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Clijsters balancing work and family life pretty well

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This isn’t the life of most top-ranked pro athletes. But it is Kim Clijsters’ life and it is working.

The mundane duties of being mother to 2-year-old daughter Jada and being wife to former Villanova basketball player Brian Lynch aren’t interfering with Clijsters’ job, which is slapping masterful groundstrokes past women who mostly don’t have kids or husbands, who don’t have to do the grocery shopping or the diaper changing or the nose wiping.

When Clijsters won the U.S. Open last September in her first major tournament after a two-year retirement, she celebrated by having an on-court happy dance with Jada.

And when Clijsters was bounced badly out of the Australian Open, a 6-0, 6-1 loser to Nadia Petrova, instead of booking the first flight out of Melbourne, Clijsters, Lynch and Jada stayed an extra two days for fun. As Clijsters said, “I didn’t want to leave with unhappy memories. I wanted to return to Melbourne next year and think of good things.”

Clijsters, 26, is the rare athlete keeping prime-time physical skills intact while acquiring lifetime wisdom.

It will be difficult to find someone at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden not smiling when Clijsters plays at the BNP Paribas Open, which begins with main-draw play for the women on Wednesday and the men on Thursday.

The top-seeded woman is Svetlana Kuznetsova and the field includes 19-year-old U.S. Open runner-up Caroline Wozniacki, who is seeded second, and Maria Sharapova, a three-time major winner who is seeded 10th and still looking for the winning results she had before her shoulder surgery in 2008.

The highest-ranked American in the women’s draw is surprise U.S. Open quarterfinalist Melanie Oudin, 18, who is ranked 41st in the world and scheduled to play 27-year-old Italian veteran Roberta Vinci in the first round.

Clijsters, the defending U.S. Open champion, is seeded 14th. Her ranking is up to 17th in the world. It takes awhile to reach that top level after changing lives, leaving tennis, becoming a wife and mother, then coming back.

It takes a different kind of focus as well. Life isn’t all about practice and training and matches and what Clijsters wants and needs. It demands that Clijsters take less time for herself, and that’s been fine.

“Things are totally different now,” she said. “Before, everything was based around me. Now, when I come home from practice I have to make sure I’m home for lunch, pick up food from the supermarket, spend time with Jada.”

Clijsters and fellow Belgian comeback girl Justine Henin, were drawn so they would not face each other here until the finals, should they both advance.

Henin would have to win an extra match to get that far. Her return to the circuit is so recent that Henin needed a wild card to get into the field and is unseeded. She will play Magdalena Rybarikova of Slovakia Wednesday in the third match on Stadium 1 (play begins at 11 a.m.)

The two have played only once since their mid-career sabbaticals, in Brisbane, Australia, last January. Clijsters won 6-3, 4-6, 7-6 (8-6).

Clijsters, however, will forever be a side note in two tremendously controversial moments involving Serena Williams.

Last September at the U.S. Open, when a late foot fault prompted Williams to threaten a lineswoman in the semifinals, Clijsters was the opponent. And in 2001 at Indian Wells, when the crowd raucously booed Williams in the finals, bringing her to tears, Clijsters was the opponent.

Clijsters’ response on each occasion was to step back and act neither unhappy nor ungracious.

“People talk to me all the time about that,” Clijsters said of the U.S. Open. “We’re way past that. Serena has apologized, and to me there’s nothing more to say.”

Except that Clijsters wishes Serena and her sister Venus Williams were in this field. They’ve boycotted the tournament since the 2001 incident, which included the crowd booing Venus during the semifinals when she withdrew at the last minute against her sister, citing tendinitis in her knee.

“If they came back,” Clijsters said, “I’m sure the crowd would be 100% in their favor. Obviously, I would like to play against the best and it would be good to have Venus and Serena back at Indian Wells.”

But since the Williams sisters are missing, it is the Belgian rivalry that may dominate this tournament.

Men’s draw up: Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal are the top three seeded players. U.S. Davis Cup teammates John Isner and Sam Querrey could meet in the third round. Federer could get flashy Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis in the third round as well, plus top American Andy Roddick in the quarterfinals and fourth-seeded Andy Murray in the semifinals.

diane.pucin@latimes.com

twitter.com/mepucin

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