She Looks Too Legit to Quit

Lindsay Davenport, pondering retirement, is noncommittal about her plans beyond this season, so her appearance Sunday in the championship match of the JPMorgan Chase Open at the Home Depot Center may have been her last.

If so, she sent herself out the door with a fitting farewell.

Playing in the tournament final for the eighth time in nine years, Davenport surprised a record crowd of 8,161 by cruising past top-seeded Serena Williams, 6-1, 6-3, in only 65 minutes to win the event for the fourth time.

It was only her third victory in 12 matches against Williams, who had won nine of 10 since Davenport won their first meeting in 1997.

And it wasn’t close.

“I didn’t play the way I wanted to today,” Williams told the crowd afterward during the on-court awards ceremony, “but all credit to Lindsay.”

Only eight days ago in Palo Alto, in the hours before a championship match against Venus Williams in the Bank of the West tournament at Stanford, Davenport felt the weight of a 10-match losing streak against the Williams sisters.

She hadn’t defeated either sister since 2000, losing six times to Venus and four to Serena, but that day she outlasted Venus, 7-6 (4), 5-7, 7-6 (4).

On Saturday in Carson, she defeated Venus again, leading, 7-5, 2-0, when Williams pulled out because of a wrist injury suffered before the match.

And on Sunday she dominated against an error-prone Serena, for the first time in her career plowing through both sisters in the same tournament.

“Given the players I’ve been able to beat the last two weeks in some big matches is a big step,” Davenport said. “... I’m really building and want to keep the momentum going.”

Davenport, a Southern California native who lives in Laguna Beach, has won 10 of her 42 singles titles in California, eight in the lead-up to the U.S. Open.

Six years ago, she was runner-up in an early-season event at Indian Wells and won at Stanford, Manhattan Beach and Carlsbad leading to her victory at the U.S. Open, the first of her three Grand Slam titles. This year, she again was the runner-up at Indian Wells in March and won at Stanford and Carson, formerly the Manhattan Beach event.

Still to come: Carlsbad this week, U.S. Open next month.

And then ... retirement?

Davenport, 28, hinted at it after losing in the semifinals at Wimbledon, saying that she might have played her last match at the All England Club.

“It’s getting tougher every year to keep coming back,” Davenport, married 15 months and hoping to start a family, said Sunday. “Like I said, it’s always easier for me when I’m not on the road. I don’t enjoy not being home for long periods of time and away from my husband and friends and family.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. Obviously, I feel great right now. This is my favorite time of year to play, playing in California and the U.S. Open.

“We’ll see how I feel in November, but I never alluded to the fact that I was going to walk away soon.... I was for sure committed to finishing the year and really excited about finishing the year. It was never: ‘I’m down about playing tennis.’ ”

She was in great spirits and fine form Sunday.

She won 70% of her first-serve points and 73% on her second serves and was never broken, Williams failing to convert all six of her break-point opportunities. Davenport had only one unforced error in the first set, “a miracle for me,” she said.

By match’s end, Davenport had 12 unforced errors, the erratic Williams 29. Williams won points on only 50% of her first serves.

Williams, who in the spring ended an eight-month layoff after knee surgery by winning in Miami, hasn’t won in six tournaments since, her longest title drought since she began winning WTA tour events in 1999.

Said Williams: “It was just an awful, horrendous, terrible, miserable, um, let me think of another word, horrible day.”

*

Attendance for the week was 50,064, a record for the 34-year-old tournament. Sunday’s crowd was the largest ever for an outdoor tennis tournament in Los Angeles.