Notes on a draw sheet

It's on: Jen v. Vera for LA spot
Serena’s headache doesn’t stop her from attending London movie premier

By Matthew Cronin, TennisReporters.net

Ron Cioffi/TR.net

Jennifer needs to reach the Philly final for a shot at LA.

Jennifer Capriati says she doesn’t just want to give away the final spot in the WTA Championships. Apparently, neither does Vera Zvonareva. On Thursday, Zvonareva overcame Nathalie Dechy 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 and now will meet Capriati in the Philly quarters. The loser will be knocked out of the Championships.

"It's very close," said Capriati, "I don't want to just give it away so I am working my hardest." Of course, Capriati wouldn’t be in this spot if she had played another event after the US Open.

Venus Williams is one win away from meeting top seed Amelie Mauresmo in the quarters, who defeated Iveta Benesova 6-2, 6-2. It's Venus' biggest match since the US Open.

Other notable wins: Nadia Petrova over Amy Frazier 6-4, 6-3; Alicia Molik winning her 10th straight match by beating Marlene Weingartner, 6-2, 6-4; Maria Sharapova over Jelena Kostanic, who retired in the third set with a right adductor strain.

"I wasn't playing my game in the beginning," Sharapova said. "She's a grinder, that's her strength. So I started changing things, started coming to the net more. She played really well so I had to pick up my game."

A few members of the Williams camp have written to say that we’ve been too harsh on Serena for skipping Philly and putting her appearance at the Championships at risk. As we’ve written many times, when she’s on court, Serena one of the greatest warriors her sport has ever seen, which is why she was able to fight off match points against Svetlana Kuznetsova in the Beijing final. It’s getting Serena on court that’s a problem.

Yes, she had a bad knee injury and yes, she only returned in March from her surgery. Yes, her knee has bothered her on and off all year. Yes, we can accept that she had a migraine headache in Linz and that migraine’s are often disabling. But no, we can’t accept that she wasn’t healthy enough to attempt to play Philly – especially when we saw pictures of her Tuesday attending the London premiere of "After The Sunset" a movie directed by her boyfriend, Brett Ratner, starring Pierce Brosnan, Selma Hayek and Woody Harrelson. Go check out the pictures of Serena with Brosnan: she basically forgot to wear a top.

We know her well enough to say that she’s always been a risk taker and as much as she cares about her results when she’s playing, she can also turn off her concern when some other non-tennis activity appeals to her more. Serena would be the first one to admit that. She’ll also say that she underestimated how hard it would be to come back and dominate. She’s not dominating anymore and the only way she’ll be able to come back and regain her edge is to play a lot more. Recall that when she began her tremendous run in ’02, she played a lot, beginning in Scottsdale in February and continuing through the US Open. In order for her to get back to her top level and then have the opportunity to cut back her schedule again, she’ll have to play more in the coming year. It’s not like the younger Russians will get any worse and roll over in 2005.

Most importantly, even with Sharapova’s rapid rise to celebrity, LA native Serena is still one of the WTA’s most popular and appealing figures. She puts butts in the seats, especially in her home city. Does she owe it to the sport that brought her fame and fortune to make a huge effort to qualify for the Championships? She sure does.

We asked Svetlana Kuznetsova to comment on Serena’s Philly withdrawal. Here’s the Q and A:
Q: Serena has not qualified for the Championship but she decided not to play Philadelphia this week. If you were in that position where you needed some points to guarantee getting into L.A., would you have played Philadelphia or would you take the risk of not qualifying?
A: Depends on my goals for the year. It depends where I am. Because if I would have been (in the US), I would probably go (to Philadelphia) because it’s not quite that far to go. I think I would do it. But it depends on my plans, because if I have been playing well, I would say why not, I’m going to go.
Q: How important do you think the Championships is to the players, qualifying and being there?
A: It just makes you feel like you had good year, that you had a good game the whole year. So that’s important to me. And it means you can have the chance to compete only against the best players of this year.

Ron Cioffi/ TR.net

Tim Henman lost his last five service games in his loss to Mikhail Youzhny.

Roddick, Henman Lose
So much for the big mo’ going into Houston.
Top-seeded Andy Roddick and defending champ Tim Henman both fell in the third round of TMS Paris Masters on Thursday. Max Mirnyi tripped Roddick up 7-6 (2), 6-2, while Henman was taken down 7-5, 6-1 by unseeded Mikhail Youzhny.

As in the case in many of his matches, Roddick blew up at an umpire. In the second set, he teed off on umpire Lars Graff. "Do you play golf?," he asked Graff, who responded, no.

Roddick replied,"Good, because if you did, you should use your mulligan on that call." Boy does Roddick need a terrific Houston is he is going to strike pre-match fears into the heart of the Spaniards prior to the Davis Cup final.

Henman lost his last five service games and said he lacked energy. "I wasn't sharp and my movement was sluggish," the third-seeded Henman said. "I couldn't dictate the rallies as I would have liked." … Lleyton Hewitt reached the quarters when Nicolas Massu quit with a thigh; Guillermo Cañas took out Tommy Haas 7-6 (4), 6-2, and Feliciano Lopez downed Andrei Pavel 5-7, 6-4, 6-4. If I'm Jordi Arrese, I'm seriously thinking of giving F-Lo Tommy Robredo's Davis Cup spot.

BTW: We’ve written that Andre Agassi might have pulled out Paris because he thinks that one of the injured threesome of Roger Federer, Guillermo Coria and Carlos Moya might pull out of TMC Houston and he’ll make it in as a first alternate. But now we hear there’s a good chance they will all play. The news is sure to make Houston promoter Mattress Mac crash through his box spring.

On a final note, when I wrote yesterday about the Kim Clijsters-Lleyton Hewitt breakup, in no way did I mean to infer that the ATP's Graeme Agars has a negative relationship with Hewitt. One of the tour’s most accessible, open and knowledgeable staffers, Agars has no public comments on John Alexander's thoughts on the Clijsters-Hewitt break-up.

Art Seitz

Lleyton Hewitt and Kim Clijsters have fuel ed questions about their break-up.

LACK OF COMMENT STIRS QUESTONS
However, I do have a couple of comments on Hewitt’s "no comments" on the split and Clijsters’ anger about the media attention on the break-up. Please realize that the reason why you are millionaires for life is because you a public figures that fans want to read about. Everyone understands that you want to maintain some measure of privacy (no one’s asking for deep, dark and intimate secrets), but offering up a few quotes as to how deep your pain runs, or how unexpected the split was is no great invasion of your personal space.

If you want to play sports in public vacuum, take up lawn bowling, which doesn’t have a large fan base asking to know a few details about your love lives. But you might have to take on a part-time job to supplement your income loss. Stop pretending you are not celebrities and never understood that being a pro tennis player would make you a public figure. If you can’t stand the heat that your job requires, quit the tours and go away quietly into the sunset.

Of course, if you want to lay some blame on Hewitt’s and Clijsters’ immature reactions, lay part of it on their handlers and their parents, who should have told them to throw the media a few bones and the story would be over by now. They both could have written a few paragraphs explaining what happened and the news cycle would have died within two weeks. Instead, they are faced the reality of having reporters running around, trying to get the real story from families and friends. That will go on until the press at large is satisfied that the real story has been told. That is the media’s job, like it or not. If Clijsters and especially Hewitt would have given a little more, they would have gotten a lot more back.