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Good morning! Serena Williams awakes from sluggish start, breezes past Pratt
Posted: Friday January 21, 2000 12:08 AM
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- As if she finally heard the alarm go off, Serena Williams awoke from lingering jet-lag midway through her second match in the Australian Open and began to look like a champion. For nearly an hour in a stuporous first set Thursday, the third-seeded Williams played as sloppily as she had in a first-round squeaker. Then suddenly, she couldn't miss as she pressed her attack to win seven straight games in a 7-5, 6-1 victory over Australian Nicole Pratt. Williams, the 18-year-old U.S. Open champion, arrived in Melbourne without her injured sister, Venus, just a few days before the tournament and hadn't played a match since Oct. 4. The rust and the weariness showed in the first round and most of the first set in the second. Williams lost her opening service and fell behind 2-0, though neither player hit a clean winner in the 30 points contested during the 19 minutes of those two wretched games. They played on in similar mediocrity to 5-5, exchanging unforced errors all the way. Then, finally, Williams looked fresh and quick. She held serve at love, then broke for the set with a snapping volley. Williams rolled from there, cutting down her unforced errors from 32 in the first set to a mere 10 in the second. More importantly, she began attacking the ball as she had in the U.S. Open last September, pouncing on short shots and going for the lines, and running up her winners to 34 compared to three for Pratt. In a tournament rich with upsets in the first two rounds, American Kristina Brandi, ranked No. 54, knocked off No. 8 Amanda Coetzer 6-1, 6-3. Five seeded women and nine seeded men are out of the draw in four days. Three-tie champion Martina Hingis beat 17-year-old Belgian Justine Henin 6-3, 6-3 in a one-hour match. Henin showed promise, however, when she won three straight games after falling behind 4-0 in the second set. She won one long, sizzling rally with a forehand crosscourt past the top seed. Other women getting through to the third round were No. 6 Barbara Schett, No. 10 Conchita Martinez, No. 12 Sandrine Testud, No. 13 Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario and No. 16 Elena Likhovtseva. Defending men's champion and second-seeded Yevgeny Kafelnikov advanced with a 6-3, 6-0, 6-1 romp over Daniel Vacek. Falling from the men's draw were two of last year's semifinalists, No. 7 Nicolas Lapentti and No. 10 Tommy Haas. Last year's runnerup, No. 6 Thomas Enqvist, lost in the first round. Lapentti retired in the fourth set against France's Arnaud Clement with weakness from a cold, and Haas claimed a rib injury hampered him in a 7-5, 6-3, 6-3 loss to Moroccan Younes El Aynaoui. Four straight double faults to blow a lead in the final set would be enough to set off a racket-throwing tantrum in anyone from a weekend hacker to a hardened pro. Jennifer Capriati simply wiped her brow and went back to work, slugging shots as hard as she could until she put away No. 14 Dominique Van Roost 6-1, 4-6, 8-6 Wednesday night to reach the third round. "You've got to get through it, and no matter what you're making, like four double faults in a row, you've just got to keep going for it," Capriati said. For the "new" Jennifer Capriati at 23, there are no goals and no regrets, no future and no past, just the match on the court, the point on the scoreboard and the ball in front of her. After all she's been through, she doesn't burden herself with expectations, her own or anyone else's. She tries her best to handle victory and defeat with equanimity. It's all part of her one-day-at-time approach to life back on the tour. So it was that Capriati could shake off that flurry of wildness even when it might appear to others that she was choking away the match with a 3-2, 40-love lead in the third set. Four double faults and a backhand clunker that landed seven feet wide cost her the game. Four unforced errors on Van Roost's serve in the next game put Capriati behind 4-3. Instead of flinging her racket or breaking down in tears or sulking to defeat, Capriati dug her way out of the jam by yielding only two points in her next two service games and breaking Van Roost for a 6-5 lead. Double faults were contagious in this otherwise high-quality, hard-hitting match -- Van Roost had 11, Capriati 10 -- and Capriati produced another one while wasting a chance to serve out the match. Again Capriati didn't fold. Instead, she bore down and broke Van Roost's serve once more, then closed the match with her one and only ace. Capriati, a quarterfinalist in the Australian in 1992 and 1993, won her first match in six years in this event last year before losing in the second round. Recently, she's been buoyed by victories over Martina Hingis and Mary Pierce in an exhibition in Hong Kong, and over No. 14 Sandrine Testud in a tournament in Sydney. Capriati's ranking has climbed over the last seven months from No. 112 to No. 21, her highest since July 1994. Little by little, Capriati can feel her game coming back, her movement improving, her aggressiveness increasing. Yet, she acknowledges she still doesn't have the confidence of the top players, like Lindsay Davenport, who know they can win a match even when they're down a couple breaks. Nor has she recaptured the feeling she had as a teen-age sensation that any time she goes on court she feels she will win. "I'm really not quite there yet, where it's just kind of expected that I win the matches," she said. "Maybe when I start to get seeded there will be a little more expectation. Now it's like I'm really going to enjoy it while I still have this luxury of not having too much pressure. If I get high-ranked or become a seed, I'll have the same outlook. "I just want to reach my highest potential, just get to what my best is. And whatever that is, that's great. It would be great to win a Grand Slam. Obviously that's why I'm playing - to win. But I'm really not looking ahead. That's kind of my problem. I lose focus. This is the way I'm just going to keep focused."
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