A Stumble Is Surprising, but It’s No Longer Rare

Serena Williams may yet hold up a trophy in Paris this spring. She and Bob Bryan are, for now, still entered in mixed doubles. But there can be no debate that the big one got away at the French Open on Tuesday evening as Williams, assailed by doubts in the city she considers a second home, found herself unable to summon the consistency or, more surprisingly, the nerve to win.

As bravely as Virginie Razzano of France played in her 4-6, 7-6 (5), 6-3 victory, as poignant as her story was and remains, Williams was in prime position to improve her phenomenal record in first-round Grand Slam singles matches to 47-0.

She was two points from victory in the second-set tiebreaker at 5-1.

Even after Razzano won six straight points and then rolled to a stunning 5-0 lead in the third set, Razzano sent numerous signals that her big lead was not secure.

But Williams, the rightful pretournament favorite, could not take the hint. Though she saved seven match points in one of the wildest final games in professional tennis history, she could not save the essential: missing returns off weak second serves, flailing at shots instead of biding her time, stumbling where her footing earlier in the match had been sure.

“I’ve never seen her tighter, and I’ve never seen her choke more,” Lindsay Davenport, once Williams’s rival at the top of the game, said of the tiebreaker as she left Roland Garros on Tuesday night.

“It was complete nerves for whatever reason,” Davenport said. “There was no reason to get tight in the tiebreak, and she did, and she was so tight even that last game. She had five break points, and she couldn’t put returns into play. It was like she just completely froze, and I don’t think anyone’s used to seeing, of all players, her freeze.”

The fair question now is whether Williams can thaw in time for Wimbledon and the other major prize she will be chasing on grass this summer, the Olympics at the All England Club.

History, on and off the court, indicates that it is never wise to count out a Williams, particularly a Williams on a mission. Neither Serena nor her sister Venus have endured as their rivals have faded by meekly accepting their lot. But Tuesday represented the latest in a string of Grand Slam disappointments for Serena Williams since she returned to the tour last June after health problems that included two foot operations and blood clots in her lungs.

Williams was on a similar roll going into the 2011 United States Open final and came out flat against Samantha Stosur, who had never won a major singles title. Williams arrived in Australia in January looking fit and energized, only to tear ankle ligaments in a warm-up tournament and then lose early at the Australian Open to the unseeded Ekaterina Makarova.

Then came Paris, where Williams arrived after the most complete and convincing clay-court buildup of her career. She won 17 straight matches on clay before withdrawing from the Rome tournament to protect a back injury.

“Three in a row,” Davenport said of the Grand Slam defeats. “I think the loss to Stosur was huge. Based on her buildup and how she was playing on the hard courts going in there, that was quite a surprise. And then coming here, this is obviously a bigger surprise.”

She continued: “It starts to add up.”

Williams appeared, if anything, too intent on making up for past disappointments at the French Open, where she has not made it past the quarterfinals in singles since 2003 and where she has won the title only once, in 2002. How else to explain her agitation and gaffes with the match in her grasp late in the second set? Of the six points she lost in a row from 5-1, five ended with her errors and another with her error in judgment as she let a ball bounce past, thinking it was long before the chair umpire, Eva Asderaki, ruled it was good.

Williams was a strange brew of passive and overaggressive against Razzano, who once beat Venus Williams in Tokyo with Serena watching in the stands but who is now 111th in the world with a losing career record in Grand Slam tournaments.

An aggressor by nature and design, Williams was often the one behind the baseline as Razzano stepped inside the court and took Williams’s shots on the rise to deprive her of time. The most intimidating server on tour, Williams put only 52 percent of her first serves in play and won just 46 percent of the points off her second serve.

Razzano — whose fiancé and coach died last May shortly before she played in the 2011 French Open at his request — was clearly inspired by this opportunity.

“They don’t have the same game,” Razzano said of the Williams sisters. “But I’d already thought a bit how I wanted to play Serena. It’s been three days that I haven’t slept very well, three days that I haven’t been able to sleep before midnight, 1 in the morning, tossing and turning in my bed. I was already sharpening my teeth to play Serena.”

Williams has plenty of scar tissue at Roland Garros, dating to another wild ride in 2003, when she was beaten by Justine Henin in a stormy semifinal. But Tuesday’s match was more reminiscent of a match here in 2008, when she also was in the midst of a convincing season and unexpectedly lost in the third round to Katerina Srebotnik.

“Coming up to Paris, I think everyone expected me to win, as well as myself, and I just crashed and burned,” Williams said of that tournament afterward.

Now she has crashed again two rounds earlier. But would we really be surprised if Williams roared back to win Wimbledon?

“Never surprised,” Davenport said. “But if I had to guess right now, I would say it would be a huge accomplishment to get over everything that happened.”