We've grown accustomed to wins and losses equally being about Serena, and on this day she was nursing a sore thumb,sustained when she took a fall in her dramatic three-set win over Daniela Hantuchova yesterday. Serena said she played at "40 or 50 (per cent) max", and was unable to hit her customary two-handed backhand without a jolt of pain shooting from her thumb through her arm at the moment of contact.
She was undecided about whether or not to play today at all, and were not for a doctor who, typically enough, was running late (I guess the rain has played havoc with the tee times at the local golf courses, too!), the rematch might not have happened at all. "One of the doctors I wanted to see couldn't make it in time, so it was like, What am I gonna do? You can't keep waitin' on them. I guess it's like, 'Okay, I guess I should go out there and see what happens.' I think mainly that was the factor."
The press pariahs cracked up at that one, but there seemed to be more to it than that. From where I sat, it looked like Momma Thunder was being jerked around the court like a rag doll, limbs askew, while Henin pranced around as nimbly as a troll enjoying a frolic in the sunshine before she returned to her dank post under the stone bridge. I don't doubt Serena's injury, and the number of one-handed backhands that she floated like Frisbees supports her case: what do you think she did, hit those slice balloons to set up an excuse for herself? In a larger sense, the Williams matches underscored the three most important words in the grass-court tennis business. Movement, movement, movement.
The conventional logic these days suggests that you give Serena a set, set-and-a-half, on determination and joie de combat alone. This is accurate. But when it comes to the undecided elements in the rest of the match, against an opponent of Henin's quality, movement is critical. Serena's two most impressive performances this year were in the Australian Open final (where she demolished Sharapova) and in Miami, where she out-fought Henin. That was on hard courts, and that's the field of play on which Serena enjoys the greatest advantage. On grass, the value and importance of good movement moves up a few notches, even though it doesn't become an issue in the matches Serena plays against all but the handful of great movers on the tour. That's a parade led by Henin.
Henin moves as smoothly and effortlessly as a figure skater on the turf here. And if you watch how disciplined she is about keeping a low center of gravity, with her knees well bent, you are looking at the fruits of all the discipline this Sister of No Mercy puts into her training. If you want to find a baseline for comparison, you have to look to the likes of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, even though those two men move nothing like each other. But their ability to wheel around the court enables them to play great defense as well as move from defense to offense with quicksilver speed. That's what Henin did today, to exploit any general or specific weakness in Serena's game or conditioning, and it's also what Venus did to bounce out Sharapova. You won't find a lot of talk about this in the press conference transcripts, but that seemed the dominant theme of the day.
I asked Henin if she would name the best grass-court player she ever had the pleasure to watch and the only name she came up was that of the woman who beat her in last year's final here, Amelie Mauresmo. It isn't a bad pick, because Mauresmo's problems have less to do with the skin of the court than what's under the skin on her head. She's a good mover, too, although not in the same class as Henin or (a healthy) Venus Williams. But she can compensate for some of that with the versatility of her game, and her ability to volley confidently.
It's curious, but years ago I felt that Venus Williams could dominate the women's game, despite the fact that Serena has a greater gift for shotmaking and more tools in the stroking box. This was because I saw Venus as another Borg, able, with her topspin, wingspan, and high-jumper's body, of covering the court and turning tennis into Big Girl ping pong.
And if you can cover the court and use varying degrees of topspin to control your length, I don't see how you can lose many matches in the women's game - not unless a new Monica Seles, capable of firing laser-like placements, winds up on the other side of the net. Today, I saw that same promise. Oh, it was dented here and there, tarnished and in need of a good rubdown with Noxon. But the facility was there - boosted by her 155 MPH serve - as Sharapova admitted, "She (Venus) has one of the biggest - if not the biggest - serves on the tour."
