's why the arrival of the US$250,000 Prudential Hong Kong Tennis Open last year had Zhang buzzing - and it still does 12 months later as we move closer to the October 10 to 18 staging of the event's second edition.
"Every opportunity is a great opportunity," says Zhang, who has been granted a wild card into the main draw of the event that boasts former grand slam winners Venus Williams, Victoria Azarenka and Samantha Stosur, along with defending champion Sabine Lisicki, Garbine Muguruza, Eugenie Bouchard, Caroline Garcia and Alize Cornet.
