French Open heals all for Henin

A pipsqueak born in an old Belgian steel town 189 miles up the road stood alone on dirt in the elegant city Saturday as 15,000 applauded her and reinforced an uncanny reality.

She rules this place. By the time another routed finalist jogged up to shake her hand, it had grown clear you just can’t beat Justine Henin here anymore, seeing as how nobody has in the last three French Opens.

You can’t even get a set, seeing as how nobody has in the last two French Opens.

You can’t even beat her when her friends’ section has three striking potential distractions.

“It’s like my garden,” Henin said.

Inarguable, but if it’s tricky for a maestro to play for her first Grand Slam tournament title since filing for divorce, it might be downright delicate playing before the three siblings from whom she’d been estranged since 1999. Yet in a 6-1, 6-2, 65-minute victory over quaking 19-year-old Ana Ivanovic, Henin saw in herself a knack she hadn’t realized: She’s a champion compartmentalizer.

“Yeah, I’ve been a little bit surprised, because it’s been hard for me, everything I lived in the last few months, ups and downs, you know, I mean, good things, bad things,” Henin said. “And then I just realized that it’s life.”

Thereby did siblings David, Thomas and Sarah, absent during the first nine Grand Slam finals Henin played, materialize at the 10th alongside her coach of 11 years, Carlos Rodriguez, just behind the baseline from which Henin began the match. Students of tennis wondered whether playing for them might avert Henin from playing against Ivanovic.

“We asked ourselves that,” said Thomas, 31. “She assured us it was OK.”

Thereby did three siblings, absent for the first five grand slam tournament titles Henin won, hear themselves thanked during the champion’s post-match remarks.

“We were surprised,” said David, 33. “She wasn’t obligated to do that. She wanted to do it.”

From the time Henin became famous as a 2001 Wimbledon finalist against Venus Williams to the winter of 2007 when she skipped the Australian Open to cope with her divorce, she sporadically begged for privacy.

Nobody knew why she and her father and siblings remained estranged, and nobody does, still.

“She went to live her life and we lived ours,” Thomas said. “She needed to be in the bubble. We thought we’d become close again after her career, but strangely, it happened now.”

By David’s account, it happened this spring. “I had a serious car accident at the beginning of April,” he said. “I was in a coma for two days, in danger of dying. Sarah called Justine and told her. Two days later when I woke up, she came to visit me. It was very moving. It boosted my morale. It was something horrible that turned into something good.”

They’d lost their mother, Francoise Rosiere, to cancer when Justine was 12. They had lost an older sister, who died in a car accident as a toddler.

“Then we lost Justine,” David said. “Those things happen to a lot of families, but with us it was more public.”

Saturday, they were there to watch their sister. From the tunnel over which her siblings stood, Henin walked out as the No. 1-ranked women’s tennis player and the 2003, 2005 and 2006 French Open champion, whose 12 sets in the tournament had included zero tiebreakers and only one that forced her to win seven games.

On the other side stood the 6-foot-tall Ivanovic, towering to Henin’s 5-foot-5. Ivanovic was the last Serb at this French Open that boasted three Serbian semifinalists (one man, two women). She was also a 19-year-old in her first Grand Slam final, two days after her first Grand Slam semifinal.

How far would her nerve endings fray? All the way to her service toss.

“It was going everywhere,” Ivanovic said, and she began to catch it rather than serve, causing delays that prompted jeers.

“So I couldn’t really control it,” Ivanovic said with good cheer. “So I start to think more about that instead of my game. And also, I was too much focused on the serve, trying to toss the ball right, so I didn’t totally think about moving well or where I should play.”

That would qualify as a textbook entry on how not to play a wizard in her garden.

Half an hour in, Henin led by 5-1, Ivanovic’s errors spraying glaringly, and the remainder became a formality. The bottom half of the draw through which the seventh-seeded Ivanovic emerged had earned its two weeks of putdowns. Ivanovic would go into the files with Henin-hammered French finalists Kim Clijsters (6-0, 6-4), Mary Pierce (6-1, 6-1) and Svetlana Kuznetsova (a relative tiger at 6-4, 6-4).

The only curiosity would be the contents of the envelopes Henin kept opening during changeovers. They would be reminders to concentrate and such, from Rodriguez. They would be superfluous.

“She’s born on clay,” Rodriguez said.

After a forehand volley winner, she threw her racket and leaned over onto the net, having done something oddly unprecedented. She’d won a Grand Slam event in front of three siblings she didn’t so much as see for seven years.

Then they played the Belgian national anthem -- a routine around here -- and she dedicated her title to them, and one of them, Thomas, said, “It was a wonderful day.”

That left only the question of when her father, Jose, might come get a title dedicated to him. He baby-sat a grandson Saturday in Belgium, watching on TV with Justine’s uncle in a restaurant.

“It’s very difficult for him, very emotional,” David said, but added, “The next year, he can come for the next victory of Justine.”

That doesn’t seem so presumptuous.

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Unbeatable

Longest French Open match-winning streaks for women in the Open era:

*--* Chris Evert 29 1974-75, ‘79-81 Monica Seles 25 1990-92, ’96 x-Justine Henin 21 2005-07 Steffi Graf 20 1987-89 Chris Evert 19 1985-87

*--*

x-current

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Source: Associated Press