Good stuff at Staples Center Monday night, and it wasn't even Kobe throwing one in from beyond the three-point arc.
Yes, Virginia, this was tennis, but not your country-club, dress-up-in-Filas-and-pat-the-ball-around-until-lunch variety. This one had sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Oh yes, lots of cash, too. And even some philanthropy. Fox will have rounds of meetings tomorrow to try to figure out how it missed this one. It was, clearly, the Best Damn Tennis Show, Period.
The news is that Maria Sharapova beat Serena Williams in three sets in the WTA's season-ending tournament. But that doesn't even come close to covering this one.
The Billboard Girl won the Almost Grand Slam. The Staples people who promoted this event, and took a huge bath on it the last two years, coined the slogan that it was a tournament of eight women, six days and three million dollars. They got everything right except the number of women. They had seven women and a 17-year-old, and, guess what? The 17-year-old won. Back to the slogan drawing board.
Not only did the 17-year-old, Sharapova, win, but she made the marketing guys look smart. They had seized on her, ah, tennis assets and posed her on billboards around the city, leaning against a tennis net with blonde pony tail flowing and long legs displayed. There were those in the media who, straight-laced and rigid in their ways, objected strongly and publicly to the use of a 17-year-old as a sex symbol.
But Monday night, Sharapova showed that she is more than just a pretty face, legs, arms, eyes, hair, teeth, etc.
She won in three sets, but it was among the most unusual three sets you will ever see. Sometime in the first set, she said the first game, Williams strained a stomach muscle serving. By the time the third set was about to be played, a trainer was a regular visitor and Williams had taken a five-minute break backstage.
When she returned, the Staples music man, on his game Monday, played the theme from "Welcome Back, Kotter." When she hit her first serve of the third set, it was clear that she was going to have to win this match on ground strokes and defense, because the serve was reminiscent of days of old in women's tennis, when France's Francoise Durr used to play doubles by patting a little serve toward her opponent and running alongside it to the net.
