In First Match With Sister, Venus Williams Prevails Aussie Open Duel Turns Out To Be A Mistake-Filled Disappointment

Big sister beat kid sister, or rather watched her beat herself.

Venus Williams, 17, won her first professional match against 16-year-old sister Serena 7-6 (4), 6-1 in a 1-1/2-hour affair that had history going for it but not artistry.

Sisterly love didn’t suffer, though. At the end of Wednesday’s match, they clasped hands, hugged, then turned to the crowd, hands held tightly, and bowed together. When they left the court, they were still holding hands.

That show of affection got the loudest applause of the day.

Serena double-faulted eight times, Venus five. Serena whacked 42 errors, Venus 34. Each held serve only twice in a miserable first set that barely raised a peep from the crowd.

This was the seventh times sisters have met in a Grand Slam event - most of the others involved the Maleevas - and so far every one has been won the older sister.

The highly anticipated duel between the Williams teens turned quickly into a flat, mediocre affair that lacked tension - in part because the crowd took no sides, in part because both played below their ability.

Whether they were too respectful of each other, or knew each other too well from daily practices, the sisters failed to push each other to a higher level of play.

Venus won a tedious opening set with her first set-point in the tiebreaker after Serena drilled a forehand wide at the end of a long rally.

In the second set, Venus took a 1-0 lead, then made it 2-0 after Serena started with another double-fault.

The only trouble Venus had in the second set came in the third game, when she lost seven beads from her hair. Ball boys and girls scooped them up and Venus went on to make it 3-0.

Serena, frustrated by her errors, kept whipping herself with her racket. Nothing helped. She made error after error until she knocked herself out of the match.

Nothing was proved in this match. Venus didn’t show she was clearly better, though she’ll move now into the third round.

“Was it fun? I think it would have been great fun if it were the final,” Venus said. “It was a match. A tough match.”

In other women’s second-rounders, No. 2 Lindsay Davenport beat Karina Habsudova of Slovakia 2-6, 6-0, 9-7, No. 8 Conchita Martinez beat Miriam Oremans 7-5, 6-2 and No. 13 Lisa Raymond downed Nana Miyagi 6-2, 3-6, 7-5.

A year after he shook up the tennis world by emerging from anonymity to depose the defending champion and surging to the final, Carlos Moya tumbled out of the Australian Open in the second round.

Australian Richard Fromberg won an uninspired and at times ugly baseline duel against the seventh-seeded Spaniard 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 (2), 6-4. In three previous matches, Moya never lost a set to Fromberg.

“It’s the biggest win I’ve had in a Grand Slam tournament,” Fromberg said. “It was one of my goals this year, to beat a top-10 player.”

Moya upset defending champ Boris Becker in the first round last year and became the talk of the tournament as he kept going to the final before losing to Pete Sampras. But except for that tournament, Moya has never gone past the second round of any Grand Slam event he’s played.

In other second-round matches, Morocco’s Hicham Arazi upset 15th-seeded Mark Philippoussis 1-6, 6-2, 4-6, 6-1, 9-7 and No. 11 Alex Corretja of Spain beat Germany’s David Prinosil 6-4, 6-3, 6-0. Unseeded MaliVai Washington, complaining of a flareup in his injured left knee, defaulted from his match against Spain’s Francisco Clavet.

Philippoussis popped pain pills a couple of times during his match and was checked for fever by a trainer.

Usually one of the biggest servers in the game, he looked sluggish, failed to convert a match point at 5-4 in the fifth set, and was out-aced 21-19 by Arazi.