Now there's a barn door, flung wide!
When pressed, she said, "Yeah, I always see the glass as half-empty. So yeah, whatever. . . I guess it's not the way to look a it, but. . ."
Was that good or bad when it came to tennis, someone wondered?
"You know, it's not good on a tennis court. I'm just talking about off the court. I'm like, 'Okay, it wasn't meant to be.' The 'story of my life' kind of thing. . ."
Wait. We actually like the story of your life. And if your glass is half-empty, there are an awful lot of folks out there trying to suck water from a stone. But good fortune and impoverishment are in the eye of the beholder, as we all know, and when Bonnie DeSimone pressed Serena on the hurts and losses she had sustained on the personal front since 2003, she did something that she isn't always in the habit of doing: She took the question head-on, with none of the coyness or obliqueness she often resorts to when similarly exercised:
Scott Price of Sports Illustrated had an idea: "Were you ever a glass-half-full person? I mean, did you change?"
Serena replied, half in jest:
Well, Justine Henin has just delivered that tap on the head, and now Serena gets to chase Justine around Roland Garros on Tuesday, in what seems to me a Huge Moment in the tennis life of a woman who's experienced them before. Serena has won this major just once (2002), because this is the surface on which she is most vulnerable. And were it not for a highly controversial match with Henin in 2003, she might have extended that "Serena Slam" to a run of six majors (when she won the 2003 Australian Open, she became one of the very few players of either gender to hold all four Grand Slam titles at the same time - an achievement that's just one rung - but a pretty big one - below having captured the GS Grail).
A win in the French Open final would represent the second and, for Serena, probably most difficult leg of a Grand Slam (unless she reaches the US Open final, where the pressure and attention would render it a higher accomplishment). But it's a little impertinent to look so far ahead, for Maria Sharapova, Jelena Jankovic, Svetlana Kuznetsova and even Ana Ivanovic (judging from the way she's playing here) would not be gimmes by any stretch. Still, the Henin match looms as the main obstacle.
In that regard, everyone has been trotting out that 2003 match, in which a show of poor sportsmanship by Henin and a artisan crowd hostile to Serena helped Henin prevail. While Serena was willing to share her Kindergarten traumas with the assembled press pariahs, she chose to duck the issue of that 2003 match instead of goosing the media with juicy observations about it. She admitted that she and Justine have never discussed that unsavory affair since the day it occurred, and wouldn't even say whether or not they had enagaged in a targeted conversation about it, way back when.
So all Serena had to say was: "I don't think about it. I know I wasn't at fault in any way, and, you know, I guess she was doing everything, I guess, to win. Who knows? I don't know. I don't really think about that. It was a long time ago. Like I said, so much has happened since '03. It seems like decades ago."
Indeed. That's the best attitude Serena could adopt; who needs white noise in the cerebral cortex when you're playing Henin on clay in France? And although I never bought Henin's typically self-centered rationalizations about what happened that day, and how and why, I also believe things happen in the heat of the moment and sometime should be left to expire like the embers of that moment.
So let's move on, because there are more interesting issues to frame the upcoming meeting anyway, starting with this one: This is Justine's last stand; Serena is back in town, although it happens to be Henin's town, and the conflict will take place in her own house (Stade Roland Garros) and on her own terms (red clay). This is is like a gunslinger taking that long, lonely walk with the sun at his back.
Beyond that, Serena hasn't played that well here so far, although she notched it up today, blazing her service returns in the way she must in order to keep the crafty and fleet Henin off balance. She chose to look at that set of circumstances in a decidedly glass-half-full fashion:
I asked Serena if her recent, stirring, comeback win over Justine in Miami had any contextual value in this match, and she said:
I pushed on: "What about the way you won that one? Does that have a carry-over effect?"
So Serena finally gets to be goose, and her job is cut out for her. But, as Matt Cronin wisely pointed out: "Maybe you never got to be the goose because you were so fast. . ."
