Now, back to the tennis. Serena Williams dodged a bullet last night, thereby pulled the rug out from under what might have been an extraordinary if fundamentally strange story - the utter (and, one hopes, temporary) collapse of the WTA pecking order. Think about this: when was the last time that both the no. 1 and no. 2 women's seeds in a Grand Slam event failed to make the quarterfinals? Thankfully, we don't have that story to write, because Victoria Azarenka was unable to complete the upset she embarked upon. No disrespect toward Serena, but she and Jelena Jankovic, the ousted no. 1 seed, have played singularly uninspired tennis in the year's first Grand Slam.
If Serena finds her game and goes on to win the tournament - and who's crazy enough to discount the possibility? - in a few months time the events that have transpired so far in Melbourne will seem less noteworthy. But that's a big "if", and it hardly changes the on-the-ground truth, which is that the top women simply have not come to play in Melbourne. Last week, I suggested that the searing heat may have had an inhibiting influence on the women, psychologically as well as physically. That may be true, but it isn't like respites from the intense heat (in the form of better weather or more favorable match scheduling) have enabled the top women to overcome their reluctance to fling themselves into the fray. This is a tournament that, despite the charming and even moving narratives churned out by Jelena Dokic, Mario Bartoli and Carla Suarez Navarro, has gone terribly wrong.
Hey, if the top players are going to step back instead of up, somebody's going to write the script. And, as I wrote the other day, the two most likely somebodies to benefit from this will be Dinara Safina and Elena Dementieva. In a weird way, that would be a face-saving tribute to the women's game, because only a nincompoop would suggest that either of those women is somehow undeserving of a major title, or a place in the Australian Open final - even with all their rivals running on all cylinders. It's just that nobody could have predicted that they would arrive there (if indeed that's their destination) via wins over, oh, Dokic and Suarez Navarro. Where have the usual suspects gone?
At another level, this analysis is impertinent - I'll be the first to admit that. After all, why should the Australian Open be considered less of a tournament because the usual suspects failed to fulfill the predictions of the pundits, or live up to their seedings and rankings? Isn't it a more exciting tournament when the form chart collapses? Yes and no. Sure, it's exciting to see new faces, or even familiar faces, break through to territories they've seldom visited. But tennis is a hierarchy-based sport that relies heavily on context, which is the established order represented by the seedings and rankings. Once they lose significance, or are shown to be mere formalities, our regard for the results tends to diminish and we wonder: Good for so-and-so, but what does it all mean?
Let's say Suarez Navarro beats Vera Zvonareva in the final. It would truly be a shocker - in fact, it would probably generate far more headlines and hype than a win by Dementieva over Safina. But it's safe to say that neither Suarez Navarro (nor Zvonareva, in the event she wins the tournament) is going to be hailed as the second coming of Justine Henin, and equally unlikely that either of them (although Zvonareva has a much better chance in this regard) is going to be a major, consistent force in the women's game. In other words, if the WTA heirarcy continues to collapse, you're going to end up with what you had on the ATP side in 2002. Go ahead, name the 2002 champ.
