LIGHTNESS OF BEING

The WTA lists Serena Williams as 5'9" and 135 lbs [60 k].
Spin's been put on more than just the tennis ball.

TWO INJURIES

Novak Djokovic reversed the result of the Indian Wells final with a straight-sets defeat of Rafael Nadal to reach the semifinals in Miami. There he'll face Andy Murray, who went through when Andy Roddick retired with an injured hamstring.

Both Andy [hamstring] and Rafa [sore foot] were taken out by their opponents and an injury - comes with living on the physiological edge. Nadal with his physically abusive [ to both him and his opponent] game will stress his body more and incur more injuries, especially on hard courts.
Limiting his play on hard courts is a solution, but not if you're hunting the elusive Rogerbeste.

The clay court season begins in a few weeks at MONTE CARLO, and he could still be on the mend.

EQUAL PAY

The Sony Ericsson Open has sold out for the men’s final, scheduled for Sunday, April 1 at 12 p.m.

Tickets are still available for Saturday’s women’s final, set to begin at noon.

RODDICK INJURED

Andy Roddick retired with an injury in the first set Wednesday, allowing Andy Murray to advance to the semifinals of the Ericsson Open.

Roddick took a medical timeout at 4-3 and left the court, then played six more points. On the final rally, he hit a half-volley at the net, and when Murray pulled a backhand crosscourt for a winner, Roddick didn't try for the ball.

Roddick then conceded by shaking hands with Murray. The injury leaves in doubt Roddick's availability for the U.S. Davis Cup team's match against Spain on April 6-8.

Despite the injury, Roddick remains hopeful of playing for the US in next week's Davis Cup tie against Spain.

"That's obviously playing a part in this process. I'm just kind of concerned about that," he said

"I think the medical term for the injury is 'the bottom of my ass hurts,'" he added.

"He hit a volley behind me and I kind of lunged at it and jarred something. More and more it started becoming like a sharp pain and then I started feeling it even when I was just kind of cruising around the court, not even in points.

"It wasn't getting better. It was getting worse, which isn't a good sign."

Murray became the first Brit to reach the Key Biscayne semifinals since Tim Henman in 1998. The Scotsman is ranked a career-high 12th and leads the men's tour with 23 wins – two against Roddick – in 27 matches.

Murray's opponent Friday will be the winner of the match Wednesday night between second-seeded Rafael Nadal and No. 10 Novak Djokovic.

No. 14 Shahar Peer advanced to the women's semifinals, winning the first nine games and beating No. 24 Tathiana Garbin 6-0, 6-3.

Peer's opponent Thursday will be the winner of the match Wednesday night between three-time champion Serena Williams and No. 8-seeded Nicole Vaidisova. Peer nearly pulled off an upset against Williams in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open in January, losing the third set 8-6.

Peer, a 19-year-old corporal in the Israeli Army, has a 20-6 record this year and is ranked 16th. She won 31 of 55 points on Garbin's serve and broke five times.

The other women's semifinal Thursday will be between top-ranked Justine Henin and Anna Chakvetadze. With second-ranked Maria Sharapova's loss Wednesday to Williams, Henin is assured of remaining No. 1 next week.

BOTTOM HALF TODAY

The matches pit:

Andy Murray - Andy Roddick

Novak Djokovic - Rafael Nadal

Both encounters have Mutt and Jeff overtones.

The Andy's match will pit Roddick's power against Murray's cunning and guile.

In the other Novack will try to attack net to shorten the rallies. Rallying from the baseline with Nadal is not a promising strategy.

TSN may deign to show us, lower [sports] life forms, the Andy match at 3 pm.

NEXT STOP - EUROPEAN CLAY-CIRCUIT

Top-seeded Roger Federer lost his fourth round match at the Sony Ericsson Open to qualifier Guillermo Canas, 6-7(2), 6-2, 6-7(5). The Argentine stunned the World No. 1 for the second week in a row, as Canas also defeated Federer 7-5, 6-2 in the second round of the Pacific Life Open in Indian Wells.

The Swiss appeared to be on his way to victory when he led 3-1 in the final set, but Canas rallied to force a tiebreak. Federer missed an easy volley at 4-5, giving the Argentine two matchpoints. Federer saved one with a good serve, but Canas converted the second on his own serve.

Canas is the first and only player to beat the Swiss this year, and now holds a 3-1 edge in career meetings. He, along with World No. 2 Rafael Nadal and Britain's Andy Murray, are the only players to defeat Federer since 2005.

