The Skies Are Clearing

It's not unusual for bad weather to foul up action at the French Open. And this year the last two days have been filled with starts and stops, playing a bit with schedules in the early rounds. But the forecast for tomorrow claims it will be seventy and sunny in Paris, and a couple women will be hoping to show that the rain on their own parades has also stopped.

After making the fourth round of the Australian Open, Alona Bondarenko lost five matches in a row. She's gotten a couple wins since then, but she began to fall from her career high #24 ranking through the spring. While still seeded in the twenties in France, I wasn't sure how she'd do, and as I'd feared, the Ukraine found herself down a set to Vera Dushevina to kick off her campaign. But the older sister of Kateryna found a way to pull through and won her next four sets, making it to the third round of Roland Garros for the first time.

She has a tough road ahead of her, though, and faces fourth seeded Jelena Jankovic next. Alona should take heart though -- after losing to the former #1 nine times, she finally broke that trend with a straight-set win over the Serb in Melbourne. If she can recapture that form, she might be able to pull off an upset, but I have a feeling Jankovic will have a thing or two to say about that.

Elena Dementieva too had been having a rough couple months, most recently losing her opening match to Tsevtana Pironkova in Warsaw. In Paris she's had a pretty intimidating draw, facing a feisty Petra Martic and veteran Anabel Medina Guarrigues on her road to the third round. Though she seemed to stumble a bit when trying to close out her last match, I was encouraged to see her stay steady. Next up she faces Aleksandra Wozniak who she simply dismantled a few weeks back in Madrid, so she should like her chances. It would be great -- if not a bit of a long shot -- to see her back in a Major final.

Caroline Wozniacki played for her first Grand Slam championship less than a year ago, and although she's now ranked higher than she was back in September few are talking about her getting back this time around. Thanks to a devastating tumble in the Charleston semis, she hasn't been much of a force in the last month or so. But she's still been a trooper -- hopefully not to her own detriment -- playing every week since and winning her first two matches in Paris in straight sets.

Unfortunately for Caro, she'll run into red-hot Alexandra Dulgheru on Friday, the twenty-year-old -- her birthday is Sunday -- who repeated as champion in Poland last week, beating three seeds to do so. The Romanian has caused quite a few upsets this season, and she should be able to take advantage of a slower-moving Wozniacki to advance in her French Open debut. I'm just hoping Caroline doesn't do her body any more damage.

Serena Williams hasn't exactly been having a bad clay court run -- she did make the semis in Rome before losing a three-setter to Jankovic. But I'm sure she would have liked a few more "W"s by her name coming into France. She didn't have the best first round, needing a first round tiebreak before ousting world #76 Stefanie Voegele. Next up she'll face Julia Goerges who's never gotten past the second round of any Major. It should be a fairly routine day for the top women's player, but with such a stacked draw, she could use a few easy days at the office.

Then there's last year's champion, Svetlana Kuznetsova, who stopped Serena's Paris run last year in the quarterfinals. The Russian had been playing some ugly tennis over the last few weeks, failing to repeat the success she had last year on the clay by losing her opening matches in Rome and Madrid. She started her defense strategy by getting down a break to Sorana Cirstea in the first round and then faced four match points against a strong Andrea Petkovic in the second before somehow finding a way to pull out the win.

But like the other ladies, her road to the title only gets more rocky from here. Maria Kirilenko, who most recently beat Svets in Italy, looms next and we've seen what kind of damage the fellow Russian can do. If Kuznetsova is going to make her seventh straight fourth round at the French, she will need to up her game to an even higher level.

So as the clouds part over the grounds these ladies will look to continue the runs they've had in the earlier part of the week. The prospects for some are brighter than for others, but whatever the case, it's reassuring to see them all playing like the champions we've known them to be!

Things Are Heating Up

There were signs of spring in the New York air this week, but a little further west the action is getting really hot.

The BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells is the first Masters event of the year and, more importantly, marks the return of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. After injury-induced absences they'll both be back in action in tonight's Hit for Haiti charity exhibition before getting ready for their main draws. And they've chosen quite the stage on which to make their debuts. Eight of the top ten men pepper the field and some are coming off big wins in the last few weeks. And that could be a bit intimidating for someone a little out of practice.

Rafa is the defending champion here, but he seems like a whole other person than he did in 2009. Last year's trophy came in the middle of a five-title run, but the now-#3 hasn't won another tournament since that streak ended. He tumbled out of the Australian Open quaterfinals after re-aggravating his knee and hasn't yet been back on court. Though he still hits hard as always, when I watch him now I often find myself wincing in anticipation of pain.

Roger, on the other hand, should be a a bit fitter, though a lung infection late in the winter caused him to pull out of Dubai. But he's got some hot players in his section -- Marcos Baghdatis, Gael Monfils and Janko Tipsarevic have all put together a string of wins in the time since Melbourne and any could face Roger before the semis.

