Bagel isn’t Venus’ French pastry of choice in loss

If the tennis tempest ever quickens her blood pressure, the tranquil Oracene Price, mother of Venus and Serena Williams, never lets on. And so in the chatty sundown of Friday in the French Open players’ lounge, she leaned on a thick chair and gave a whirl at explaining the inexplicable.

Even given her voluminous witnessing of tennis from the front rows of the planet watching her daughters, Friday had churned out some striking abnormality when it presented Venus’ lifeless 6-0, 6-4 third-round loss to No. 31-ranked Agnes Szavay of Hungary.

This was the elder Williams sister’s worst loss in her last 142 Grand Slam matches dating to the 2001 Australian Open semifinals, and a first 6-0 loss in a Grand Slam set in 10 bustling years. Her mother and co-coach had hurried into the locker room beneath Court Suzanne Lenglen, and she had found the 28-year-old veteran far more distraught than usual.

“This was up very high” on her disappointments, Price said, later adding, “You know, never winning this one or the Australian, I think that’s her major focus right now, really.”

And while the Australian often finds Williams unluckily infirm, Price contended, the French, well . . . “She gets here, and it’s just weird. Every time she gets here, it’s just weird.”

Oddly, Venus Williams began Grand Slams at the French, a budding sensation at age 16 in 1997, winning her first round and almost beating the veteran Nathalie Tauziat in the second. It’s hard to imagine that 12 years on, even given the obstacle of clay, the great champion probably won’t ever win this Grand Slam and hasn’t surpassed the third round in the last three years.

Weird? It has been, from her awkward No. 26 seeding in 2007 (which fetched Jelena Jankovic for a third round), to her loss in the dark to Flavia Pennetta in 2008, to the surrealism of a gorgeous Friday midday.

“You know, I’m used to beating people 6-0,” the world’s No. 3 player said. “I’m not used to my shots not going in and losing a set 6-0. So it was completely foreign ground for me.”

She botched some early gimme shots in a way that can linger. She fought her service toss in the wind. She looked completely out of sorts. By the time she trailed 5-0 and love-30, the crowd began encouraging her as if she were some overmatched scrapper rather than one of the game’s great champions.

“C’mon, Venus!”

“Allez, Venus!”

“Fight!” her mother offered once.

One day after fending off both match point and Lucie Safarova in a match that spilled from Wednesday night to Thursday, she looked half a step slow to Szavay’s pelts into the corners.

Against a rising 20-year-old opponent who did not play well, Williams would follow masterful points with clunky ones, or “back to la-la land,” as her mother put it. She had a point for 5-3 in the second set and quickly mashed a backhand long on that.

“Sometimes the more you miss, the harder it is to make the next one,” Williams said.

Sometimes, it all just looks weird.

“It wasn’t there,” said the mother who has seen it all. “There was something missing today. . . . She probably doesn’t understand it herself, but I think I know what it is. I think it’s really the emotion. Sometimes a match is so emotional” -- as the escape against Safarova -- “kind of draining mentally.”

That seemed as plausible as anything, but so did a word Price used three times, a word that after all this tennis viewing, she can use and then move on, this word:

“Weird.”

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chuck.culpepper@yahoo.com