Davenport gets through coolly

The number on Lindsay Davenport’s mind was 101 degrees.

And it had nothing to do with temperature readings in the desert. Her 9-month-old son Jagger fell sick for the first time in his young life and Davenport took him to the tournament doctor at the Pacific Life Open on Sunday.

“I was stressed out of my mind, yelling at my husband because my son has a fever and he’s not sleeping,” Davenport said. “ . . . I think it was mostly because he’s teething they think. But he has a rash all over his body and he’s really cranky. It’s the first time it happened. It was a nightmare yesterday.”

Davenport did have reporters in the interview room laughing when she told a story about Jagger’s size.

“He’s huge. He’s great,” she said. “We take it as a compliment. Someone the other day was like, ‘Oh, your son’s so big, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, thank you.’ She goes to me, ‘I had a friend who had a really obese baby.’ ”

Perhaps failing to realize that the words obese and baby should never meet in the same sentence, the woman kept on talking.

“ ‘Don’t worry, when he grew tall, he grew out of it,’ ” Davenport said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ . . . That was pretty funny.”

In any event, stress is all relative. In the old days, it probably meant a lousy practice or going three sets against an untested teenager, not trying to calm a crying infant.

This doesn’t mean the old stresses aren’t capable of creating moments of anxiety. A day after Jagger’s woes, his mother was locked in a third set against an 18-year-old from China, summing it up: “Just kind of drawing everything out. It was like a slow death.”

But Davenport won the last four games, beating Yung-Jan Chan, 6-4, 5-7, 6-2, in the third round Monday, and will next play Marion Bartoli.

Of the eight women’s matches, Davenport’s was the only three-setter.

In men’s third-round play, second-seeded and defending champion Rafael Nadal took the first four games and breezed against teenager Donald Young, 6-1, 6-3; No. 9 James Blake beat Carlos Moya, 6-3, 6-4; and in an all-French showdown, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga beat Paul-Henri Mathieu, 7-6 (5), 6-4.

Tsonga’s victory set the stage for an appealing fourth-round match against Nadal, a rematch of their Australian Open semifinal, which Tsonga won in straight sets.

“Well, going to be important to serve well, because he’s strong in his serve, and from baseline, try to play a little bit more aggressive than in Australia, no?” Nadal said. “I think he have -- he has the control of the point all the time there, so try to not repeat the same.”

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lisa.dillman@latimes.com