The women's draw is no less formidable. Though missing Serena & Venus Williams as well as Dinara Safina, past champions like Vera Zvonareva, Maria Sharapova and a still-unseeded Justine Henin pose real threats. A different woman has won Indian Wells in each of the past six years, though, so the tournament is really wide open. While there is, again, the possibility of a Henin-Kim Clijsters final, this time I won't hold my breath. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see someone like Victoria Azarenka or even Alona Bondarenko advance far into the bracket.

Of course, you don't have to win to make a statement at Indian Wells. With such an impressive field, this tournament is a great opportunity for players like James Blake or Anna Chakvetadze -- both in action today -- to turn their spate of bad luck around. And newbies like sixteen-year-old Sloane Stephens and Ryan Harrison, just a year her senior, can both put their names on the map if they can follow up on the upsets they scored in their first rounds.

And with more than a week of play left, it certainly looks like just about anything can happen!

Who Has to Hold?

I hate serving. Always have. When I was kid breaking my opponent was not the issue, and I could almost guarantee that the player who held his serve first was the one who would win. Even now I still find myself playing First-Ball-In or Three-Fault tennis. No one wants to win a match on double faults.

I feel bad about it -- it's frustrating that the one shot in a match over which I really had total control could go just about anywhere it wanted to. But I wrote it off to the fact that 1) I'm pretty short, 2) no one ever taught me proper ball tosses and racquet swings, and 3) I'm only an amateur.

Turns out those three factors don't matter -- the pros, even the tall ones who've trained for years with the best coaches, can't really hold their serve either.

Now that's not totally fair, of course. Rafael Nadal and Ivo Karlovic only broke each other once per set last night, with Rafa happily coming out on top of that battle. And during the marathon, historic Wimbledon final last year, Andy Roddick wasn't broken until the very last, seventy-seventh game -- there were only three breaks total during that four-hour-plus match, and Andy had two of them!

Is it just on the women's side then? Maybe. But even players like Karlovic, who fired off 121 aces in four rounds, can't advance well into the draws of Majors. And typically strong women like Serena Williams can also struggle. In her third round match when she was serving at 5-0 against Carla Suarez Navarro, about to close out an easy first set, she hit nine errors, endured thirteen deuces and faced six break points in a twenty-three minute game that more than doubled the length of that entire set. Serena advanced of course, despite the little hiccup, but others found themselves going through a little more trouble in order to advance.

It shouldn't be surprising that 5'5" Justine Henin has trouble holding her serve -- it's really her beautiful backhands and crushing groundstrokes that have won her seven Grand Slam titles. In her second round match against Elena Dementieva she had two chances to serve for the match and ceded both of them -- more than half of the games actually went to the server. In her fourth round Sunday against fellow Belgian Yanina Wickmayer, Justine was broken four times and even lost the second set 1-6. Wickmayer was not much better, allowing Henin to convert on sixty percent of her break opportunities, including two of two in the deciding set. But mediocre serving aside, the more experienced champion was able to pull through when it mattered, making the quarters in Melbourne for the sixth time in her career.

Earlier in the day world #35 and former top-twenty player Jie Zheng was similarly unimpressive in her service games against Hobart champ Alona Bondarenko. The seeded Ukrainian actually won slightly more on her first attempts -- fifty-one percent to Zheng's even fifty. But the woman who ousted Jelena Jankovic in the previous round was even worse on second tries, winning only a third of those serves versus 56% for the Chinese #2. The ladies traded breaks through the first set -- three a piece -- before Zheng, a shrimpy 5'4", finally won in the tiebreak. The server lost another five games in the second, but Jie was able to hold when it counted, winning the last game of the match for a chance to play in her first ever quarterfinal here.

They weren't the only ones. Five-foot-ten Nadia Petrova lost her serve three times in her defeat of reigning French Open champ Svetlana Kuznetsova and Vera Zvonareva traded breaks with Gisela Dulko five times in the second set of their third round match. Apparently, it would seem, losing your serve doesn't guarantee your opponent a win, a hard lesson Alexandra Dulgheru learned when she broke a six-foot-tall Wickmayer nine times in the first round and still lost.

Of course, this isn't an argument that players shouldn't work on improving their first serve percentage, or that having the ability to bomb ace after ace won't serve you in the long run. But it is amusing that the usual race-to-break mentality of tennis can be so easily turned on its head. And it highlights just how important an all-around game is on Tour. Maybe when we start to see some real, legitimate big servers or even -- God forbid! -- serve-and-volleyers, especially on the women's side, we could start to see a whole new style of tennis, and a new crop of champions emerge.

Until then, I'll continue to harbor delusions of being able to compete with the pros with my dinky little serve! Hey, if they can do it, so can I!