Tennis/French Open: The dream had life for 61 minutes. By the end of it all Martina Navratilova, her red spectacles pulled off, wiped herself down, the splash of Roland Garros clay across her shorts from a second-set tumble testament to the beating she had just taken. Johnny Watterson reports from Roland Garros
Navratilova chased the game but essentially it was always a step ahead of her. Pro tennis is short on sentiment. More a reflection of Darwin than Dylan Thomas, the clay is always a matter of survival of the fittest, not a theatre for raging against the dying of the light.
No one will understand that better than 19-year-old Gisela Dulko. She won the match 6-1, 6-3, outplayed her opponent but was at the same time peripheral to the plot. A 64th-ranked battler who had only kudos to lose had she fallen to her 47-year-old opponent she can now look forward to telling her grandchildren she beat a player with 167 singles titles and 18 Grand Slam wins.
After the match Dulko was asked how old her mother was. "Forty-seven," she replied to much hilarity.
But from the moment Navratilova stepped onto court, mid-afternoon trouble was brewing and after scissors were produced to remove an offending logo from her hat, Dulko got stuck in.
Well, what do you do with an opponent 28 years your senior? You make her run. And run. And run. With Navratilova's inability to play the big points well, it took Dulko only 15 minutes to race to a 4-0 lead in the first set and lap it up 6-1.
Court sympathy lay with Navratilova and as Dulko moved her side to side, occasionally turning up the volume, it became clear the Argentinian might just do to the former champion what she had done to so many players in her prime.
Taking her second break point in the fifth game of the second set to break the teenager for 3-2, Navratilova raised hopes but only briefly as Dulko reacted smartly, breaking back service for 3-3 before winning the next three games for 6-3.
At the moment Navratilova has not requested a wild card for Wimbledon and any decision to take to the only grass Grand Slam will depend on how she performs at Eastbourne, one of the pre-Wimbledon tournaments. Whichever she chooses, she will not be melting into retirement again until the end of this season and in the meantime plans for a renaissance of sorts.
"We'll see how the body holds up," she said cheerily afterwards. "I need to win a few matches at Eastbourne before I would put myself on the line at Wimbledon. Of course that will be on grass, so it's a slightly different ball game to playing on clay.
"I just thought if I could get out there on the singles court, it would really help me on the doubles court. I have improved my serving just because of that already."
With over $20 million earned in prize money alone, the cash is not a motivation. Still, if the bottom fell out of her on-court world tomorrow, she could continue to earn a tidy income.
"Oh yeah," she said. "I made $400,000 last year. That's a pretty good living. Absolutely I could make a living. Thank God I don't have to but I could. If I didn't feel I deserved a place in this tournament, I wouldn't have asked for it. I don't want a hand-out."
Elsewhere, the Williams sisters were performing to type, both coming through their first-round matches untroubled.
Serena, in her first Grand Slam match since Wimbledon last year, arrived looking like an escapee from Pirates of the Caribbean. Her fuchsia-and-raspberry ensemble, which by common consent might not look out of place in a retirement home in Palm Springs, immediately attracted the attention of the fashion police.
Like her tennis, it's from a unique line. But Serena didn't hang around on the catwalk of Centre Court that long to model, winning 6-2, 6-2 in 70 minutes.
Her most recent memory of Roland Garros was last year when she was booed and jeered in a semi-final match against Justine Henin-Hardenne.
"I walked out and I was just expecting nothing. I got out there and I got nice applause," she said. "It was interesting. I didn't think anything of the semi-finals. Honestly, it didn't cross my mind. I don't think I even thought of it once when I was out on court."
Mary Pierce, a winner here in 2000, also advanced in her first game of the tournament, with a 6-2, 6-3 win over Claudine Schaul, while the sixth seed, Anastasia Myskina, defeated Alicia Molik 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 for a place in the second round.
In the last match of the day on the Suzanne-Lenglen court, seventh seed Jennifer Capriati also came through in three sets.
