WIMBLEDON CHAMPIONSHIPS: THERE IS a curious surliness about Serena Williams that never fails to draw the crowds. With her sister Venus, the two have inadvertently sold themselves as a mini travelling circus. Roll up, roll up and see the Williams. They will not do or say anything you think they should. Watch them prepare for London grass on a hard court in Florida. Watch them dip in and out of the professional circuit, playing tournaments they like, dodging those they feel are a little stinky.
Listen to Serena say the two of them will be around for decades - yes decades - and try to follow her idiosyncratic logic of training in the Sunshine State for the cloudy dank of Britain.
Hear the sixth seed mumble an uninterested, uninformative answer to a tennis question on what high jinks the two get up to in Florida pre-Wimbledon, or become positively Joycean and scholarly when asked about the retro design of her trenchcoat- tracksuit top.
"We just go home and practice in the hot sun," explained Serena yesterday. "We are so ready to leave Florida, we're like . . . we're going to do anything we can to stay at the tournament as long as we can, so we don't have to go back to that heat.
"That's pretty much our preparation."
Negative stimulus psychology more than science evidently plays its part and for trench-coat Serena, it has always been pot luck how she might fall into the spirit of grass. Each year the first few matches are fraught with the possibility of her God-given talent falling short against a player ranked in the lower rungs of the world ladder.
Having won the title in 2002-03, however, her critics are largely disarmed and although she struggled in the first set at 5-5 and a break point down yesterday, she again emerged as a clear cut 7-5, 6-3 winner over Estonia's Kaia Kanepi, who is now disparagingly known as Serena's finger food (canapé).
"I don't think I had time to play myself into this match. I think I had to start straight away. I couldn't play myself into this match. I needed to get started right away with it," she said on the issues surrounding the current buzz word, "transitioning".
Williams was beaten in the quarter-final at the Australia Open, the fourth consecutive time she has fallen at that stage in a major. At Roland Garros she fell in the third round to Katarina Srebotnik, her earliest Grand Slam exit for almost two years.
So where is the magic? "I played a lot of errors, I panicked. Anything I could have done wrong, I did wrong," was the explanation for Paris. "But you know I just try and let that go for the most part."
In between the majors Williams hit a rich vein of form and after Australia swept to victory in the next three top tier events in Bangalore, Miami and Charleston. "Yeah, it's definitely in between," she added wearily without a hint of explaining why.
Her older sister and title holder plays her first match today against Britain's 197th-ranked wild card entry, Naomi Cavaday. Given Serena's thoughts after defeating Kanepi, she will be dearly hoping for a sibling win. Little short of a total malfunction between Venus and earth, should ensure that outcome.
"I do everything Venus does," said the younger sister. "I've tried to grow out of that but I still kind of do everything she does."
The two are also known to take energy from each other during tournaments and when one goes out there is an almost personal crusade conducted against the tournament for daring to pour misery on the other.
Serena, however, will have a scheduled meeting with top seed Ana Ivanovic before the final if the two proceed through to next week. Twenty-year-old Ivanovic was barely troubled by Rosanna De Los Rios in her straight sets win but was relieved to get the first match out of the way after reaching the final of the Australian Open, winning the French Open and recently being promoted to the world number one position. She has some pressure on her to perform.
De Los Rios, however, could only take three games, one in the first set and two in the second. The 32-year-old found herself chasing balls she was never going to reach. A natural baseline player from Asuncion, Paraguay, her initial game was comprehensively pounded to incy-wincy pieces. When Del Los Rios hit it as hard as she could to Ivanovic and the Serb hit it back harder, there was a general "whoa" from the crowd.
"When you tell them I just want to play match by match, they think it's such a cliché," said Ivanovic. "But you have to work hard on grass. Everything is happening so fast." And it's only day one.
