Baby Got Back, Baby Came Back

Well, it looks like radio silence of the kind that some of my colleagues in the International Tennis Writer’s Association would like to institutionalize in order to protect on-site journalists at tournaments is in effect, intentionally or not, in Cincinnati. I’ve been having a hard time getting an appropriate body of Serena Williams quotes to fisk. Danny Kendall of the WTA is supposed to be sending me some stuff shortly, and I hope to parse it before the end of the day.

Overall, though, my initial reaction to Serena’s demolition of Anastasia “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” Myskina (apart from feeling gratitude that M+T=T’s weltanschungwill not be seriously threatened by anything that occurred Tuesday night) is that if Serena decides to stick around and concentrate to, oh, even a 70 per cent degree on playing tennis, a lot of women who have been feeling pretty good about their games had better head for the hills - Make that run for the hills, clutching their bootys. The Big Babe is back.

My default position on the “legitimacy” of a player’s resume is that you can’t hold it against a player that his or her peers didn’t show up to play. That is, the fact that so many of the top women were absent from the WTA Championships last fall should not diminish or qualify Pez Mauresmo’s victory there.

At the same time, it would be silly to willfully ignore facts that stare you in the face. So in that regard, I’d say that a number of women – including Justine Henin-Hardenne and Kim Clijsters – have been very lucky that Serena Williams has been stuck in the horse latitudes of champion for over a year now. Her rivals (including her sister Venus, but you didn't hear that here. . .) poured into the vacuum, and showed the initiative and courage to win the big events. More power to them, for ultimately nobody is going to remember that Justine had a virus, Lindsay had a bad back, Marat was a little whacky – all you’ll have left ultimately is a name in the record book – say, Clijsters or Mauresmo or even Gaudo, after the heading, Champion.

My gut feeling, though, is that Serena is capable of playing the game at a level above the other women on the tour. All of them. It’s actually that simple.

Since I started this post, I came up with an audio-file of the conference call Serena conducted before her return at Cincinnati (hat tip to Nick), and I’ve perused all the match reports I could find. My reactions are mixed.

I think Serena is still being very coy and somewhat evasive in ways that I find irritating and unsatisfying, but she has also sent some fairly strong signals pertaining to her feelings about the game, her immediate past, and her future. The money quote, if there was such a thing in this mish-mash of thin information, cautiously rendered, was buried in a halting response to a question about whether it was her knee or mind that needed the recent, long rest:

With Serena, the challenge to me always seemed two-fold, which is one fold more than most players can bear and still retain a Top 50 ranking. That’s a roundabout way of saying it’s amazing how well Serena did, for so long, while struggling with doubts about the career she chose, as well as her dedication to the everyday demands of the profession – that would be the grunt work of training, fitness and things like nutrition.

On that latter score, Serena is pretty opaque. A reporter asked her if she considered her weight an issue and she replied, “Everyone has problems with their weight, one time or another, too thin, or they get too big. . . I always fluctuate. But I haven’t stepped on a scale since I was 12.”

Save that for Oprah, toots. We're talking serious sports here.

When pressed on her workout routine, Serena was curiously brusque. “It’s long enough. Sometimes, I think it’s too long (always beware when Serena tries to make light of an issue; it usually means it’s troublesome for her). It’s definitely intense.”

Jeez, Serena, would it kill you to say something like, “I’ve been doing two-a-days with a pair of hitting partners, for about four hours a day, total, and putting in 90 minutes in at the gym every other day.”?

So the bottom line is that the jury is still out. What we saw yesterday was that Williams is pretty much as good as she wants to be, which will become manifest over time. But if she's not working hard enough, or paying enough attention to fitness issues, she'll never be a consistent force again. She'll get hurt, partly because she goes all out and plays an effortful, stressful game.

But was nice to read Serena saying, before her match with Myskina, “I hope to get a lot of satisfaction out of my game. I hope to go out and blow the joint up. My goals — I’ve never said them out loud. I just expect to do what I do best, and I think I play tennis best.”

Update for Myskina watchers: The Cincinnati Post reported that on Monday, Myskina rode the roller coasters at Paramount’s King’s Island amusement park. She reported: "I was in King's Island; I was there (Monday), and I had some fun. I almost had a heart attack on one roller coaster. It was awesome.”

That’s our fun girl Anastasia, right?