Still, this step down served to relax Kleybanova, who likened the atmosphere to a practice session. In the fifth tournament of her professional career, she won a main draw match at the prestigious Indian Wells event and did not look back. Kleybanova had not played in such a low-level tournament since she was 14. For Kleybanova, play was often delayed when a ball bounced into a cluster of shrubbery, with the player nearest having to forage through the leaves. In the match preceding Kleybanova’s, the players twice met at the net to argue line calls and even the score itself. Kleybanova had to fetch her own balls, call her own lines and keep her own score. The matches in Landisville were a far cry from her fourth-round match with Venus Williams at Wimbledon in 2008. She will play Jacqueline Wu, an unranked American, in the first round of the main draw Wednesday night. Kleybanova won two more routine matches to qualify for the main draw. “I got taught a lesson on tennis today,” Rischbieth said in a Twitter message after the match. She was not as quick or consistent as she had previously been, but nearly any time she hit the ball with conviction, Rischbieth could not send it back across the net. Her first-round match was against an 18-year-old Australian, Brooke Rischbieth, ranked No. Kleybanova picked Landisville because she correctly thought higher-ranked players would be playing in Europe, allowing her to qualify for the field and play against less-threatening competition. But she is playing this week to maintain her eligibility for a protected ranking.īecause she is playing, she will be able to enter as many as eight tournaments using the ranking of 22 that she had at the time of her diagnosis. I basically had so much will that I mentally overpowered that match.”įor the next year, Kleybanova dedicated herself to training, not competing. “I was completely exhausted way before we finished the match. “Basically, the match I won with Larsson, I was going way far over my limits. “My body just gave up, because I wasn’t physically ready to do that,” Kleybanova said. But after losing her next match, to 22nd-ranked Maria Kirilenko, she began to realize that her body was not ready for such a high level of competition. She won her first-round match against 64th-ranked Johanna Larsson. Kleybanova tried a comeback just 10 months after receiving her diagnosis, accepting a wild card into the tournament in Key Biscayne, Fla., in March 2012. She beat the disease, a triumph more important than victories over the former No. In May 2011, two months after reaching those career highs, Alisa Kleybanova, then 21, received a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma that forced her off the tour. 10 in doubles a little more than two years ago. No electronic scoreboard.īut there was a woman who was ranked No. Pro Circuit tournament at Hempfield Recreation Center here. There were a lot of tennis tournament essentials missing on Sunday at the $10,000 U.S.T.A.
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