She has grown up in the States, living there since she was 7. She’s all over our television sets, selling us stuff. She lives in Manhattan Beach, Calif. And goodness knows, we could use a third decent player to back up the Williams sisters.

But Sharapova won’t do it. Unlike tennis immigrants of the past – Monica Seles, Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova come to mind – Sharapova holds tight to her foreign-ness and insists that her Russian soul will never belong to us.

“I just have always had the Russian feeling inside of me,” she said. “There was a point in my career where I got a lot of questions living in the United States for such a long time, leaving when I was young from my country, why I never chose to change citizenships.

“One of the reasons is because deep down inside of me, I know where I’m born. I’m really proud of it, of my Siberian roots, moving to Sochi. Apart from my parents, all my family lives there. It’s all about Russian culture. We speak Russian. We talk Russian.”

Sharapova will play the villain Friday, when she must face local favorite Laura Robson, the great British hope, in a second-round match that was postponed Thursday because of rain delays. When she steps on court, finally, it will be as a Russian-born Californian facing an Australian-born Englishwoman. The difference is that Sharapova remains true to her birthplace.

There may be monetary incentives attached to this loyalty, such as tax laws, but that would be a cynical take. There is no denying Sharapova’s early personal history. Born in Siberia, she played tennis with her father Yuri in the local park after the family relocated to Sochi from Belarus to flee the Chernobyl disaster.

When Sharapova was young, Russian girls didn’t play much tennis. Her classmates were more about Olympic sports such as gymnastics and rhythmic gymnastics. Sharapova kept at her own sports obsession. She was discovered and coached in Moscow, before Yuri left without his wife, bringing Maria to America and to the Bollettieri Academy with just $700 in his pocket.

“She could speak English only fair,” Bollettieri recalled. “But she picked up everything. She was very quick like that.”

Yuri Sharapov, her father, can be a harsh man, and he has been at times publicly tyrannical. Even as Maria was on her way to the U.S. Open title in 2006, Yuri was famously ordering his daughter from the player’s box to eat a banana between games.

Still, his personal sacrifice is not lost on Maria. Sharapova seems to understand how her own fortunes impacted and directly tore apart her own family, geographically.

“(My parents) could have had a normal job and I could have gone to school and they would have supplied my school and everything around that,” she said. “But they sacrificed their lives because they saw a talent in my game and they got recommendations from outer people. They made that big decision to go to a country where tennis was a lot bigger, more facilities.

“It’s tough,” she said. “But I think his drive came from the fact that he never really thought that he didn’t have much. Even though it was really tough, I think he kept believing that one day he would have more, even if it was one trophy, even if it was one more dollar, one victory over another.”

“I talk to my grandparents constantly,” she said. “I call them. I speak to my parents in Russian, eat Russian food, all of that. I leave my house, and most of my friends – some foreign, some are American. I speak to my coaches in English. It’s different.

“There is something natural about it, and it’s within me,” Sharapova said. “I don’t think it’s something that you can really explain, that you can put into someone. I think it’s more of a feeling than anything else.”

She won’t embrace us, even as we buy her cameras and tennis equipment. We’d take our business elsewhere, but there aren’t that many options.