Adieu, Fabrice. Or is it finally au revoir? Fabrice Santoro played what everyone assumes was his final match on home soil yesterday, in what was the end of a rare tennis fashion. We not only saw a man who invented shots no one else would imagine playing but he was still bamboozling the opposition as he approached his 37th year.
The roof was almost taken from the Palais Omnisports yesterday when Santoro beat his retreat, exchanging sweaty shirts with American James Blake at the end of a straight-set first-round defeat. The Net Post was happy to sit in on his press conference, from which the answer to an initial question (yes, it was about the emotion of calling it a day) showed how much we shall miss him.
Why spoil the quote by interrupting it? “Before coming onto the court, I was in the locker room with two close friends and my dad. We were joking. We made a few photos. We tried to immortalize the moment,” he said. “We knew it might be the last time. When I left the locker room, I immediately focused on the match. I knew I was ready, because I practiced very well during the past days. I worked hard, I had no pain. I was playing well during practice, but this doesn’t mean you can play a high-level match. So I wasn’t sure.
“I was able to hold my serve. I was the first one to break him. It was a very intense match with high-level tennis. But that feeling of thinking [as I was] coming out of the locker rooms that it might be the last time I would walk down those steps and be in the middle of this huge arena is something very difficult to express. Although I am the one who made the decision eleven months ago to put an end to my career, I still know that many things are going. I’m going to miss many things, and I know the crowd will. I will miss the crowd, and even coming here to press conferences is something I will miss because we have been seeing each other for many years and all these rituals I had in my life are going to disappear.
“So something will be missing. This is why we were talking about a first death or mourning, but on the other hand, I feel relieved, because I think finally I will be able to live normally. I will ask less from my body now. I can thank my body. I was lucky, but I will be able to rest a little bit more. I respected my body but I really pushed my body as far as I could, and I really ran a lot, so you have to know when to stop, especially when I’m going to turn 37 in a month.”
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And he said he was delighted to have been playing Blake - like Santoro, a thoroughly decent man - in his final match. “Out of 48 players here, there are two or three who wouldn’t have given me a hug like Blake did. So I didn’t want to play against them.” When asked for names, Santoro replied: “It’s in my book. Just read it. [Tomas] Berdych, for example. I wouldn’t have liked that. Well, first, he [Berdych] is a very good player and he certainly would have won, but, well, this is not really important, but he would have had no emotion. And I wouldn’t have given him my T-shirt, anyway, so...”
He had all the grand slam T-shirts. He played in 69 of the major tournaments and reached one quarter-final, in the Australian Open in 2006. He played on each of the centre courts of the world, completing the set last year at Wimbledon when he lost in straight sets to one Andy Murray. He won fourteen times against players who held the No 1 ranking at the time. He is a legend.
Today it is Marat Safin’s turn. Will his career end against the Frenchman Thierry Ascione? We hope not.
Serena awaits sentencing
Having done the London rounds last week - Jonathan Ross, Simon Mayo, various book signings, probably Harrods - Serena Williams will learn from somewhere that was not on her itinerary, ITF HQ in Roehampton, whether she faces an extension of her initial punishment for the world’s most infamous foot-fault.
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It has taken the authorities a couple of months to gather all the information about the incident which brought the US Open semi-final between Serena and Kim Clijsters to an explosive climax and it is expected that a pronoucement will be made on Tuesday. Bill Babcock, the grand slam administrator, will inform the chairmen of the United States, Australia, France, Great Britain, what he has decided and ratification is expected to follow.
ITF president Francesco Ricci Bitti of Italy may have let the cat out of the bag. “I don’t think banning her from the Australian Open (a punishment open to the ITF) would make much sense, because it would penalize the people handing out the punishment,” Ricci Bitti said over the weekend. “For the grand slam committee to exclude her from a slam doesn’t seem likely. A significant financial penalty makes more sense. But it has to be significant enough for the fans (to appreciate) it. Of course it may not be significant for Serena Williams, who earns tens of millions.”
Indeed, by clinching the season-ending Sony Ericsson WTA tour championship in Doha last weekend, she set the record for single-season prize money in women’s tennis of $6.5 million. Her career prize money is a record $28.5 million. Williams was fined $10,000 after her profanity-laced outburst at a lineswoman during her semi-final loss to Clijsters, precipitated by a second-serve foot fault called when she trailed 6-5, 15-30 in the final set. The call left her match point down, the point penalty for her verbal onslaught gave Clijsters the match.
Back to the future
In the absence of both Serena and Venus Williams, the Fed Cup final went the way most judges had expected as Italy completed a 4-0 whitewash over the United States in Reggio Calabria. It was not as if Mary Joe Fernandez had not expected it would happen to her team as the WTA finals in Doha became something akin to a Serena exhibition and the amount of tape around her left thigh grew match by match.
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However, Serena’s withdrawal late on the Friday evening was a massive disappointment to the United States team and places the captain in an intriguing position. For Serena and Venus to guarantee their acceptance for the 2012 Olympic Games, they would need to play in the Fed Cup twice between 2009 and 2012 and one of those appearances would have to come in either 2011 or 2012. Maybe Fernandez will look to the future and decide to stick with the likes of Melanie Oudin and Alexa Glatch in her side and eschew the experience the Williams sisters bring. Then again, she probably won’t. But it’s an intriguing situation nonetheless.
Wild-card reins in waywardness to rise in rankings
Dominic Inglot is not a name immediately recognisable to even the most ardent of British tennis supporters. A 23-year-old who attended the University of Virginia, having been told that going to such an establishment would be the end of his prospects of becoming a pro (the Net Post will spare the person who told him that the embarrassment of revealing his name, for he has quite a reputation), is making something of a noise. Those who saw the blond-haired Inglot as a junior who would tell you that he had a great attitude but his game was a bit wayward to say the least. Clearly, his time at UV has been put to productive use.
This week, in an ATP Challenger in Charlottesville in Virginia (the tournament gave him a wild card because of his local ties), Inglot defeated two players of repute, Ilja Bozoljac of Serbia and Roko Karanusic of Serbia, before losing to American Donald Young 6-4, 6-3 in the third round. Inglot’s ranking at the start of last week was 1,104, making him Britain’s 30th ranked player. Bozoljac was No 205 on the ATP Tour and Karanusic No 164 which renders these back-to-back victories among the most impressive produced by any British player this year.
Inglot has been training at a new tennis academy in Bromley, Kent for the last few weeks with Nick Cavaday, another player who chose to join an American university to enhance both his tennis and education. “He’s got a massive game and works extremely hard,” Nick tells the Net Post. “He’s a great advertisement for the American college system.” And so their numbers grow...