Williams tightens up, loses her grip at the French Open

What a weird, whimsical French Open for Serena Williams, who arrived in a muddled clay funk but somehow departed with the kind of near-miss disappointment that can keep a fighter up nights.

“I just deal with losses a little bit better nowadays,” she said forlornly, and a good thing, for her 7-6 (3), 5-7, 7-5 quarterfinal loss to Russia’s Svetlana Kuznetsova left her slammed just behind a trap door that led to some heady goodies.

Her 3-1 lead in the third set might cling to her nimble mind for occasional haunting through the years seeing as how, being Serena Williams and all, she looked ready to make it a stunning 25-1 in Grand Slam matches since last Wimbledon. She looked ready to reach her first French Open semifinal since 2003.

Further haunts? She would appear as overwhelming favorite in that semifinal against first-timer Samantha Stosur of Australia, and then would hold psychological cards against No. 1 Dinara Safina in a potential final, having beaten Safina easily in the U.S. Open and the Australian Open. Jeez, she might have alighted at Wimbledon hunting a second Serena Slam in the Serena life, six whopping years after the first.

Then, at 3-1 and beyond, this shocker:

“In the third I had an opportunity and I got really tight, and I pretty much gave it to her. It was like, ‘Here, do you want to go to the semis? Because I don’t.’ She was like, ‘OK.’ ”

Serena Williams, tensing up with a lead? Not your typical Grand Slam.

She began here as a prognostication puzzle, a reigning U.S. Open and Australian Open champion with an 0-3 record on clay in 2009. From there she rode an odd road. She confessed to nerves in the first round, lost her voice at one point, had trouble breathing at another, noticed her third-round opponent probably cheating and barked that her foe “better not come to the net again.”

She looked skittish in the first round, mighty in the second, skittish in the third and mighty in the fourth.

Against Kuznetsova, she meandered between bleakness and excellence, a clay-court straggler one minute and a title threat the next, rallying serially from deficits before finding new deficits.

“So it was very confusing,” Kuznetsova said of the first set alone.

Having rallied from 3-0 and 5-4 (with Kuznetsova serving) in the first set, from 3-0 and 4-1 and 5-3 in the second, Williams suddenly reached a point of command in the third. She seemed utterly capable of wriggling all the way to Saturday glory.

Then: “I don’t know, maybe I put some expectations on myself that I didn’t put on myself initially,” she said. “You know, I started hitting a lot of short balls and my arm locked up a little bit.”

From undoing two match points serving at 4-5, to plunking three straight returns into the net at 5-5, to being broken at 15 to close it, her French Open snaked all the way.

“I didn’t have any expectations on it,” she said. “I was just trying to feel my way and just do the best that I could do. . . . You know, I guess I was just on a hope and a dream, and now it’s over.”

Her father and co-coach, Richard Williams, claims “Serena and John McEnroe” are the only people who have never actually lost a match but have known scoreboard inconvenience only because of bad shoes or court surfaces.

This time, though, Serena blamed her own nervous system. Gamely she had found her way all the way to regret in one peculiar French.

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chuck.culpepper@yahoo.com