For Gajdosova, a Slow Australian Embrace PERTH, Australia - Just like on the Australian flag, Australian tennis still has one star who considerably dwarfs the rest. Save for Samantha Stosur in the months since her Grand Slam breakthrough at the United States Open in September, there has not been another Australian player in the past decade who could fill a stadium in Australia the way Lleyton Hewitt, the former No. 1 and two-time Grand Slam champion, does. Even with his current ATP ranking of No. 186, Hewitt still draws and thrills a crowd, and his actress-singer wife, Bec, often attracts more camera lenses from the stands than his opponents. But even within that context, his Hyundai Hopman Cup teammate, Jarmila Gajdosova, barely twinkles next to him. "It's not easy to play mixed with Lleyton," said the 33rd-ranked Gajdosova said after being congratulated on holding her own during a postmatch on-court interview. "I'm about this big when I play next to him," she laughed, holding her thumb and index finger less than an inch apart. He just does everything there is. I try my best but he's still the superstar here. After representing her native Slovakia for the first three years of her professional career, Gajdosova switched to playing for Australia in 2008. She married the Australian tennis player Sam Groth in February 2009, and became an Australian citizen in November of that year. Gajdosova, who returned to using her maiden name after separating from Groth in early 2011, is one of five of the six Australians in the top 130 of the ATP or WTA rankings who was born in a foreign country. Only Stosur, the highest ranked of the six, was born in Australia. Though Gajdosova is the only Australian besides Stosur in the top 50 of the ATP or WTA rankings - she has made it to the second week of a Grand Slam twice and won two WTA tour titles since switching over to Australia - she was greeted as little more than another anonymous tennis-playing "-ova" as she first stepped onto the court for Australia at the Burswood Dome in Perth, her first match representing Australia in the unique mixed doubles-centric I.T.F. event. Unlike Hewitt, who was showered with "C'mon, Lleyton" and "Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi!" repeatedly during his singles match, the home crowd stayed vocally unengaged throughout most of Gajdosova's match, partisan but not passionate, perhaps flummoxed by the pronunciation of her name as much as anything else. It is abbreviated to the far simpler "Jarka" by her friends. But once she went down a break in the third set of her match against Spain's Anabel Medina Garrigues, the New Year's Day crowd began to pull for her more purposefully, by nationality if not by name, shouting, "C'mon, Aussie!" With the crowd then firmly behind her, Gajdosova rallied, winning six of the final eight games and the match. The nervousness inherent in the occasion hardly seemed to fade even after the win was in the books. "I'm still shaking," she laughed, holding up her trembling hand for the camera. The standing ovation from the Australian crowd to which she walked off had to feel especially validating for Gajdosova after the cyberharassment she was on the brunt end of on Twitter after a disappointing second-round loss at the United States Open, with Australian fans disgruntled at her performance calling her a "refugee" and claiming that her perceived lack of mettle did not reflect the values of Australia. The bullying led Gajdosova to emotionally announce that she was leaving her active Twitter account, a pledge that held for almost a week before she returned to her previous frequency of fan interactions, obliging retweet requests and posting photos of herself. "You know, I'm still just a girl and I try to do my best," Gajdosova said, reflecting on the criticism in an interview before her first match in Perth. Every tennis player is in kind of a spotlight, and we get talked about a lot. I tried to kind of stop thinking about it, and stop reading about it, but it does hurt, eventually. It was a hard year, and tennis was all I had to work with. And I can say there were times I wished I didn't have to go on the court in front of people so I don't have to be talked about again, and criticized, and being told what I did wrong or what I didn't do. "Some people literally told me that they thought I wasn't pretty," Gajdosova added. But it's a New Year coming. I'm looking forward to the new start.