It was a high-gloss, low-flavor crowd that schlepped out to godforsaken Corona, Queens, last night for one hour of entertainment. When I walked in late in the first set, Svetlana Kuznetsova had already cracked—she looked out of shape and strangely exhausted from the start. There was a silent, stiff, good-posture, yacht-club-dining-room atmosphere in the lower sections of Ashe Stadium as Kuznetsova continued to hack routine shots five feet long. We needed Rodney Dangerfield to stumble in and bellow, “Hey, who died in this joint?”
This does not diminish Justine Henin’s achievement, however—don’t blame her for putting a sleeper hold on Kuzzie. Rather than push the limits of her game the way she usually does, she played it smart and small last night. All she had to do was keep the ball in play and make Kuznetsova move a little, and the errors were going to come. But Henin being Henin, she couldn’t help punctuating the routine with moments of brilliance. There was a classic, perfect-form overhead late in the second set that somehow looked surprising coming in a WTA match. As Ray Stonada next to me said, “It’s nice to see someone not take a swinging volley.” OK, we were a little starved for entertainment out there.
Henin provided some more in a seven-deuce game at the start of the second set, in which she finally broke Kuznetsova and effectively ended the match. She showed off her whole arsenal here, which pretty much includes everything you can do on a tennis court. After floating most of her returns back, she suddenly knocked a forehand right past a startled Kuznetsova; seemingly out of a point, she scampered side to side to make an extra get that caused Kuznetsova to finally dump a volley in the net; and she cut a forehand volley with so much extra backspin it almost hopped back onto her side of the net. This was a showy shot, and not one you’d normally see in major final. But it came naturally to Henin.
The Belgian dervish now has seven majors for her career, and her two Slams in 2007 have locked up player of the year honors on the women’s side. She sounded a new note of self-confidence in her presser afterward, mentioning how she had finally returned to her form of four years ago, when she also won two Slams and seemed poised to match Roger Federer’s dominance on the men’s side. At this tournament, I began to hear those Federer comparisons again. My fellow tennis writer Allen St. John said “throw Federer in the dryer and you’ve got Henin.”
Has she banished memories of her questionable retirements in last year’s Australian Open and Fed Cup? Probably not yet—her blatant communication with her coach, Carlos Rodriguez, at Wimbledon has kept her critics happy in 2007. And she’ll never be a marquee name on TV, expecially since she's had that name botched during the Open's awards ceremony twice: A few years ago she was called “Christine”; this time Dick Enberg referred to her as Justine Henin-Hardenne.
Not that it matters. Henin has done something better for the women’s game. She’s given people who love tennis a reason to watch it. At her peak a few years ago, it was said that she was the only woman that the men regularly watched in the locker room. There you have it: At a time when her rivals are half-players, half-stars, Henin remains a player’s player. This tournament, in which she beat both Williams sisters and took the trophy from last year’s winner, Maria Sharapova, is her reward.