Shotgun Williams

by Pete Bodo

Venus Williams, who turns 31 on Friday, played her first official WTA match since the Australian Open today in Eastbourne, and the way it went was a statement on why the game his missed both Williams sisters, and why it's good to have them back.

Blustery winds wreaked havoc with service tosses, lobs and groundstroke drives. The air was damp and salty in the British seaside town, and Venus looked rusty, her forehand flying all over the place. Scrambling for one ball in the 11th game of the second set, Venus slipped on the baseline and did a split that was worthy of a break dancer. It was a heck of a way to play her first competitive match in four-and-a-half months.

To make matters worse, Williams was unseeded for Eastbourne and had drawn Andrea Petkovic, one of the arcing players on the WTA, as her first-round opponent. Since January, Petkovic has slashed her way from No. 32 to No. 11, and was seeded No. 8 in this event. Would you like a side of insult with that main course of injury? Okay: Petkovic was the opponent whom Venus last squared off with back in January in Melbourne. Venus had to quit that third-round match after just one game, due to a hip injury she had sustained two days earlier.

All in all, the odds seemed stacked for an inauspicious return by Venus, the first barrel of the Williams shotgun to be discharged in this Wimbledon tune-up (Serena, the other barrel, goes off tomorrow).

Of course, Venus proceeded to win the match, 7-5, 5-7, 6-3, to force the choir to sing yet another verse of that now familiar tune, Never Count a Williams Out.

"It was definitely an adventure: the conditions, falling down every other point," Williams remarked afterward, in a jolly mood. "Coming back from such a long lay-off and competing against someone who has been playing so well the last 12 months, there was a lot going on out there, but I was extremely excited to come back with a win."

The Williamses are awfully good when there's "a lot going on," and this was just a preview. Tomorrow, Serena kicks her Wimbledon campaign in to gear at Eastbourne, playing her first competitive match in nearly a year against Tsvetana Pironkova, against whom she's 1-0.

Serena has a well-documented flair for the dramatic, and she didn't miss her opportunity during a press conference at Eastbourne. Contemplating the setback caused by the pulmonary embolism that left blood clots in her lungs in February, Serena said: "I've had some serious health problems and I was literally on my deathbed at one point in my career, or my life. This is like a totally different road where I'm more or less thinking, okay, I have nothing to lose at this point."

Lest we forget that other life-and-death matter, she also declared, "I'm here not to lose. I'm hoping I can peak at Wimbledon."

Still, as much attention as the Williams sisters command, and in spite of their proven ability to surpass expectations and silence critics, the women are returning to a different WTA world—one in which the quality of the game has visibily improved, even in the short period of their absence. The short version: more than ever, the WTA contenders are playing to win (rather than not to lose). Never before have so many women played such bold, positive tennis.

Partly because of the Williamses' absence, the tour has developed a whole new set of players who are comfortable swinging freely and taking big cuts. Whether they will continue to be able to do that when facing either Serena or Venus is to be determined. I suppose the Williamses can take heart from the fact that Petkovic might have made the short list of anyone's set of newly-minted contenders, and we saw how it went for her. But there's a string of comparable opponents out there for what has to be the most dangerous brace of "floaters" (unseeded players) the WTA has produced in a long time.

Can the Williamses handle the mobility and precision of the new French Open champion, Li Na? How about the power and pace of Petra Kvitova, who won on the red clay of Madrid and is even more dangerous on faster surfaces? Serena beat Kvitova in the penultimate match she played (semifinal, Wimbledon 2010), but the 21-year old from the Czech Republic has risen to No. 8 in the rankings and collected a solid year's worth of experience since then. Other young ladies who could conceivably out-hit if not out-compete either Williams are Victoria Azarenka, Julia Goerges, and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.

And then there's that familiar rival to Venus and Serena, Maria Sharapova. She must be salivating at the prospect of being back on the grass, given how pleasantly she surprised so many fans and pundits (and probably herself) during the clay-court season with her triumph in Rome and excellent run at the French Open. If Sharapova's level of execution carries over from the clay to the grass, she's going to be a formidable force again at Wimbledon.

The Willamses have always played their cards close to the vest, so it's hard to know just how hard they've been working on fitness or technique. The nature of each woman's injury (for Serena, it all started right after Wimbledon last year with that awful laceration of her foot) suggests that the down time—when neither swung a racket—was a significant stretch. And we know that you simply can't reproduce match-play conditions no matter how hard you try on a pratice court. A part of you—and your opponent—always knows it's not really for keeps, and that affects performance. One match doesn't yield enough data to make any predictions.

In the big picture, Venus' bugaboo is apt to be consistency. Her technique over time has seemed to erode. Players like to talk about having their strokes "grooved," and that's the quality that's been most lacking in Venus, for some years now. She's still a superb athlete, although at a late 30, the clock is beginning to look like an enemy as well.

Serena's biggest liability may be mobility, even if her fitness is at a peak. Let's face it, she's strong but also big, and has a lot of body to move around. Tennis is a game in which you don't necessarily have to do a lot of running (as Monica Seles and Serena version 4.2 demonstrated) if you have the ability to take the ball on the rise and club winners—or roll out shots so penetrating that your opponent is always back on her heels. Serena is a better athlete than she looks; how often has she sprinted for a ball and not just surprised us by getting there, but found a way to turn the defensive retrieval into an offensive thrust? But doing that day after day over this next month will take a toll.

Serena's quick-strike capacity will come in handy, and Venus would do well to borrow some of it for herself. The new generation of big hitters on the WTA are unlikely to defer to the Williams sisters, now that they've seen how the other half lives.