ESPN Tennis

SYDNEY, Australia -- Kim Clijsters began her retirement year with a victory, beating Serbia's Jelena Jankovic 4-6, 7-6 (1), 6-4 in the Sydney International final Friday.

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Third-seeded Clijsters, who is expected to retire at the end of 2007, broke a nine-match winning streak by Jankovic, who won the Auckland WTA title last week.

Clijsters, who had to save a match point in the second set Friday against Jankovic, beat Australian Open No. 1 seed Maria Sharapova in a Hong Kong exhibition tournament last week.

Earlier Friday, defending men's champion James Blake cruised into the Sydney final in a walkover when Austria's Jurgen Melzer could not start his semifinal due to illness.

In a scheduling quirk, the third-seeded Blake will go for the title against Spain's Carlos Moya -- his first-round opponent at the Australian Open next week. Moya, who survived a three-setter against Marcos Baghdatis on Thursday night, had to go the distance again to beat Frenchman Richard Gasquet 6-3, 4-6, 6-2 as temperatures hit 100 degrees Friday afternoon.

Melzer, blaming a batch of bad sushi, said he was so sick to his stomach that he needed an intravenous drip. He had doubts about his fitness for the Open.

"At the moment, there's no way I could play," Melzer said. "I hope that somebody from upstairs looks down on me and gets me ready."

Melzer is the seventh player this week to either withdraw or retire from a match in Sydney, and Lleyton Hewitt was a late withdrawal with a calf muscle injury. Women's No. 1 Justine Henin-Hardenne withdrew due to personal reasons that also will keep her out of the Open.

No. 3-ranked Nikolay Davydenko was fined $10,000 Thursday by the ATP for "unsportmansmanlike conduct" after saying nobody cares about the tournament, a traditional warmup for the Open, the season-opening Grand Slam event. Davydenko retired with a foot injury after losing the first set of his opening match, saying he was not overly concerned about the smaller tournaments.

Rafael Nadal, Paradorn Srichaphan, Dmitry Tursunov, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Nadia Petrova also pulled out of the tournament citing either injury or illness.

While Blake criticized Davydenko's comments, he suggested the sport needs an injection of entertainment to improve its image after 383 withdrawals from tournaments last year -- a trend that ATP chairman Etienne De Villiers has described as "unacceptable madness."

"You go to other sporting events and there's an entertainment value inherent besides just the athletes out there ... whether it be music during changeovers, whether it be cheerleaders at basketball games, anything like that," Blake said.

"It's tough with such a traditional sport [like tennis] to find that there's no timeouts where you bring in cheerleaders or have rap music blasting. But I think there may be ways that we can find a happy medium and make it entertaining for the casual fan as well as those diehards."

Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press