by Pete Bodo
You have to stream or rent DVDs of those old, black-and-white Victory at Sea episodes, in which a bobbing, spiky mine is likely to blow an entire battleship sky high at any moment, to see anything like what Serena Williams has gleefully been calling herself, a "dangerous floater."
Clearly, this lady likes that term (you have to admit, it's catchy in an insidery kind of way), and the colorful terminology is accurate. Serena entered last week's tournament at Stanford unseeded and ranked No. 169, and left that college town with the title and a vastly improved ranking. She's way up to No. 79, and if she applies herself and things go right, who knows, Serena might pass No. 78 Carla Suarez Navarro at her next tournament (although they say that Suarez Navarro is pretty danged good on hard courts). Let the rallying cry be, "Today Suarez Navarro, tomorrow the world! Or at least No. 77 Akgul Amanmuradova. You see how absurd it is. Let's face it, the only relevant number for Serena has been the first one. The rest simply don't matter in any way, shape or form.
In the Stanford final yesterday, Serena chop-chopped the very game and combative Marion Bartoli—as dangerous a final-round opponent as you could have dreamed up for the 13-time Grand Slam champion. Bartoli is one of those reckless, bold souls who isn't afraid of anyone, although more prudent souls might angrily claim that she ought to be. What they fail to understand is that Bartoli's attitude makes her anathema to many of her rivals, even those who may be more successful, talented, or stylish. Ergo, she wins plenty of matches, leaving the idealists to moan about aesthetics, or the world not being a fair place.
Bartoli is battle-hardened, poised, and awfully good on hard courts. In fact, her triumph at Stanford in 2009 is probably the best win of her career. Throw in that it was Bartoli who bounced defending champ Serena out of this year's Wimbledon (fourth round) and you can see how Serena was up against it in the final. And for a while it looked as if the book on Serena—that she needs more matches, maybe a lot more, in order to be a major force at the the U.S. Open—was accurate. Bartoli raced out to a 4-2 first-set lead and served for the set at 5-4. Then, in the blink of an eye, Serena seemed to draw all the potential benefit of those as yet unplayed matches. She reeled off eight straight games and before Bartoli really knew what hit her, Serena had won it 7-5, 6-1. It doesn't make sense. When did it, ever?
Bartoli may be brimming with confidence and flush with self-regard, but she's not stupid. She said after the final, "I would pick Serena [as the U.S. Open favorite] considering how many times she won there. Six weeks from now, she’ll be more than 10 percent better."
The final culminated a challenging week for the winner, because you'd be hard put to have come up with a draw that put as many different, potentially hazardous obstacles in Serena's path. Three of her opponents were women who played highly individualized styles, none of which were very similar. Serena's week began with a chilling opening statement, an 0-and-0 beatdown Anastasia Rodionova, the kind of player who under most circumstances has nothing with which to hurt a player like Serena.
The next battle was Serena's "fitness" match, a run-and-gun, three-set shootout with No. 25 Maria Kirilenko. She's the kind of player who's steady and athletic enough to force an opponent to pay attention, and good enough to capitalize on the opportunity should said opponent not do it. That set up the much anticipated and overly hyped match-up with Maria Sharapova. We all know how that turned out.
In retrospect, Sharapova put a lot of pressure on herself when she declared shortly before the tournament that she was eager to play Serena again. Some of that might have reflected the bravado Sharapova was entitled to feel after winning 17 of her previous 19 matches on a combination of all three major surfaces. The hype was welcome. It may be just hype, but it still makes things more interesting—which is the secret of hype.
But when it was over (and it was over quickly) it was hard to resist thinking that Sharapova had tried to pull off something with smoke and mirrors rather than aces and forehand winners. Granted, the degree to which Sharapova was not the 17-of-19 Maria we've come to know was ghastly, real, and hard to explain. But you had to wonder if the quality of the competition didn't mandate the transformation. Nobody puts you under pressure, both big-picture mental pressure and micro-cosmic technical and strategic pressure, like Serena. And no stroke breaks down as quickly under pressure as the serve.
The match was a tale of two serves. Sharapova was off-form to start; the fact that she lacked a serve on which she could rely for help doomed her before we were a dozen games in. At times in the first set it looked as if she was so preoccupied with the need to serve well that she didn't know quite what to do when Serena smacked the ball back into play.
By contrast, Serena used her serve to get out of—rather than into—trouble. The only time Sharapova threatened to get back into the match (with Williams down break points while serving and ahead, 2-0 in the second set), Serena dispatched the threat with an ace and game-ending service winner. The problems Sharapova has with her serve are becoming ingrained in her game, and they're dragging it down at the times it most counts—as in her French Open match with Li Na.
No. 28 Sabine Lisicki presented a potentially larger threat to Serena in the semis, because she's a rising talent who began her long road back from injury just months ago. A strapping 5' 10" with a wicked, booming serve, Lisicki had to fight her way through qualifying at the French Open (she then won two rounds in the main draw), and a few weeks later she became just the second wild card to make the Wimbledon semis. Lisicki had to feel all puffed up arriving in Stanford after that showing, and the way she played (losing just one set in the earlier rounds, just like Serena) confirmed it. But Serena demolished her, 6-1, 6-2.
What is it that turns otherwise dominant, confident players—even power players—to mush when they look across the net at Serena? The only answer can be fear, or perhaps more accurately lack of self-belief. It's nothing that impairs Serena these days. Nor Bartoli, for that matter. In the final, Serena simply had too much of everything for Bartoli to handle. As Bartoli, a frank interview even when she's saying things some people rather would not hear, saw it: "She (Serena) has really improved her level from Wimbledon. She beat [Maria] Sharapova and [Sabine] Lisicki easily [at Stanford] and everything is just better, her serve, her movement. . . everything."
When the week in Stanford was over, I couldn't help but think of those two poor tournament directors in Toronto (Karl Hale) and Cincinnati (Vince Cicero). I could almost visualize them during the final, hurling wine glasses at the TV or gnawing their fingernails, wondering how the increasingly inevitable Serena triumph would affect their events—will she pull out of one or both of them, now that she once again seems a Grand Slam-ready player?
At Stanford Serena made a point in an interview with ESPN to say that she was looking forward to doing better in sub-major events. She talked about how happy she is to be back, how determined she is to put herself into the best position to win the U.S. Open, how much she loves the game. That's the hole-card for Cicero and Hale. If Serena has fallen in love with tennis again, if that appetite is back, along with a determination to sweep a U.S. Open, where she's likely to be the top story, those TDs can breathe a little more easily today.
The real issue here may be whether Serena loves the game enough to make it the central focus of her day, every day. As she approaches 30, she must know she doesn't have that much time left (although with her, you don't discount anything). It's time to wring the last sweet drops of nectar from the fruit, unless you no longer have an appetite for it. It will be interesting to see how the week in Stanford influences her thinking about the next few weeks.