There’s something special, some extra tension in the air, when you know that a match is the only one being played at that moment. Like Monday Night Football, it’s part of what accounts for the excitement surrounding the night matches at Flushing Meadows and Melbourne Park every year. It’s also what makes the U.S. Open’s annual second-Friday women’s semifinals such serious affairs. These are always played in the afternoon, with no men’s singles scheduled anywhere all day. While the night session is famous for its raucous, boozy atmosphere, the women’s semis inspire an attentive hush, even in a packed house. Unlike many early-round matches, every point of the semis feels significant. The world is watching now.
It must be a bit of a shock to play in this atmosphere for the first time, the way Jelena Jankovic did yesterday. But as you might have expected if you’d ever watched her before, she came out looking oblivious to the moment. She won the first set by hitting her patented crouch backhand to all parts of the court; she’s got one of the few inside-out backhands anywhere. She was also hitting her forehand with more penetration and less loop than usual. As always, Jankovic threw her body into her shots with abandon. My favorite is the backhand she hits from the ground. It could be the next innovation in technique: the sitting backhand.
What was her opponent, Justine Henin-Hardenne, up to? The usual, with her: looking vaguely injured—her back AND her shoulder this time—and breathing heavily for no apparent reason. These were Henin-Hardenne’s famous late-Slam nerves kicking in, I suppose, a strange reaction for someone who owns five major titles and has played in every Slam final this year. She labored through the first set and a half, playing from her heels and hitting with much less depth than her opponent.
The moment finally caught up to Jankovic late in the second set. With a game point for 5-2, she argued a line call with the chair umpire rather than challenge it. She seemed to get distracted, lost her serve, and didn’t win another game all afternoon, going down 6-0 in the third set. Was this the dark side of the challenge system, where an umpire won’t overrule and a player gets distracted by the options involved? On one level, obviously, yes, but I would say that Jankovic got into that argument in the first place because she didn’t know how to handle the idea of being one game away from the final of the U.S. Open. She had already blown a sitter volley at 40-0 in that game, and she’d been broken earlier in the set while leading 3-1. My question is: If the umpire says to her, “I’m not a machine” to excuse himself from making a call on a serve, why did the Open get rid of Cyclops this year in the first place? The players trusted it to make calls in the past. It may help them trust a call like this one—and not get bent out of shape about challenging—in the future.
In 2006, we’ve seen two up-and-coming women, Jankovic here and Nicole Vaidisova at the French Open, come unglued just when they appeared to be heading to a Grand Slam final. Neither could put their missed opportunities out of their minds. Tennis is tough—you can be far ahead, but if you don’t finish a match when you should, it feels as if you've lost it. How many times, when you should be concentrating on the next point, have you found yourself thinking back three games: "If only I had a chance at that forehand again. How could I miss that!!!???" I believe Vaidisova will be back to the big stage, and I’d like to think Jankovic will be as well, because she’s a character (and you have to love that crouching backhand). But the 10 losses in a row she suffered early this year, while they made a great story at the Open, don’t say a lot for her long term stability and toughness.
Didn’t Amelie Mauremso look just a little too relaxed when she went out there yesterday? In the back of her mind, she must be pretty satisfied with her year already, and it showed in her less-than-gritty performance against Maria Sharapova. I was struck early by how little she was doing. Not only was she content to rally, she wasn’t even trying to get control of those rallies. Sharapova, meanwhile, measured her shots more skillfully than usual. She played with controlled aggression, served well, didn’t aim for the lines, and yet she wasn’t passive. It’s the kind of play that will win you 24-minute 6-0 sets, even against the world No. 1. After the shaky, breaky Jankovic-Henin-Hardenne match, it was nice to see Sharapova lay down the law and hold serve all the way to 4-5 in the second.
That’s when Mauresmo decided to use her head. She’d been trying to fire herself up all set, and she’d made her first inroads in the match by coming to the net, the one place where she’s obviously superior to Sharapova. At 4-5, Mauresmo added a very deliberate, floating backhand slice that she aimed at Sharapova’s forehand. The Russian had trouble getting under the ball, netted a few, and was suddenly broken for the first time all day.
Mauresmo then decided to go back into her shell. She played just as she did in the first set, rallying passively. Sharapova, to her credit, asserted herself at the baseline again; this time she went for more than she had been in the first set, and she got it, to the tune of another 6-0 set. The perennial Slam semifinalist—Sharapova had lost five in a row—showed that she can play with consistency. More important, she showed that she can keep her emotions in check. Remember her display of facial expressions during her loss to Mauresmo in the Wimbledon semis? She showed way too much, and it hurt her concentration. There was little of that from Sharapova at Flushing yesterday. You could see that she had a handle on the big-match atmosphere from the start. Maybe she’s learning. Next thing you know, she’ll start eating bananas on her own.
Who’s going to win tonight? I’m going to go with the upset and say Sharapova, even though she’s lost the last four times they’ve played, three of them in straight sets. While Henin-Hardenne is quicker and has more flexibility to her game, her continued nerves are a problem. Sharapova shouldn't be awed by her first Open final; she's always on stage anyway. Still, she’ll have to play every bit as well as she did in the first set against Mauresmo. But Sharapova has motivation. As she has said, the more major titles she wins, the more endorsement dollars she can collect.