Women Offer Insight on First Day of Open

The WTA has joined the reality-television craze, and Monday women’s tennis players showed live just how fun, exciting, frustrating and exasperating their daily routines can be.

By turns, Serena Williams laughed at herself, or at least at a bobblehead likeness of herself, in the hot-pink outfit she wore while winning the Nasdaq-100 Open at Key Biscayne, Fla., in April, and then waxed philosophically about what is important in life.

God, family and then tennis, in that order, she said, not long after Williams, Nadia Petrova, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Ai Sugiyama chopped lettuce and blended ingredients for Chinese chicken salad alongside chef Wolfgang Puck and sampled vanilla cookies shaped like tennis rackets and topped with white icing.

Vera Zvonareva, meanwhile, spoke of the travel demands that are part and parcel of life on the tour, and Venus Williams rushed off to a practice session after fulfilling media obligations.

“We get used to it. But we’re going to be in the United States for a month now, and sometimes after a couple, three weeks you start missing home,” said Zvonareva, of Russia. “But we have to do that. It’s our job.”

The scenes and sound bites, interspersed amid matches on the first day of main-draw play in the JPMorgan Chase Open tournament at the Home Depot Center, could soon make their way onto “Real Life on the WTA Tour,” a tour-produced monthly television show that will make its debut Aug. 8 on the Tennis Channel.

“I think it’s going to be good for the tour,” Williams said. “I mean, we have some exciting players out here, and I think it’ll be fun because a lot of people think that we just play Grand Slams. And a lot of people on the tour don’t have a life, but I do.”

A three-minute trailer of the show’s first 30-minute episode proved that. Shots of Williams’ life on the court and on the fashion runway were spliced between clips of French player Sandrine Testud mugging for the camera with her 17-month-old daughter, Isabella, and there were plenty of highlights of the game’s biggest stars celebrating victory and agonizing over defeats.

Any such scenes taped Monday would have had to include 2002 tournament champion Chanda Rubin’s 6-2, 1-6, 7-6 (5) victory over North Hollywood Harvard-Westlake High graduate Marissa Irvin, and Nathalie Dechy’s 6-4, 6-4 victory over 32-year-old Conchita Martinez.

Dechy broke Martinez in the seventh game of the second set for a 4-3 edge and won, continuing a string of disappointing results for Martinez since she lost in three sets to Venus Williams in the final match of an event at Charleston, S.C., in April.

“The last couple months haven’t been really good, but I’ve had some good matches, and that keeps me going,” Martinez said. “There’s a lot of young players hitting the ball really hard, and of course, I’m not getting any younger.”

Martinez, who has lost in the first or second round of each of her last four tournaments, says she is taking her career a year at a time, but is not yet considering the real-life prospect of retirement.

“I’m finishing the year, and then we’ll see,” she said. “The last couple matches haven’t been good.”

Nineteen-year-old Ashley Harkleroad showed she is doing bettersince recovering from a sore right elbow that kept her off the court for three months.

Harkleroad beat Shinobu Asagoe, 6-3, 6-2, but her reward will be to play Venus Williams in a second-round match.

Williams, who is rounding into form after suffering an abdominal injury last year and two sprained ankles in the last year, is coming off a runner-up finish in the Bank of the West tournament behind winner Lindsay Davenport.

“It was a real step for me since Wimbledon,” said Williams, who was upset in the second round by Karolina Sprem of Croatia at the All-England Club three weeks ago.

“I really wanted to play all three events here [in California] because I felt like this year, I haven’t really had a chance to build on tournaments. This will be really a good time for me to be in tournaments, back to back to back, get some matches in, be in some tight matches and be healthy.”

* (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

JPMorgan Chase Open 2004 The schedule for singles at the Home Depot Center in Carson:

Today: 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday: 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Thursday: 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Friday: 12 p.m. and 8 p.m. (quarterfinals) Saturday: 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. (semifinals) Sunday: 1 p.m. (finals)

* Surface: Hardcourt * Ticket information: (310) 630-2020

Live television Wednesday: 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. and 7-10:30 p.m., Tennis Channel Thursday: noon-5:30 p.m., Tennis Channel Friday: 2:30 p.m.-4 p.m., Tennis Channel; 8-10 p.m., ESPN2 Saturday: 7-9 p.m., ESPN2 Sunday: 1-3 p.m., ESPN2.

Seeding

No. Player Country 1. Serena Williams United States 2. Venus Williams United States 3. Lindsay Davenport United States 4. Elena Dementieva Russia 5. Svetlana Kuznetsova Russia 6. Ai Sugiyama Japan 7. Nadia Petrova Russia 8. Vera Zvonareva Russia 9. Patty Schnyder Switzerland 10. Anna Smashnova-Pistolesi Israel 11. Francesca Schiavone Italy 12. Silvia Farina Elia* Italy 13. Fabiola Zuluaga* Colombia 14. Chanda Rubin United States 15. Amy Frazier United States 16. Meghann Shaughnessy United States *Eliminated in MondayÕs first round

Singles prize money The winnerÕs purse is part of a total of $585,000 in tournament prize money. The winnerÕs purse in the doubles is $29,000.

Winner: $93,000 (195 Points) Finalist: $47,800 (137 Points) Semifinalists: $24,550 (88 Points) Quarterfinalists: $12,700 (49 Points) 3rd Round: $6,520 (25 Points) 2nd Round: $3,360 (14 Points) 1st Round: $1,730 (1 Point)

Source: WTA Tour