DELICIOSO

Delic got into the main draw in Key Biscayne as a qualifier and beat France's Julien Benneteau in the first round and a seeded player, 37th-ranked Jose Acasuso of Argentina, in the second. Today, he beat the #4 player in the world, Nikolay Davydenko.Amer Delic will face Juan Ignacio Chela for the right to go to the quarterfinals.

Delic's improbable odyssey has hinged on a few serendipitous events.

When he and his family left war-scarred Bosnia in 1996, they could have been sent anywhere in the United States. It was simply good fortune that they already had a cousin in Jacksonville, Fla., where there were plenty of tennis courts and sunshine year-round.

Delic, his parents and older sister, Lejla, arrived in Florida with $1,000 in cash and four suitcases, managing to find room for a pair of tennis rackets that belonged to 13-year-old Amer. They moved in with their relatives, seven people sharing a two-bedroom apartment. Lejla, the only English-speaker, translated when their parents went on job interviews.

He eventually played his way into a scholarship slot at the University of Illinois, where he spent three years. A few months after he won the NCAA singles title in 2003, his long-standing application to become a U.S. citizen was approved.

But luck and natural talent only get you so far. Delic, 6-foot-5 with a broad wingspan and a big but erratic serve, struggled with the transition to the professional ranks, and considered going back to Illinois to finish his degree, but his parents talked him into giving it a shot for a few more weeks.

Luck had nothing to do with Delic's decision last May to start working on his game almost from scratch. "Just absolute basic stuff, which I never used to do," he said. He hired Amelia Island, Fla.-based coach Paul Pisani and started going out to practice serves with a blue-collar bucket of balls. Work, not luck, earned Delic a series of good performances. Pisani grinned as he confirmed that Delic needed work on his work ethic.

But Pisani sees Delic taking more steps forward than backward these days.

Delic did need one more piece of luck to advance Monday. Davydenko was serving for the first set at 5-4, ad in, when, on his second set point, he lashed a forehand down the line that was called good. Delic challenged as Davydenko started to walk back to his chair, and the call was overruled by the Hawk-eye system. Delic eventually would break the Russian and win a tiebreak.

Had he been on any other court, the electronic line-calling system wouldn't have been available.

KENDRICK - LUCKY LOSER

Players who didn’t make it to the final eight of the Qualifying Tournament, do not get into the Main Draw. They can sign in with the Tournament Director telling him that they are staying around and if any one in the draw withdraws, they’re available to take his spot as a Lucky Loser.

Robert Kendrick spent Thursday night drinking Grey Goose vodka and watching a couple NCAA basketball games with fellow American ATP player Robby Ginepri.

But he made sure he got up in time to make the 9:30 a.m. deadline to sign the lucky loser sheet at the tournament office -- just in case.

Good move.

Kendrick returned to his hotel and received a phone call at 10:45 a.m., with the news that he would replace Lleyton Hewitt, who withdrew because of a lower back injury.

'The first couple of mornings I thought it was kind of worthless [signing up],' Kendrick said. 'So I might have had a little fun last night and then I woke up.'

Lucky losers are the highest-ranked players to lose in the final round of qualifying, but then are able to gain entry into the main draw when a player pulls out before his first match.

Because Hewitt was seeded (18th), he received a first-round bye, so Kendrick was inserted into a second-round match with Raemon Sluiter, which he won 6-4, 6-4.

The victory was worth $18,500 for the 87th-ranked Kendrick, the second largest payday of his nondescript seven-year career. He earned $29,180 for reaching the second round of Wimbledon last year.

'I was packing my stuff,' said Kendrick, 27, just 2-7 this year.

Kendrick is one of three lucky losers to win their opening match this week. Russian Evgeny Korolev took Robin Soderling's spot (personal reasons) and Alejandro Falla of Colombia replaced Philipp Kohlschreiber (stomach illness).

Falla was practicing with Guillermo Garcia-Lopez on a practice court when he got the call to play.

'I had like a half hour to be ready,' said the 95th-ranked Falla, who dispatched Sergio Roitman 4-6, 6-3, 6-1 in a first-round match. 'I was nervous because I wasn't prepared to play.'

The farthest a lucky loser has gone in this tournament was Ivan Ljubicic when he reached the quarterfinals in 2001.

HENIN - WHAT'S ON HER MIND

When Henin appeared on the tennis scene, I looked under her visor, past her stone face, into her dark eyes which seem to be squinting in fear at the outside world “What secrets and dark tales lie behind?”

