Tennis: Hewitt: leave Australian Open in January
By DENNIS PASSA
Associated Press
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MELBOURNE, Australia — Lleyton Hewitt would like to see the Australian Open left where it is — two weeks in January.
"I think as an Australian, it's probably the ideal time," Hewitt said Sunday. "This is the time that I've always known it as the Australian Open, the dates that I've always come to, since I was coming here as a young kid to watch."
Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray have suggested this week that it might be better to shift the Australian Open to February to allow for a longer preparation for the first Grand Slam through an extended period of leadup tournaments.
Organizers of the Australian Open don't want to move the tournament back because the existing slot coincides with the national summer holidays and doesn't conflict with any other major sporting events.
Hewitt agrees.
"It fits in so well with the school holidays and getting kids out there," Hewitt said. "I think sport-wise there's not a lot on at this time of the year either, so it sort of stands out by itself."
Hewitt suggested that it can't be all that difficult playing here.
"It's obviously early in the year (but) a lot of overseas players have prepared well enough to win it in the past," he said, smiling.
FOUR SEASONS IN A DAY: The forecast for the first two days of the Australian Open is for mostly sunny skies and a high of 95 degrees. But Melbourne's fickle weather often sees extreme temperature fluctuations and wild changes in the weather — four seasons in a day.
Britain's Andy Murray, who comes into the tournament as one of the favorites because of his strong recent play, spent nearly a month training in Florida to get used to the expected warm temperatures at Melbourne Park.
"I think you need to be prepared for all the different sort of changes in conditions," Murray said. "Some days it can be very, very windy, some days very hot, the next day it can be pretty cool, and it changes the speed of the court as well. So you need to adapt your game a little bit depending on the weather."
Murray said he's not surprised the two-week tournament often results in a higher than usual number of injuries to players.
"You need to come in having had a good offseason and be physically prepared," Murray said. "If you take a bit too much time off and maybe don't train in a warm climate in December, it's tough to play the five-set matches very well."
Venus Williams, who has seven Grand Slam singles titles — five at Wimbledon and two at the U.S. Open — says she knows why it's more difficult to win here.
"Just starting off the blocks at the beginning of the year, just trying to recover mentally and physically from that last year," Williams says. "That turnaround is always so quick. When you also start the year off, you can also get injured quickly because of just getting your body back into it.
"It's definitely one of the toughest ones to win because of all those different factors."
A TRIO OF ROLE MODELS: Jelena Jankovic figures she, Ana Ivanovic and Novak Djokovic give Serbian tennis fans three role models.
"In Serbia we don't have the best facilities in the world, especially in wintertime it's very hard for to us train," No. 1-ranked Jankovic said.
"But we are really hungry and motivated to do well. The three of us that have achieved and came to the top of the tennis game, we all did it in different ways going to different places and really wanted to become the best that we can be."
She says that Ivanovic, last year's French Open winner who is ranked fifth, and Djokovic, who won last year's Australian Open for his first Grand Slam, will help create a future group of top players from Serbia.
"I believe from our achievement we can push and motivate the other generations, the younger generations, to come after us," she said. "If, for example, they can think if Jelena or Ana and Novak have done it, why can we not do it?"
