Posted by Peter Bodo, TENNIS.com
Serena Williams suffered a surprising loss last week to Patty Schnyder in one of the final, critical warm-up events for the French Open. Uh-oh. We remember what happened the last time Serena suffered a similar fate on the eve of a major: It was roughly four months ago, in Hobart, New Zealand, when she lost to Sybille Bammer.
Serena was so distressed by that confidence-shattering loss -- one that seemed to confirm everybody's worst suspicions about her fitness and dedication to the game -- that she flew on down to Melbourne, Australia, and opened up a can of whup-you-know-what. She didn't just win the first Grand Slam of the year; she destroyed almost every girl who dared get in her way.
Like I said, Uh-oh. Someone just poked the beast with a stick again.
Granted, the loss to Bammer on hard courts was borderline bizarre, knowing what we know now. Schnyder, not quite so. She's a blue-chip player who just happened to turn into a corn chip when she went deep into the top 10 a few years back. This is a girl with issues, as her colorful history with her family and the oddball Svengali she hooked up with amply demonstrate. But she can still bring the stuff on a tennis court, and periodically emerges from the depths to show it.
So what does this loss mean for Serena, as she sights in on the French Open? Nothing. She's not the type who's going to go to pieces over a bad loss or dry spell, which is to say she's not Bammer or Schnyder. It isn't like Schnyder ripped away some façade and exposed Serena as a cowering choker, or found an interesting strategy that will take a prominent place in the How-to-Beat-Serena playbook. What she did was play great tennis and refuse to bow to Serena's reputation as perhaps the greatest pressure player of this, or any other, era.
What she did, probably, is make Serena mad and even more determined to claim her second title at Roland Garros, to go with the one she earned in 2002. And Serena can use some mad: The slow clay of France is the surface on which Serena is most vulnerable, especially when it comes to fitness and the kind of stroking consistency clay demands.
Until the men's final at Hamburg Sunday, the most compelling if not necessarily most publicized or hyped story of the French Open was: Can Serena, playing such a reduced schedule, seemingly so vulnerable to fatigue and injury, win the one tournament that was never a gimme for her, even at the best of times?
The dominant issue in Paris for two years now has been, "Can Roger Federer win Roland Garros?" But if you swap out his name with Serena's, you're left with an even more textured, seductive story line. People seem to forget that she's only won in Paris once, and that Roland Garros is Henin's turf. And she's no Patty Schnyder.
Uh-oh.
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