Williams Reaches For Answers After Loss to Clijsters
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It was a bizarre match, full of momentum swings, acrobatic returns, frayed nerves, and, in the end, incredible fitness and irrepressible spirit on the part of the winner. Afterwards, Venus Williams, never known as a gracious loser, offered even more bizarre explanations for her freefall against Kim Clijsters late Tuesday night.
“She started playing, like, really bad, and it totally threw me off,” Williams said after her 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 defeat. “She started hitting, like, these really weird shots and short balls and, like, just weird stuff. Just like it threw my game off. Next thing I knew, I was playing as bad as she was, and she was able to recover, it seemed like; I just wasn’t. I guess maybe it was a good strategy.”
Williams did not stop there. She rushed her approach shots, she said, and she did not move well. Her hip began to bother her, too. Was it a new injury? “No, it’s not – I don’t think it’s anything serious. I don’t think. It’s just that sometimes, and this is normal especially being the taller you are, you know, things just – you land hard, things just go like that. Usually if I get an adjustment, I feel better.”
Let’s recap: Williams lost because 1.) Her opponent played poorly early in the match, 2.) She felt uncomfortable approaching the net, and 3.) She is too tall. If only the rest of the tour had realized how vulnerable the Wimbledon champion has been all these years.
Williams at least recognized that Clijsters was the better player – last night. But as usual, she only seemed willing to say that her sister Serena might be better than her.
“Maybe she should have won the match we played,” Williams said.
It would not have made a difference. Clijsters, the hottest player on tour this summer, had an off night, but it was still good enough to outlast Venus. Serena, far more inconsistent and in far worse physical condition, would not have withstood more than an hour and a half of Clijsters’s sprints and splits.
No matter how Williams spins the loss, Clijsters deserves the credit. The Belgian kept her wits and eventually smoothed out the forehand that troubled her early on. Should Williams have prevailed? Probably. But her height and her hips had nothing to do with her failure. Instead, her chief mistake was relying too much on the defensive game that succeeded at Wimbledon. Williams can play defense as well or better than Clijsters, but these days, not for as long.
Had she approached the net a little more often – had she taken notice of the strategy that is working so well for Mary Pierce – she might not have blown a 4-2 lead in the second set and lost seven of her last eight service games. Williams has superior agility at the net and her wingspan – there’s that height again – allows her to reach passing shots more easily than most players. A few more volleys and Clijsters would not have had the chance to find the rhythm she had in the third set, when Williams succumbed to fatigue. Williams was not too tall to win Tuesday evening, she was simply short on strategy.