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Crowd behavior affected Serena (MaliVai Washington, 6/05/03, ESPN.com)

All tournament long, Justine Henin-Hardenne has had a lot of crowd support because she's from Belgium, a French speaking country. It's not a surprise that much of the crowd was for Henin-Hardenne today. In addition, I think a lot of people wanted to see someone other than Serena Williams in the final.

However, I thought the crowd at times showed very poor taste toward Serena. There were a couple of occasions when the linesperson didn't call the ball out and Serena stopped in the middle of a point to circle the mark and the chair umpire confirmed that the ball was out. Therefore, Serena was completely in the right but the crowd reacted negatively toward her. After that, they proceeded to cheer when Serena would miss the first serve, which in tennis is completely inappropriate.

You almost have to pity this poor woman at the U.S. Open, where, even though it's not her fault, she'll pay a high price for this Francophonic solidarity. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2003 1:46 PM