[[I have good news for you this morning; Bobby Chintapalli will be filing daily reports for TW from Charleston for the rest of the week and weekend. I'll be focused on Davis Cup - and Easter with my family.I suggest you use Bobby's daily posts for match-calling and general socializing. Enjoy - PB]]
by Bobby Chintapalli*
CHARLESTON – It was the first point of a second-round match, a high-value one between two former No. 1s and two former champions here at the Family Circle Cup. Venus Williams stood at the baseline and prepared to serve, and Jelena Jankovic waited, not far behind the baseline herself.
It was dead silent, and then someone sneezed.
Perhaps no one else in the intimate Charleston stadium last night thought much of it, but the start was what folks in the part of India my family is from would call “inauspicious.”
It’s a superstition around those parts – you don’t start something important right after someone sneezes. If you hear an “achhooo” as you’re about to embark on a big trip, you might sit down, read the paper and have a quick snack before returning to the matter at hand. But Venus didn’t know all that. And she couldn’t have sat down, read the paper, and consumed a snack had she wanted to.
So she started badly. On the first point Venus made an error, hitting a ball way wide. On the second Jankovic hit a service return winner, off a 114 mph serve. On the third Jankvoic hit another winner but mostly because Venus didn’t even try. My notes don’t say what happened on the fourth point, but Venus lost it and she lost the game at love.
That start wouldn’t have surprised my relatives, and it didn’t surprise either player too much, based on what they said in their press conferences after Venus rebounded to win, 7-5, 6-0.
“It (the slow start) didn’t (surprise me) because I think last time we played with each other I won 6-0, 6-1 in Rome in the quarterfinals” said Jankovic, who came to the interview straight from the stadium and with a towel draped around her shoulders. “So maybe also that stays in your mind and stays in your head. And. . .you want to see how things go, and maybe that’s what played a part, but I cannot talk on her behalf. You have to ask her that.”
I also broached the subject with Venus 45 minutes later, when she arrived to do press wearing black-blue sweats and a black tank top, looking, as one besotted fan remarked, "long and lean." She said her troubles at the start of the match had to do with her desire to conserve her resources. “Going into every match I always think how much energy can I save, and then when I start losing, then I say, okay, I have to spend... But it’s very hard to change that mentality because there’s nothing worse than nothing left and it’s a terrible feeling. So I’m still trying to figure out ways to psych myself out not to think that way, but I haven’t found it yet.”
In tennis, though, it’s not how you start that counts - it's how you finish. You’ve heard it before. And you’ve seen Daniela Hantuchova up 6-0, 2-0 in a Grand Slam semifinal only to see her opponent Ana Ivanovic go on to play the final.
Yesterday it was Jankovic’s turn to show you can get a good start and muck it up. You could see it from one game to the next after that quick start. Even from one serve to the next. Down set point at 5-6 in the first set, she served a ball that was called out but was overruled by chair umpire Kader Nouni. She then served another first serve, which was out. On her second serve (her third in all) she served a ball that was called good but was again overruled by the chair umpire. This time Nouni said, in his baritone voice, “fault.” Jankovic lost the first set on a double fault.
She didn’t win another game.
It was partly that her level dropped, especially on her serve. (She served five double faults in all.) It was mostly that Venus’s groundstrokes got bigger, her net approaches more frequent and often likely to end with drive-volley winners as fans screamed, "kill it!," and her serves more effective (she served all three of her aces in the second set, and her serves started reaching 120 mph).
Venus said later she wished she “could play like that every set.”
Asked about her backhand winner on match point she said, “I thought it was going out. It felt like it wasn’t going to land, but the luck was on my side.”
My relatives might disagree about the luck part – someone sneezed at the start! They might say, as many of her fans might in this stage of her career and after all she’s been through, that Venus Williams made her own luck.