Slam-bang Return

No, really. It's a hard sport, tennis. Maneuvering balls in those Mondrian-style boxes. Conceiving angles and devising strategy. Running sideline to sideline for hours, sometimes in oppressive heat. It's no picnic. � It's just that one would never have known that from watching the 2007 Australian Open. Roger Federer, the men's champ, cruised to yet another Grand Slam title, failing to drop a solitary set, sweating so little that he could've gotten away with wearing the same shirt for all seven matches. The women's winner, Serena Williams, had played just five tournaments in the past year and arrived out of shape. But, finally having some clarity of purpose, she dusted off her rackets and then dusted the competition. In different ways Federer and Williams made the job look so easy. Then again the great ones tend to do that.

Barely two weeks before obliterating top-seeded Maria Sharapova in last Saturday's final, the 25-year-old Williams was alone running wind sprints in a Tasmanian park. She had just lost a match to Sybille Bammer, an Austrian nein-name, in a low-level tune-up in Hobart. Having missed most of 2006 on account of injury and indifference, Williams entered the Australian ranked a lowly No. 81. "It was like a Rocky moment," she says. "I was so mad I lost that match, and I just did the ultimate workout. I think it paid off."

And how. Given no chance to win in Melbourne, Williams got progressively better with each round, the coat of rust dissolving from her game. More important, her resolve was so conspicuous that it sometimes appeared as though her matches doubled as a sort of marketing campaign for competitive fire. In her third match, down a set and 3--5 against fifth-seeded Nadia Petrova of Russia, Williams found a way to win. Two points from a quarterfinal defeat to Israel's Shahar Peer, Williams pulled through. For as many unforced errors as Williams commits, her accuracy at critical times is remarkable.

With each win, she regained more of her old aura of intimidation, always good for a few games each set when she was at the height of her powers. Her fourth-round opponent, Serbia's Jelena Jankovic, entered the event as one of the hottest players on tour but radiated fear when facing Williams. "I was thinking what would happen if [her serve] came too close to my body, and I couldn't get out of the way and it hit me in the stomach," Jankovic, the 11th seed, said afterward. "Would it go through me?''

The glass-half-empty view: Serena's tear exposed a poverty of both depth and courage on the WTA Tour. How else to explain how a player so lacking in fitness and match preparation could swoop in and win the title? Yet this was, ultimately, more about Serena's singular talent than about others' deficiencies. She's a "one-off," as the Aussies would say, a superior athlete who simply defies conventional tennis wisdom. Plus, it wasn't as though she played poorly. "All of a sudden she was hitting the ball every bit as well as she did in the good old days," says hitting partner Mark Hlawaty, referring to the phase when Williams won five of six majors. "And she's probably serving better now."

Besides, looks can deceive. For all the cracks about her physique, Williams never fatigued, even when playing three-setters in sweltering heat. Nor was her movement lacking. "I'm definitely in better shape than I get credit for," she asserted. "[It's] just because I have large bosoms and I have a big ass.... I was just in the locker room staring at my body, and I'm like, 'Am I really not fit? Or is it just because I have all these extra assets that I look not fit?' I think if I were not to eat for two years, I still wouldn't be a size two. We're living in the Mary-Kate Olsen world. I'm just not built that way. I'm bootylicious, and that's how it's always going to be." (Yes, that marked the first time the word bootylicious was uttered at a tennis event.)

Thanks largely to Williams, the generally uninspired tennis played on the women's side was offset by riveting drama. The men's draw, by contrast, featured uninspired drama (Federer wins again) offset by riveting tennis. Time and again, even the blowouts were terrifically entertaining by virtue of scintillating shotmaking and high-quality points. And it wasn't only Federer doing the dazzling.

In his first years on the tour Fernando Gonzalez was tennis's answer to Nuke LaLoosh. In keeping with his nickname, Gonzo was equally capable of drilling a winner or drilling the ball into the courtside signage, particularly with his lock-and-load forehand. And in addition to his sponsor patches, Gonzalez wore his emotions on his sleeve, never leaving doubt as to his state of mind. Last season, tired of what he calls "all the ups and downs," the flayin' Chilean contacted veteran coach Larry Stefanki--a Californian with a New Age vibe--in search of a calming influence. Under Stefanki the 26-year-old Gonzalez has toned down both his on-court emotions and go-for-broke style. In his first six matches in Australia, a run that included wins over James Blake and second-ranked Rafael Nadal, Gonzo hit 307 winners while committing just 130 errors. (Sixty-forty is a good ratio.) "When you play like this," he says, "tennis is so much more fun."

The fun ended against Federer. While the Mighty Fed hadn't lost a match since last August, there was a sense in the locker room that he was ripe for the taking, that as Andy Roddick (among others) suggested, the gap was closing. While Federer never directly admitted it, there were indications that he was rankled by this talk. His semifinal evisceration of Roddick--a 6--4, 6--0, 6--2 masterpiece that Roddick gamely described as an "absolute beating"--was a forceful statement. In the final Federer neutralized Gonzalez with defense and superior strategy and prevailed 7--6, 6--4, 6--4.

Federer became the first male since Bjorn Borg at the 1980 French Open to win a major without dropping a set, all the while playing his typically ornate tennis. Federer didn't pound winners so much as he swept them and flicked them with a majesty that suggests that brute force is beneath his dignity. As a courtside sign read: QUIET: GENIUS AT WORK.�"It all came together nicely this tournament," he said. "I felt so relaxed, it was a joke."