A Little Bit of Roll, A Lot of Rock

!Picby Pete Bodo

If you were present when Svetlana Kuznetsova won the French Open in 2009, on a sunshot day when the jam-packed Court Philippe Chatrier resembled a bowl of multi-colored gumdrops, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was someone else out there, facing off this morning against this year's third seed, Agnieszka Radwanska.

For one thing, the atmosphere seemed almost somber, under overcast skies. For another, the stadium was almost as empty as it usually is for the first of the men's semifinals (ask Roger Federer about that sometime)—but this time you couldn't even blame the corporate-entertainment crowd. That crew doesn't show up for a first-week match. Lastly, Kuznetsova looked as if she were impersonating someone, lest she be mistaken for. . . Svetlana Kuznetsova.

The big thing was the hair, done up with (I think) tightly wound braids pinned to her skull, so it looked like her temples were shaved while someone had artfully decorated the top of her head with a pastry bag. The effect was part Star Wars, part French provincial farm girl. The overall effect was Cosmic Milkmaid, which would not be out of character for our free-spirited Sveta.

Maybe that's a good thing, because it kept you from thinking how far the fortunes of the talented, two-time Grand Slam champ and former No. 2, now ranked 28th, have fallen. Kuznetsova has very good reasons to appear to be someone else. Lately, she has been practically anyone's "good win", losing to, among others, Jie Zheng, Iveta Benesova, and Lucie Safarova; not a major champ among them.

Radwanska, meanwhile, had been to the quarterfinals or better in 10 of her 11 tournaments this year. She beat Maria Sharapova in the Miami final and accumulated a 36-7 record going into Roland Garros—a whopping five of those losses inflicted by world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka. The other losses? One was a walkover (Radwanska pulled out of Kuala Lumpur after winning one match), the other a three-set failure against Petra Cetkovska.

But there was this: Since Radwanska won their first meeting (in the round-robin portion of the 2008 WTA Championships), Kuznetsova had beaten her five consecutive times before today—and was 9-3 against her overall—including a win that earned Sveta her last title, way back in 2010 (San Diego). If there's a lesson to take out of this match today, it was that you can't ever discount personal history. Kuznetsova may not have looked much like the woman who won it all in Paris in 2009, but for the better part of the day she played like that woman. The result was a stunning 6-1, 6-2 blowout of one of the most consistent players on the WTA.

The incredible thing about this match was how completely Kuznetsova looked like her better self; she's been in an extended slump, but it appears that all she really needed to pull out of it, at least temporarily, was a little bit of Aggie.

Kuznetsova is a pleasure to watch when she's playing well, partly because she so beautifully shatters our stereotype of body types suited for high-level sports. I'm not hiding under her bed at the hotel, so I don't really know if she's in great shape, but even when she has been fit, Kuznetsova has not looked it. But that shapeless build and conspicously low center of gravity are great assets. She seems to roll rather than run, and I mean that in a good way. And her strokes can be explosive.

But then I also get a great kick out of Radwanska, and find myself wondering, Can this girl look any slower and more lazy?—knowing full well that she is neither. In reality, this was a match between striking eccentrics, which may help explain the big surprise.

Kuznetsova rolled to a 6-1, 2-0 lead in no time, hitting 16 winners. When she's on her game, her ability to pull the trigger on the down-the-line placement—off either wing—to end a cross-court exchange is unparalleled. More important, she made just seven unforced errors in that first set, the same number as Radwanska, who specializes in avoiding them.

But then, there was all that bad karma Kuznetsova has accumulated during these mostly fallow months. She grew a little careless, and Radwanska built a 15-40 lead while returning the third game of the second set. Radwanska made an error on the first break point, and Kuznetsova dismissed the second with a down-the-line forehand winner. Kuznetsova followed with a successful smash and a service winner to go up 3-0.

Radwanska held for 1-3, and Kuznetsova grew even slopper in her next service game. She fell into a good-point/bad-point rythm, and her form eroded before our very eyes. She lost the game when she mashed a forehand into the net, clearly choking. Suddenly, we were back on serve, and it looked as if we might have a match instead of a demonstration.

But Kuznetsova held fast. She forced deuce in the next game, then prevailed in a pair of rallies, each one ending with an uncharacteristic backhand error into the net by Radwanska. With that 4-2 lead, Kuznetsova reeled off the next seven points and ended things with a showy drive volley on her first match point. By then, the sun was peeking through, fans were drifting into Chatrier, and you could almost believe that it was 2009 again.

Ordinarily, that might end my report. But in one of those wonderful and typical Grand Slam concurrences, two big men were engaged in a Bullring court duel that was the polar opposite in tone. For there's nothing eccentric about the way either Tomas Berdych or Kevin Anderson plays, looks, or pursues his goals. They are big men; Berdych is 6'5", and Anderson taller yet—by three full inches. Both of them rock opponents with atomic serves and take ferocious cuts, uinterested in extending any point longer than necessary.

Each man is having a good year. The steadily improving 26-year-old South African Anderson has climbed to No. 34, and Berdych, 17-4 on the year, is in the midst of one of his best clay-court seasons yet. Something had to give, and for a long time, as ESPN commentators Patrick McEnroe and Brad Gilbert were repeatedly falling back on the words "huge" and "incredible" and "unbelievable," it looked that it would be something other than these two guys. I assume that the the press box heroes were quaking, the memory of 6'9" John Isner's epic of yesterday still fresh in their tired minds.

The men split sets, and the third went to a tiebreaker. You had to give Bedych the edge, based on his deeper well of big-match experience, but Anderson was inspired. Anderson made a good return to force an error that put him up 3-1, and he won Berdych's next service point as well with—get this—a deft drop shot. Anderson lost just one point on serve and closed out the breaker, 7-4, when Berdych attacked but flubbed an easy smash near the net. It was one of the very few ugly points in the match.

Credit Berdych for keeping his cool in the next set; Anderson surely would have capitalized on any letdown by the No. 7 seed. And while Berdych didn't win more than a lone point in Anderson's first four service games, he won the coveted four in his fifth to get the critical break to 5-4. Berdych survived a break point in the next game to take the set, 6-4.

The conflict was so fierce that both men summoned the trainer for a quick rubdown on their rubbery legs following the third game of the fifth set. The interlude made no appreciable difference; both men held to 3-all. By that time, Anderson had rained down 21 aces, but in the end he might have traded half of them in if he could take back the double fault (just his third of the match) that he hit at break point. With that 4-2 lead, Berdych rolled downhill to a 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 6-4 win, both men blasting away to the bitter end.

Once again, we're left wondering, has Berdych's time finally come? And once again, we're toying with the idea that Kuznetsova's time has come, and gone, and come again.