Four Points

Rebound aces
Lisa Raymond and Samantha Stosur look to be back on track to make another run at the top of the doubles rankings, but they'll be splitting up again for a short time this summer. That's because Australia's Stosur, who recently missed eight months with a one-two punch of serious illnesses followed by an injury, will be playing in the Olympics, while Raymond, much to her disappointment, won't.

The U.S. Tennis Association elected to leave Raymond off the team and pair No. 1-ranked Liezel Huber with Lindsay Davenport as the second doubles team after the Williams sisters. It was another bitter pill to swallow for the 34-year-old veteran from Wayne, Pa., who went to arbitration -- unsuccessfully -- after being denied a spot on the 2000 team. (She and Martina Navratilova reached the quarterfinals in 2004.) "Basically, they thought that Liezel and Lindsay were the team to go with,'' said Raymond, who got the bad news last week. "It just wasn't meant to be.'' If Davenport, who withdrew from Wimbledon due to injury, or Huber were unable to play, Raymond could be named as a reserve. "But I'm not going to hold my breath,'' she said. "I'm going to make other plans.''

Stosur secured her spot by using her special ranking, obtained after she was flattened by viral meningitis and Lyme disease last year. She plans to play singles and doubles (probably with Rennae Stubbs) in Beijing.

The 16th-seeded duo has played four tournaments together since Stosur's full-time return to the WTA circuit in mid-May. Monday, they played what Raymond termed "our best match since we've gotten back together,'' advancing to the quarterfinals here by upending the No. 3 seed, Stubbs and Kveta Peschke of the Czech Republic.

"We just have to be very forgiving as far as our results are concerned," Raymond said. "Sam was out with what could have been a career-ending disease for eight months, almost, so we're not going to step right back on the court and win tournaments. But each tournament, we're getting better. We struggled in our first two matches, but it helped us today to have to grind through those first two.''

Raymond and Stosur have won two Grand Slam championships together, the 2005 U.S. Open and the 2006 French Open, as well as year-end WTA titles in 2005 and 2006.

AP Photo/Elise Amendola

Nicolas Massu, right, won Olympic gold in singles and doubles, with Chilean partner Fernando Gonzalez.

Lottery winners
We were glad to see defending Olympic gold medalist Nicolas Massu of Chile invited to Beijing as an International Tennis Federation wild card, although we're not in favor of the suggestion that the previous quadrennium's champion should get an automatic entry -- no other Olympic athlete gets that perk. Other notable additions to the entry list, which will be formally announced Wednesday: Swedish stalwart Jonas Bjorkman, who will retire after this season; Japanese phenom Kei Nishikori; and Australia's Alicia Molik, who openly campaigned for a spot. Molik's depleting series of injuries have spurred speculation by those closest to her that she may call it quits after Beijing, although she's been mum on the subject.

Order in the court
We're usually sympathetic to tournament organizers who have to juggle a lot of competing agendas and egos when they decide who plays where, and they have a perfect right to be nationalistic in their choices. But we're baffled by Monday's scheduling that relegated both Williams sisters' singles matches and their doubles match to Court 2. Roger Federer hasn't been scheduled anywhere other than Centre Court or Court 1 since the 2003 Wimbledon quarterfinals; granted, he has won five in a row now, but during the same stretch, quadruple champ Venus Williams has played on Court 2 eight times, and she's obviously the defending titlist this year. With all due respect to quarterfinalists Nicole Vaidisova and Agnieszka Radwanska, it made no sense to us to have their Monday matches scheduled on Center and No. 1, respectively, while Venus and Jelena Jankovic, the highest-ranking woman left in the draw, toiled elsewhere. Jankovic was dispatched to Court 18 -- technically a show court because of its interesting sunken seating configuration, but not what you'd call the big stage.

Coming of age
A stroll around Henman Hill, the habitually muddy, seething Woodstock of Wimbledon that has stayed dry this year, found an almost somnolent crowd enjoying the sunshine but somewhat emotionally detached from Andy Murray's third-round match. That all changed, and rightly so, Monday during Murray's epic four-hour, five-set win in the gloaming over Richard Gasquet. We recognized the familiar symptoms of "favorite son fever" -- glazed eyes, smiles of wonderment and hands folded in white-knuckled prayer, accompanied by the throaty sound of British yearning in full cry. The baton isn't passed automatically here. The year after Tim Henman's retirement, Murray had to wrestle away that affection, and he got it in a headlock on set point in the third-set tiebreak when his momentum after the shot practically carried him into the crowd. Murray's look-at-my-muscle flex after match point was symbolic of the fact that he wants to shuck the label of 98-pound weakling. Credit him for embracing the pressure rather than simply enduring it against a resurgent Gasquet.

Bonnie D. Ford covers tennis and Olympic sports for ESPN.com. She can be reached at bonniedford@aol.com.