Prior to the start of this week’s Western and Southern Financial Group Open, two reporters from Cincinnati.com interviewed a number of the tournament’s top seeds. Ordinarily this wouldn’t merit much attention, except for the fact that the two interviewers were local 13-year old tennis players.

The resulting interviews, two to three minutes each, are a joy to watch. The girls are having the time of their lives, they handle themselves remarkably well for middle schoolers (if I were interviewing my tennis heroes while in seventh grade, I’d probably have sounded like Chris Farley on those old SNL sketches — these girls ask good questions and sound like seasoned professionals) and the players are great sports.

You can view them all at Cincinnati.com. Here’s the interview with Kim Clijsters:

Cute isn’t a word often used here on Busted Racquet, but it qualifies here. Clijsters talks to the girls like they’re equals, as do all the other players. I guess after talking to Pam Shriver for years, the players appreciate being on the receiving end of some decent questions.

Other highlights: Katherine looking up Jelena Jankovic before telling her she’s "obviously very athletic", Elena Dementieva saying she doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter because she’s "very lazy" and French Open champion Francesca Schiavone offering to be best friends with Katherine and Abigail and then giving them a hug at the end.

MASON, Ohio (AP)—Jelena Jankovic is hoping to get tournament-tough with a long string of matches. Kim Clijsters just wants to get back into the flow.

Living up to their Cincinnati Open seeds will help both players reach their goals.

The second-ranked Jankovic is the defending champion and No. 1 seed and the seventh-ranked Clijsters is seeded fourth in the $2 million Western & Southern Financial Group Women’s Open, which started Monday. Jankovic is coming off a first-round loss last week in San Diego, her first match since injuring her left ankle in the second round of a tournament in Slovenia in mid-July.

“My ankle’s OK,” said Jankovic, who also had to retire from her fourth-round match at Wimbledon with lower back problems. “I’ve been able to practice the last couple of days. Now, it’s feeling good. I’m looking forward to getting back to playing.”

The former No. 1 player, who got a first-round bye, is scheduled to play qualifier Vera Dushevina in the second round. The 71st-ranked Dushevina advanced in straight sets, beating Anastasia Rodionova 6-2, 7-6 (7) on Monday.

Ana Ivanovic lost the first set and was down 2-4 in the second before charging back to win that set in a tiebreaker and go on to upset ninth-seeded Victoria Azarenka 2-6, 7-6 (6), 6-2 in a grueling first-round match that lasted 2:14 on Monday night. The 62nd-ranked Ivanovic built on the momentum of winning the tiebreaker to break Azarenka’s serve in the first game of the third set and never looked back, clinching the win with a successful challenge on match point.

Clijsters, the defending United States Open champion, also got a first-round bye. The Belgian is scheduled to meet No. 35 Dinara Safina in a second-round rematch of last year’s quarterfinal. Safina, who beat Clijsters in straight sets last year, advanced Monday with a 7-5, 6-4 win over Roberta Vinci.

Clijsters hasn’t played a tournament since losing in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon, settling for playing World Team Tennis and doubles.

“It’s been a while,” she said. “I’m looking forward to playing a match. It doesn’t matter who I play.”

Serena and Venus Williams both had to skip the tournament because of injuries. Serena, ranked No. 1, is out with a foot injury, while a knee problem has sidelined No. 4 Venus.

In other first-round matches on Monday, qualifier Bojana Jovanovski rallied to upset 14th-seeded Aravane Rezai 4-6, 6-3, 6-4. The first-round loss was the second straight for Rezai. The 19th-ranked Frenchwoman lost in the first round last week at San Diego.

Jovanovski, ranked 98th, will meet Akgul Amanmuradova in the second round. Amanmuradova cruised past Kimiko Date Krumm 6-1, 6-2 in a matchup of qualifiers.

Shahar Peer became the first seeded player to advance with a win when Olga Govortsova retired because of heat illness, giving the 13th seed a 6-3, 4-1 win. Peer will meet Nuria Llagostera Vives in the second round. Vives needed three sets to eliminate Vania King, 3-6, 6-3, 6-1, while Sara Errani moved on with a 6-4, 6-2 win over Jamie Hampton.

Temperatures reached the mid-90s during the afternoon matches.

Sixteenth-seeded Marion Bartoli followed Peer into the second round, rolling over Anabel Medina Garrigues 6-4, 6-0. Bartoli will face Alona Bondarenko in the second round. Bondarenko came from behind for a 3-6, 6-2, 6-3 win over Dominika Cibulkova.

