FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — Fifty minutes into the highly anticipated Venus Williams vs. Kim Clijsters showdown on Sunday, their 11th meeting dating back to 2001, no one could quite come to grips with what they were se
eing. The scoreboard just looked wrong. There had to be some explanation. Had there been some technical glitch? Or had the two former No. 1s really just swapped 6-Love sets?
The No. 3-ranked Williams — a two-time U.S. Open titlist — hadn’t been bagled in Ashe Stadium since falling to Martina Hingis in the ’97 final. And Clijsters, the ’05 USO champion, while having hung plenty of zeros on her opponents in Flushing over the years, had never been shut out in a set at the Open herself.
The 26-year-old Clijsters looked sharp in the first set. The Belgian broke Williams to open the Round of 16 matchup, as Williams appeared limited by her problematic left knee. The new mom then cruised through the remainder of the set, hardly resembling an athlete who had stepped away from the sport for two and a half years to start a family.
But just as soon as it began to look as if Clijsters would waltz through the match all but unopposed, Williams returned the favor, blanking Clijsters in the second set.
Perched high above the court alongside Mary Carillo and Dick Enberg in the CBS booth, John McEnroe — never one to clam up — was at a loss for words. He was as puzzled as the rest of us. “What is going on out here?” he asked rhetorically. “We’re supposed to know what we’re talking about.”
For her part, Clijsters — who called the match “very weird” — later pointed to nerves as one possible explanation for her second-set walkabout.
“I felt really nervous out there today,” said Clijsters, who landed 68 percent of her first serves. “It was kind of the first time I was in a big stadium like that, in a situation like that again.”
The erratic play finally subsided in the third, and for the first time all afternoon both players managed to hold their serve in the same set. But Clijsters would score the most important break of the day to go up 2-1. Williams did have her chances later in the set, including a break-point opportunity while trailing 4-3, but the 29-year-old couldn’t convert. Clijsters was serving for the match at 5-4 when a pair of forehand errors left her in a hole. But Williams’ sent a backhand long at 15-40 and couldn’t get to a Clijsters forehand at 30-40. And on her first match point, Clijsters crushed a 101 mph serve wide that Williams stabbed for but couldn’t return.
“I’m not even going to tell you what was going on in my mind,” said Clijsters of her final serve. “I was shaking. My arm felt like 50 pounds or more. But I just told myself, ‘Look, don’t give it away like that. Just try to play aggressive tennis and let her come up with a good shot to win it.”
With an odd, seesaw 6-0, 0-6, 6-4 win, the formerly retired mom moved into the quarterfinals, where she’ll face China’s Na Li (a 6-2, 6-3 winner over Francesca Schiavone).
“She played so well, hit a lot of deep balls,” said Williams, who committed only two errors in the second set, but totaled 24 on the afternoon. “[She] just played really consistently and aggressively at the right times. I had a really slow start. Just didn’t get going. The second set I got going a lot better.”
“I felt like we never were really playing our best tennis at the same time until the third set,” said Clijsters, who shed tears of joy after the win. “In that first set, I was dominating a lot of the points. I was serving well. I think that’s where I kept her under pressure, kept her from what she’s good at — stepping into the court, playing aggressive tennis…Then I felt like in the second set, she was kind of doing that to me for a little bit…I just said to myself, ‘Okay, forget about what happened this last hour. You start from zero, and just make sure that you stay aggressive, keep serving well,’ and it worked.”
