I’ve been a fan of tennis for a long time and, in fact, used to watch quite a few matches in my high school days when Chris Evert Lloyd (my favourite at the time), Martina Navratilova, Andre Agassi and John McEnroe were the hot stars of the court.

I haven’t watched many matches in a long time, but saw Serena Williams play in, and win, the Australian Open earlier in the year.  She was thrilling to watch and it was awesome to see her come back from an abysmal 80-something seed ranking to win a major Grand Slam event.

I’m not up on the current tennis scene, but saw that Serena would be playing in the US Open and saw her second and third round matches which she won easily in both cases.  I knew Williams was scheduled to take on Number 1 Seed Justine Henin in the quarter-finals so I recorded all the day’s early action only to fast-forward through three matches I had no interest in.  When I found out the Williams-Henin match was scheduled for the evening, naturally the live showing was only available on an HD channel I can’t get with my standard digital box!  GRRR!!!  So, I had to wait for the re-broadcast at 12:30am to catch the action.

With an event like the US Open and dynamic players like Serena Williams, it’s hard to stay away from the results of a match after it’s been played when you’re watching a re-broadcast.  This entails not looking at any of the headlines on Yahoo’s home page, not watching the news or any sports-related channels.  In fact, just don’t turn on the TV unless you’re watching movies or pay channels that don’t broadcast any news headlines or sports-related information at all!  This is harder than it sounds when you have digital cable!

So, finally the time arrives for the match to start and the first set was tense.  Williams gave away points in several instances when, with a little extra effort, she could have easily won.  She battled back from a 5-4 game match point advantage for Henin to make it 6-all to force a tiebreak for the first set.  Again, points were given away when they could have been won and Henin took the first set.  Then, a horrible thing happened….

Commercials rolled between the end of the first set and the beginning of the second set and when the footage resumed, it was 4 games to 1 in favour of Henin in the second set – WTF!?!?!  Needless to say, the match had more or less slipped from Serena’s grip and you could tell she wasn’t fighting for it the way she had in the first set. 

It was disappointing to see Serena eliminated from the tournament, especially after waiting all day to see the match and then having to wait for the truncated re-broadcast.  But, she seems to be a player who plays hard when she wants to and can skate through early rounds even when she doesn’t have the drive to go all the way.  It’ll be interesting to see how she performs in her next tournament.

Maybe I should get a job writing for Yahoo! Sports? lol