It becomes Earth to Venus after her 128-mph serve

Already this French Open boasts an impressive sampling of Williams theater.

By now you know Williams theater -- the sisterhood, the glorious fashions, the cacophony, the skill, the inexplicable hairpin turns of fate on the court. It’s all here already, even after only two rounds of Venus Williams and one of Serena.

To wit: On Wednesday, Venus Williams prepared to serve, with a sudden grin and a surprising laugh and a lead of 6-1, 4-1, 40-love. If you couldn’t comprehend this burst of mirth, it meant you hadn’t looked at cozy Court One’s speed gauge from her previous serve.

That one read 206 kilometers per hour, and this is one 26-year-old with a working knowledge of metric conversions. The 206 translates to 128.002 mph, unprecedented in the annals of women playing Grand Slam tennis.

“Did I touch it? Was it an ace?” Ashley Harkleroad, the 22-year-old American, asked in a news conference.

Answers: sort of and no. It accidentally grazed her racket in mid-whir.

“I loved it,” Williams said.

And then, she loved it a bit much, for if 206 startled the ears, what followed did a trick on the eyes. “I lost a little bit” of focus, Williams said, “because I saw the 206.”

So, after clinching the game for 6-1, 5-1, then holding two match points in the next game, she proceeded to lose that game, then the next two, then another two match points in the next game, then that game plus two more to trail, 6-5.

The only woman to save match point in a Wimbledon final in the Open era wound up saving five set points against in the second-set tiebreaker.

Factoring in that Serena Williams already played a meandering first-round match with Bulgarian Tsvstana Pironkova that went 5-7, 6-1, 6-1, with a six-hour rain delay, this tournament might have the most two-pronged Williams theater since the 2005 U.S. Open, even as rain prevented Serena’s second-round match on Wednesday.

The French is their first Grand Slam together since the 2006 Australian Open, and that one featured a three-set, first-round loss from Venus, a shooing Harkleroad thought she could duplicate if she just could squeeze out of that second set.

“I really just got overconfident,” Williams said. “I was just feeling like I couldn’t lose and then it was even. So it was definitely a mistake that I’ve made before, not often.”

In the trademark mystery of Williams theater, Harkleroad, in turn, claimed she had aimed to make Williams “close it out,” because Williams had been “maybe struggling with some confidence.”

Indeed, the match drifted from overconfidence -- Williams played so brilliantly that Harkleroad once yelled at herself, “I can’t play tennis and I hate being out here!” -- to under-confidence, with Harkleroad’s two-man camp in the corner barking such encouragements as, “Make her play, she’s tight!” and, “She doesn’t want it like you do!”

Piling on the unthinkable turns, Williams served four straight faults in the tiebreaker to languish from 3-3 to 3-5, then trailed 3-6 before winning 10-8 with impressive aggression.

The serve that both thrilled and spilled Williams ranks second all-time behind a 130-mph effort from 34-year-old Dutchwoman Brenda Schultz-McCarthy last summer in Cincinnati. That happened in qualifying and surpassed both Williams’ 127 from Zurich in 1998 and Serena Williams’ 127 from pliable Cincinnati air in 2006. Schultz-McCarthy turns up again in fifth with a 126 from Indian Wells in 2007.

“And I’m really glad that I broke that record,” Williams said, “because, I mean, when I was younger, I was always trying to serve harder and harder, and now I’m not trying to serve hard. It comes hard. So it was unexpected.”

As was much.

*

French Open

Highlights from Day 4:

Uncertain future: Russia’s Marat Safin is not quite sure how much longer he wants to play pro tennis. “I’m 27 years old and already downhill on my career,” the 22nd-seeded two-time Grand Slam champion said after losing, 6-4, 6-4, 7-5, to Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia in the second round. “It would be sad to live with being a struggling player.”

* Today’s top matches: Serena Williams (8) vs. Milagros Sequera, Venezuela; Rafael Nadal (2), Spain, vs. Flavio Cipolla, Italy; Maria Sharapova (2) Russia vs. Jill Craybas.

From the Associated Press