Qualifier Monica Niculescu also won, knocking off 91st-ranked Sabine Lisicki 6-3, 6-0, while Yaroslava Shvedova defeated Alla Kudryavtseva 7-5, 6-4, qualifier Ayumi Morita knocked off Arantxa Parra Santonja 7-6 (7), 6-2, and Alisa Kleybanova beat Alexandra Dulgheru, 6-4, 6-4.

Howdy. Most of the news today came out of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic (Washington), where they’ve experienced a severe tropical storm and tsumani that last night washed away nearly an entire generation of U.S. players. If you want to check out my thoughts on that, go over to the ESPN tennis home page, my post should be up shortly.

—Andy Roddick’s case is particularly interesting. He’s down to No. 9 now, and it’s pretty clear that he’s struggling to keep his place in the tennis elite. If you graph Roddick’s results through his career, you get a pattern of surge and decline. Nobody has so consistently and intelligently re-invented himself in his ongoing quest to remain in the hunt at the top, nor found the slope so slippery. But I give him great credit for repeatedly coming up with ways to catch a new puff of wind. This is one guy who won’t retire and be haunted by “what ifs?”

At 27, Roddick is nowhere near the end of his career. But you have to wonder if there’s any more progress to be made by this seasoned, salty competitor who defined himself for a decade now as a work-in-progress. What can anyone bring to the table that hasn’t already been supplied by his succession of coaches, starting with Tarik Benhabiles and ending (thus far) with Larry Stefanki? I come up blank when I ask myself that question, but who knows. . .

My feeling is that Roddick is at that stage where he just needs to keep the faith, stay in absolute top shape, pick his spots, and make the most of any opportunity that presents itself. It’s a watching and waiting game for him now, and I still believe that he’s got the competitive character to make the most of any chance that comes his way at any major but the French Open.

Sure, it would help to roll into Flushing Meadows with a final or semi from Toronto or Cincinnati under his belt, and he’s more than capable of achieving that. But even if he has a mediocre hard-court season, I think he can still be a force at the U.S. Open—as long as he believes it himself. I see certain parallels between Roddick and Roger Federer in that regard, although Federer is undergoing the process on a different, higher level. The Mighty Fed hasn’t had to expend all his energy and options to keep his position at or near the very top (the new bullet in his gun is Paul Annacone). It’s always helpful to a player when he’s got something new and promising to try.

—You saw that Coco Vandeweghe upset Wimbledon singles and doubles finalist Vera Zvonareva at the Mercury Insurance Open (San Diego). This is the first tournament Zvonareva has played since her terrific Wimbledon, but I’m left wondering if Zvonareva is feeling as good as she ought to about her Wimbledon feats. If I’m not mistaken, this thoughtful, emotional young lady cried as she saw the doubles title slip away the day after she lost the singles final to Serena Williams. This tells you something about Zvonareva, who’s always seemed happy to see a glass half-empty when she could just as soon see it half full.

I can see how Zvonareva might feel a little bitter, a little hollow inside after coming so close only to falter at the final hurdle at the two main Wimbledon events. Maybe she’s feeling like a failure, or that she got screwed over at Wimbledon. And that kind of negativity is always poisonous. Zvonareva will feel greater pressure now to build on what she achieved at Wimbledon, and she’s never handled expectations especially well. Somebody needs to sit her down and convince her that Wimbledon wasn’t the end of something, and the end of Wimbledon wasn’t a final grade. There’s no better quality in a tennis player than toughness, and the ability to see the positive side of every experience.

—After losing to Alisa Kleybanova, Jelena Jankovic floated the idea that her ankle, sore since she turned it in the Portoroz tournament, isn’t entirely healed. As a result, she said she may not be able to defend her title in Cincinnati. Kleybanova, though, was among those who weren’t buying the injury excuse. “She was actually moving pretty well today,” she reportedly said of Jankovic. 

I’m not buying the excuse either. Jankovic just needs a little drama in her life, which is fine by me because it makes our lives more fun. I say she shows up to defend in Cincy.

—I had to smile when I received an email with the subject line, U.S. Open Bigger and Greener. Turns out the “green” reference is to U.S. Open sponsor Esurance handing out free Metrocards (good for NYC subway and bus) to fans, to encourage public transportation. I guess that’s green, but forgive me for wondering how exactly this is going to work. It seems to me that nobody in New Jersey or Connecticut, accustomed to driving to the tournament, can make good use of a Metrocard, while those who are staying in the NYC are already obliged to use the public transport system. It’s a nice giveaway, but not likely to have much “green” effect.

