Well, The Little Backhand That Quit once again became The Little Backhand That Could, on the pumpkin-colored Court Centrale at Roland Garros this afternoon. Her performance was impressive: on two occasions, she slammed the door on Svetlana Kuznetsova - just when the Russian second-time Grand Slam finalist appeared to be working her way back to parity in the match.
True to form, The Kooze started with a Snooze. For the first four or five games, she was a spectator, and while she didn’t have to pay for her ticket, it still isn’t a great way to go if you're one of the principals.
Kuznetsova eventually came out of the spell, and early enough to keep the match from becoming yet another misadvertisment for women's tennis. But one dimension of it did not change the rest of the way: her best weapon, the forehand, kept misfiring. Oh, she clocked the big winner with it now and then, but she also consistently pushed the ball into the net, or smacked it long, at exactly the moments when she most needed to score a direct hit. And she had the weirdest explanation of all for it in her presser, saying:
I was trying to play the way I wanted to play but I didn't expect that the ball would come so easy. Sometimes I was expecting rallies to be so much different, you know.
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I was all the time I had chance to play inside the court and I had so many chance to go forward and play my forehand that I was just overdoing it. I was not ready for, like, sitter, you know.
Yeah, I think I just lose my chances. I had plenty of them during the whole match. Yeah, it was the same picture as usual I have against Justine playing. It looked so much similar to other matches. But I just don't use the chances. If you don't use the chance, you don't win the matches.
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Well, I love the Kooze, and I don’t think she has an arrogant or pretentious bone in her body. But it’s always a little dodgy for a player to say - I couldn’t win because I expected her to have more game! It isn’t exactly like Henin-Hardenne was serving up puffballs, or doling out beach ball forehands.
The only real explanation, if you want to give the Kooze the benefit of the doubt, would be that she was jacked up for a more comprehensive, offensive assault, and for having to play more frequently off her heels. Therefore, she was thrown off stride by TLBTC’s willingness to lay back and trade groundies, interspersed with occasional forays to the forecourt.
And even if that is the case, isn’t it to Henin’s credit that she surprised her opponent in the tennis player’s equivalent of throwing off-speed pitches to someone expecting curve balls?
And Kooze: What was up with this riff, straight out of the Novak Djokovic Foot-in-Mouth playbook?
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No, I'm saying I didn't use the chances I had. I had so many of them. And she served well some important moments on the lines. But the rest, I was 2 Love, 30 Love, and I felt like I'm in control, same as I was in the end of the first set. Then you just miss two balls and then you lose your chance, you know.
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Okay. Kuznetsova fought her way back in and almostgot back on serve in Set 1; she did jump out to a second set lead, but if that's being in control, I don't want this girl driving my car!
Oddly enough, I just finished this last sentence when I was called to the WTA Office to participate in the small group round table with Henin. She provided some support for the Kooze’s claim that she was getting too many “easy” balls: “I was too far from the baseline. She had control of the rallies and I was feeling that she was playing very solid and more aggressive than I was, and hitting the ball harder than was.”
So this brings us back around to unforced errors. Kuznetsova made 38 of them, and was credited with just 8 forehand winners. I didn’t count forehand errors, but my memory says she made many and my gut says the number doesn’t matter: it was Kuznetsova’s Achilles heel in this match. In the eighth game of Set 2, with Henin serving to go up 5-3, my notes have Henin holding at love. The last three of those points were forehand errors by the Kuze. I didn’t jot a note on the first point. Does it matter.
Here’s the Kooze, again:
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...The forehand is the shot, the best shot I got. It's also the shot I got to build my game on, you know. I wanted to move her around but the balls was so a little bit different coming to me than I expected them to.
They were a little bit easier, but also bouncing a little bit higher. I was hitting it and I was not sometimes very well placed to hit that ball, and sometimes I was going for too much so I was just missing.
But I think I kept the right tactics. The thing is I just was missing too much.
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I asked Henin-Hardenne in her own presser about the two critical occasions on which she kept Kuznetsova from turning a solid match into a good match.
So in the end, Kuznetsova’s feeling that she didn’t take advantage of enough opportunities probably is the bottom line on why the match became enough traction.
So Henin won her third French Open, and became the first player since Steffi Graf to successfully defend at Roland Garros. When she was asked about her mental toughness (and how much her coach, Carlos Rodriguez, has helped her), she replied:
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I asked Henin in the small group session if she was in some way playing to avenge herself on her world – trying to prove how tough she is by, well, overcompensating, as so many achievers have done.
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Actually, in this department you have to admire Henin. She’s been with Rodriguez all of her career and shows the same kind of fidelity to him that she does to the game itself.
And for all the criticism you can bring against Henin (why did she always have to start forward toward the net when Kuznetsova asked the umpire to check a mark? You want to say, whoa, settle back, girl, nobody’s going to take anything off your plate!), that fidelity is wonderful in a day and age when almost every other girl out there is treating tennis as if it were a platform for launching her singing or entrepreneurial or film career.
When I remarked upon this in the small group, she said: “Fidelity is very important thing me. In all the things I have in my life – to my husband, my coach, my game.”
This is something for all you tennis lovers, but Henin haters (and you all know how unrelentingly I’ve hounded her since that performance in Melbourne), to bear in mind. Whatever problems you may have with her, no player has a comparable degree of passion, for and fidelity to, the game. And nobody brings the same degree of intensity to the enterprise, no matter how unappetizing some of results of that are.
This is a young woman who, the deeper she goes at a Grand Slam, the more trouble she has sleeping, saying: “Everything I live, its being intense – in my career, my life, my relationships. When I wake up for any reason, I can’t sleep anymore. I want to be at that court. I can’t wait.”
Man, what I wouldn’t give to hear those words tumble from the lips of any of the multiple Grand Slam title winners out there!
The long-term reward for this passion and fidelity has been simple – strikingly so. She said something so simple and telling in this regard when, discussing the role of Rodriguez in her life, she remarked:
Henin, as we know, enjoys skydiving. She plans on doing it again soon, although she doesn’t feel the urge right away. She says she gets the same thrill out of playing tennis as skydiving (“it’s the adrenalin.” she said), so why jump out of airplanes?
Okay. For Justine, it’s all about Justine. We’ve seen that demonstrated time and again. But the other way to look at it is that Justine is all about tennis and, therefore, saying that it’s all about Justine is saying that it’s all about tennis.
You lose an awful lot when it’s all about tennis, all about you. But there is an icy kind of beauty to it, too.