Tennis Tournaments

This year's prestigious event in Indian Wells is not so much a tennis tournament as a tightrope walk. Some things will be the same. The sun will mostly shine and the sky will remain mostly cloudless. People will come from Indio and India to soak up the ambience and lounge on Charlie Pasarell's plush lawn amid shade trees in the middle of the complex.

Talk about financial bailouts. As one of the biggest events in tennis started to gather steam in the desert Thursday, three of the biggest names in the women's game became notable as big losers. To be clear, that term can never apply to Maria Sharapova and Venus and Serena Williams. Among them, they have won 20 Grand Slam event titles -- Serena 10, Venus 7 and Sharapova 3. This is strictly about money. This year's BNP Paribas Open, an event that pays a $4.

Love is zero in tennis. It also is what James Blake and Fernando Gonzalez have little of for each other. Without some history, Blake's third-round match against Gonzalez in Monday's BNP Paribas Open was merely another day at the office for two players in the top 20 -- Blake 13th and Gonzalez 17th. Both are big names in the sport, Blake for the United States and Gonzalez for Chile.

For Dinara Safina, it is time. Lil' sister deserves her own picture over the fireplace. No more hand-me-downs. No tennis rackets with man-sized grips. No more keys to big-brother's old convertible. Safina is now four tennis-match victories away from not having to pass the potatoes first at the dinner table at home. If she gets to the final of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells next weekend, she will become the No. 1 player in the world.

So, Ivan Ljubicic, how did you spend your 30th birthday Thursday? Do any fun stuff? Any good gifts? Oh, we forgot. You had a tennis match. Quarterfinals of that big deal over at the Indian Wells Garden. The one in the big, fancy stadium with all those signs for that French bank, BNP Paribas. Gotta feel sorry for those guys, being a foreign bank and all. They can't put their hands into our tax-paying pockets like our banks. So, you're gonna wear that orange shirt again.

The air barely moved in the desert Saturday at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells. The same thing could be said for a couple of men's tennis players. When Andy Roddick beat defending champion Novak Djokovic in one quarterfinal, the effort on the Serbian's part was barely discernible. And he admitted as much afterward. Movement was also hard to define on the part of Juan Martin Del Potro in the other quarterfinal, but that was not so much for lack of effort as lack of a motor.

Vera Zvonareva and Rafael Nadal won wind-aided tennis titles Sunday. If they were track stars, they'd put asterisks next to their names. The weather in the desert, at this BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, had gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Hot, cloudless days turned to nasty, swirling wind. The palm trees thrashed, the light poles around the outside courts bent, and the tennis balls inside the 16,000-seat stadium acted more like Tim Wakefield knuckleballs.

Maria Sharapova still wears her long, shimmering silver earrings. She still elevates the sound of her ground strokes, the grunts that reverberate throughout stadiums and indicate the effort needed to produce her whip-like forehands and backhands. What Sharapova is now trying to locate is a new comfort zone with her serve.

It's a question that can fill hours of airtime on sports talk radio, or countless threads on online message boards. And Dinara Safina knows it's coming whenever it can be asked. How can a player be ranked No. 1 in the world without any Grand Slam titles? Helpless though she may be to provide a satisfying answer, she at least seemed prepared Monday at the L.A. Women's Tennis Championships, an event she won last year, are being held at Carson.

On Monday, Ana Ivanovic talked about pressure as if it were a lost love. "I realized how much I missed it and how it made me sharper, and, in some ways, more focused. "Then I realized I wanted it back." At the L.A. Women's Tennis Championships on Tuesday night in Carson, she played without it, at least the intense public kind, because the ranking "No. 1" is no longer in front of her name, and it hasn't been since she had it for two stints of 12 weeks last year.