For years Henin's family life has been clouded by controversy following an extraordinary rift with her father and other male relatives. Henin's mother, to whom she was very close, died when she was 12 and five years later she left the family home for good, cutting off all ties with her father and two elder brothers, for reasons which have never been made public. The only members of the family who attended her wedding in 2002, four years after she had met Pierre-Yves, were two aunts. Her father, two brothers, sister, grandparents and paternal uncles were not invited.

Henin's late withdrawal from the Australian Open had taken everybody by surprise - her clothing sponsors had even designed a special outfit to help her cope with the Melbourne heat.

Within weeks of lifting the WTA crown for the first time, Henin, an intensely private person, announced the breakdown of her marriage, pulled out of the Australian Open, thereby, losing the world No 1 ranking to Sharapova. Two months later, however, she was back on the circuit and her return has been so successful that she goes into this week's Miami tournament as the world's leading player once again. Sharapova helped Henin along by working on her serve during the Aus Open [ Daddy, work on her serve after the Slam!!!!!!!!], and exiting Indian Wells in the early rounds.

TERMINOLOGY

MAIN DRAW - The tournament proper excluding the Qualifying tournament [ held the week prior to the MAIN DRAW].

QUALIFYING TOURNAMENT held the week before the start of the MAIN DRAW. This tournament can vary in size from 16 to 64 entrants. Only the last 4 or 8 will be put into the MAIN DRAW. These players couldn't get into the MAIN DRAW on the basis of their points.

The best players in the tournament are SEEDED and placed at specific spots in the draw according to their seeding [ how good they are]. They are separated from one another so that the best players won't play one another in the early rounds.

LUCKY LOSER is a player who played the QUALIE, but just missed being in the group of 4 or 8 that got into the MAIN DRAW. However, if a player in the MAIN DRAW pulls out of the tournament before it starts, the LUCKY LOSER will fill in his spot.

DRAW SIZE - 128 - NOT!

This draw seems to be a large 128 player tournament at first glance.
However, the seeded players [ 32 ] have been given a BYE in the first round.
This transforms the tourney into the usual one-week,
6 round, full draw of 64 for the seeds.
This week will see the QUALIFIERS playing for a couple of open spots in the MAIN DRAW.
They didn't have high enough ranking to get DIRECT ENTRY.
CLICK HERE for a look at the MEN'S DRAW
The main draw will probably begin this Wednesday [minus the seeded players who
will start on the weekend].

MIAMI TENNIS ON TSN

Mar 25th	11:30 PM
Mar 26th	1:00 PM
Mar 27th	1:00 PM
Mar 28th	1:00 PM
Mar 29th	12:00 AM
Mar 29th	1:00 PM
Mar 30th	12:30 PM

WILD CARDS

Each tournament is allowed [by the ATP] to hand out invitations to players who would not have been able to enter the tournament on the basis of their ranking.
Miami has a draw of 128 players for the men and has given about 12 wild cards out to both veterans and the stars of tomorrow
In the men’s main draw, the five wild-card recipients include rising American stars Sam Querrey, Alex Kuznetsov and former Florida Gator Ryan Sweeting.

Querrey had a terrific 2006 campaign winning three challenger events. He jumped more than 600 ranking positions from the previous season to become the fourth-youngest player in the year-end Top 150. He is off to a solid start in 2007 reaching the third round of the Australian Open defeating the 27th seed José Acasuso in the first round. He’s has also reached the quarterfinals of two events this season (Memphis,Las Vegas).
Also receiving wild cards are a pair of former Grand Slam champions. Fan favorite and three-time French Open Champion Gustavo Kuerten returns as well as Thomas Johannson, the former seventh-ranked player in the world, who is looking to regain the form that brought him the 2002 Australian Open title. Johannson has been recovering from an eye injury suffered in 2006.

Wildcards for the men’s qualifying draw were awarded to Brendan Evans, Donald Young, 2006 Luxilon Cup champion Pavel Checkhov and 2006 Junior Orange Bowl winner Alex Luncanu.

The 20-year-old Evans, who lives and trains in Key Biscayne, Fla., was one of the top junior players in the country for several years. He teamed with Scott Oudsema to win three junior Grand Slam doubles titles in 2004 including the Australian Open, Wimbledon and US Open. He was also among the world’s top junior singles players, reaching the French and Italian Open semifinals and the Australian Open and Wimbledon quarterfinals.