Friday Housekeeping (YC)

Mornin', and apologies for leaving yesterday's Ryan Harrison post (below) headless for so long. Thankfully, one of my eagle-eyed colleagues, or Mod Squadders, intervened with a placeholder headline. Also, the Bodo kiss-of-death is alive and well. Did you see that destined 2009 Grand Slam champion Elena Dementieva was beaten yesterday in Beijing?  Many of you know that I dislike making predictions, although every once in a while I'll throw one out there because I have a gut feeling about it. And I'm sticking with this one, Dementieva just has too much game, and experience, not to cash the in for a major title one of these days.

Tomorrow, I'll have a special report from Bobby Chintapalli on Serena Williams's auto-biography. The timing is right, given Serena will assume the no. 1 ranking on Monday, and she's also the cover subject of the new issue of ESPN (the magazine), which hits newstands tomorrow.

In other business, PR specialist Matt Van Tuinen (a great friend of TennisWorld), wants all of you know about a special charity event James Blake, with help from Andy Roddick and others, will be hosting in New York City on Dec. 1. at Pier 94 in New York City. The event is sponsored by BackOffice Associates (a data services company) and presented by the Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. If you live within striking distance of NYC and would like to attend, check out the details at Blake's slick website. I will definitely attend both the event and the after-party. It definitely sounds like a fun event.

Credit to Blake for taking on these responsibilities on behalf of cancer research; hopefully, the aren't too distracting from his main job, which is winning tennis matches.  Blake's production on that front fell off last year, and he's one of those players who will go into 2009 under a lot of pressure to cling to the strata he occupies in the ATP hierarchy. I'll have a more thorough post on that issue next week.

Carry on with the usual discussion, and have a great weekend. Jackie-Oh will have a Deuce Club for you tonight at the usual time.

-- Pete