BTW, did you know that when it comes to land requirements for energy production, the two most consumptive methods are biofuels (which require—by far—the most land) and wind farms? There’s been a well-informed backlash against biofuels and, more recently, wind farms.
It will take 128,002 square miles (an area about the size of West Virginia) to meet the federal government’s stated aim of producing 20 per cent of U.S. energy from wind, and that’s not counting the 20,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines that will required to get the electricity from windswept places to cities. Nor the lawsuits that will be filed over the degradation wind farms wreak on the environment. Even outfits like the Nature Conservancy are beginning to experience a touch of buyer’s remorse when it comes to wind power.

It’s tempting to slap the “green” label on any enterprise these days, but as always the principle of caveat emptor applies.

Jackie-Oh will be around later with a new Deuce Club. Enjoy the weekend, everyone.

– Pete

Chances are I’ve written this before, but it’s been quite a
mid-season break, hasn’t it? I’m usually sympathetic to player complaints about
the length of the schedule and the burden of the travel—I’ll take a subway ride to Chinatown rather than an around-the-world flight to Shanghai any day.
But this fall I might have a hard time stomaching any chatter about the
season being too long. What’s made the break even longer, from a
TV-spectator viewpoint, is that a tennis blackout seems to have been ordered in this country.
Jankovic, Roddick, Stosur, Isner, Berdych: I haven’t seen a point this week.

That will end soon for me, as I’m heading to Toronto
tomorrow. I’ll have a draw preview up sometime over the weekend. Before I get
there, let me take a look at a few of the developments from this past week, and what
they might mean for the near future.

***

Andy Roddick is talking about . . . retirement?

Well, not exactly, but he sounds unsure of his motivation at the moment, which is very rare for him. He’s had a tough start to his favorite part of the season.
Roddick lost to Fish in Atlanta and now Gilles Simon at the Legg Mason.
Afterward, he said he hadn’t been fully into the match, and later claimed he wouldn’t stick around for long if he wasn’t winning tournaments (he’s about to exit the Top 10 for the first time in years). I can only imagine that any speculation like this is a temporary product of disappointment, considering that he won’t even be 28 years old until the end of
this month. Then again, like Boris Becker said, a tennis
player’s life should be measured in dog years, and Roddick has been going at it pretty hard for
close to a decade. This loss aside, he doesn’t take matches off, and he’s had a career’s
worth of emotional ups and downs. This season alone has brought its share. He had
a highlight-reel moment when he beat Nadal and Berdych to win Key Biscayne, but
he’s lost his momentum since. One thing you’ve always been able to count on was his desire. The other was his
ability to beat the guys he should beat, like Gilles Simon and Mardy Fish. A tennis tour with
an uncertain Roddick would take some getting
used to.

***

Paul Annacone is going to do . . . what, exactly?

Annacone, as you may remember, came to the net on everything; he served and volleyed and he chipped and charged. He also coached one of the last of the great serve-and-volleyers, Pete Sampras. So you might think that he’ll start by getting Roger Federer to move forward more, to end points sooner, to find new ways to be aggressive and use his various skills. And I think he will try that. But it’s not necessarily that easy for someone like Federer, who is fundamentally a baseliner—not a grinder, but a guy who is comfortable winning with his ground strokes—to point his game in a different direction. For example, Federer has never subscribed to the old idea that he should just come in on everything to beat Rafael Nadal. He knows it’s not that easy to suddenly do something different, and any evolution in his approach with Annacone might at first be invisible to the layman’s eye

A few years ago, I talked to Annacone about Federer’s game for a Wimbledon preview article. I was impressed by the detail and authority he brought to his analysis. One thing he mentioned was Federer’s superior ability to create angles from the middle of the court, without taking huge risks; no one else at the time could get his opponent moving like Rog from a neutral position in a rally. I don’t know if that will be something Annacone emphasizes, or even if it’s something that needs to be emphasized, but he will be thinking about it as one of his strengths.

The other question, I suppose, is how well Annacone will fit with the established entourage that surrounds Federer. Jose Higueras had some trouble with this, but if anyone can do it without stepping on any toes, it’s the quietly studious and soft-spoken American.

***

Ernest Gulbis is . . . already tired?

I suppose the opposite of the Roddick situation would be true here: A tour
with an upbeat, rather than an ironically despairing, Ernests Gulbis would take some serious getting used to. Fortunately, it doesn’t look we’ll have
to worry about that any time soon. In L.A., Gulbis received a
point penalty (“This referee, his only fun in life is to give warnings”) for racquet abuse and looked unready for the American heat (“I got so tired”). In D.C., he retired from a match in the first
game of the second set, again due to the heat.

Gulbis is an interesting case to me. You could dismiss him as lazy. You could get frustrated with his underachieving ways. But I don’t want to do either of those things. For some reason, Gulbis makes me question
the whole idea of effort in the first place. Why do we care if he’s in shape? Why do we think “giving your best” is better than not
caring about whether you win or lose? I know we’re born with an instinct for
survival, but is a desire to “win” really the natural tendency of humans? Is
the person who tries harder morally superior to the one who doesn’t? Or has it
just been drummed into us over the last two centuries by the synchronized ideologies of capitalism and
Darwinism?

Just asking. And just thinking out loud. And just wondering why
Ernests Gulbis, of all people, brings these sacrilegious ideas to my mind.

***

Isner, Querrey, Fish: Is the
American renaissance over before it began?

These guys started the summer with a bang, but they all went
out early at the Legg Mason this week. It was a valuable reminder that they remain solidly second-tier (not an insult). But when I saw that Querrey had gone out to
Tipsarevic, my first reaction was that this was a good loss. Querrey doesn’t like to play three weeks in a row, but he must have felt obligated,
whether by appearance fees or some other reason, to support these U.S. events.
Isner’s loss to Malisse is a disappointment, but again, when you live by the
tiebreaker—Isner had won two of them in his first round—it’s very easy to die
by it as well. As for Fish, his loss to Cilic isn’t surprising, but it is the
kind of match he’s going to need to win if we’re going to believe
that this particular resurgence of his will lead somewhere.

***

Why is Melanie Oudin listening so closely?

Oudin mildly complained this week that she gets annoyed when
fans shout things like, “Get it together, Melanie,” or “Wake up,
Melanie!” I’ve never heard a player make such a specific analysis of crowd
noise before. I agree, it would be irritating to hear that, and it obviously
comes from the high expectations she engendered at the U.S. Open last year.
She must want to say back, “I am awake! You can’t get to the quarters of the U.S.
Open and beat Maria Sharapova every week!” 

Maybe the best advice we can give would be: “Don’t listen to me, Melanie! Whatever I say, do not listen!

*** 

See you on Sunday

Daniela Hantuchova and Svetlana Kuznetsova reacted to Jelena Jankovic’s penchant for blaming her losses on injuries, like she did after Alisa Kleybanova defeated her in San Diego. Jankovic has been bothered by an ankle injury.

“Everyone has a different opinion and different personality,” Kuznetsova said. “When I played in Miami I injured my shoulder and I saw stars in my eyes. I cannot blame that my shoulder was the reason that I lost. If you are injured you forget it and you go out there and you play. If you complain the press later, that’s your problem and how people are going to judge. That’s why Venus Williams gets so much respect because she doesn’t complain about injuries. The fans when they read our press conferences, they know who is who.”

Hantuchova wouldn’t single out Jankovic but said that she agrees with how Venus won’t discuss injuries after losses.

“If you can’t play, then don’t,” Hantuchova said. “But if you do, don’t complain afterward.”—Matthew Cronin

Daniela Hantuchova and Svetlana Kuznetsova  react to Jelena Jankovic’s penchant for blaming her losses on injuries, like she did after Alisa Kleybanova defeated her in San Diego. Jankovic has been bothered by an ankle injury.


“Everyone has a different opinion and different personality,” Kuznetsova said. “When I played in Miami I injured my shoulder and I saw stars in my eyes. I cannot blame that my shoulder was the reason that I lost. If you are injured you forget it and you go out there and you play. If you complain the press later, that’s your problem and how people are going to judge. That’s why Venus Williams gets so much respect because she doesn’t complain about injuries. The fans when they read our press conferences, they know who is who.”


Hantuchova wouldn’t  comment specifically on Jankovic but said that she agrees with how Venus won’t discuss injuries after losses.


“If you can’t play, then don’t,” Hantuchova said. “But if you do, don’t complain afterward.”—Matthew Cronin