US OPEN

August 30, 2005

Lindsay Davenport

Q. Looked kind of tough out there.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: Yeah, it was a good match. I was expecting a tough match from her. I'd heard some good things about her. I didn't feel like I was at my sharpest in tennis, but really happy to go out there, win the match and get to move on.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: For sure. You always want to get the match over with as fast as you possibly can. When some opportunities go by, that probably makes it more frustrating. But I got to say, she did play some great shots. At the end, you know, the last couple games, were really close. I had I felt like a lot of opportunities to go up in the second set two breaks and just wasn't quite able to put another good return game together. Because of that, it ended up to be a really close set.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: You know, it never crossed my mind that I wouldn't be able to play here. It didn't cross my mind that I would miss all the tournaments in California either. It was kind of a wake-up call in Stanford when I was, you know -- everyone had to sit me down and say, "You can't play, you can't move, you can't rotate." That was a setback for a few weeks. Really set my goal on trying to be ready for here no matter what that meant in tournaments before here. Luckily I was able to play last week. But I still feel like I'm still kind of trying to get back into my groove of playing well and being consistent and being on my toes. I'm happy I'm here. I'm grateful I'm here. Hopefully I can make the best of it.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: I heard that she had good groundstrokes. She actually hit with some more spin than some of the other Chinese girls. She had a really good backhand. I didn't realize her backhand, she got it off the court quite well. I wasn't really expecting that. And that she moved well and was pretty strong player, like to hit the ball pretty hard.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: I'm enjoying the challenge of everything that's come my way in the last 18 months or so. It's been really fun and really rewarding to get back to the top and be back into contending, being just right up there with the best again. Because for about a year or two, I felt like I had moved away from that. So that makes it more fun obviously when you're doing well. I think that I've learned just to kind of embrace everything again and not think that everything is so important, I guess, have some really great people that I work with now and really enjoy that again. I know that it's not forever.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: It probably came together. You know, all of a sudden last summer I started to do well. I think when you start to do well and get your confidence back, everything becomes more fun. When you're playing with not your full capacity of confidence, I think things get a little tough. I knew I could be doing better than what I was doing. Even though I was ranked 5 or 4 or whatever it was, I wanted to get back to the level I thought I could play at.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: I feel as good as I possibly could feel. I think it was a tough summer in the fact that I didn't get to train the way I would prefer to train. I didn't get to hit as many balls or compete as much as I would like to. But to come in here and be able to play and not have anything majorly wrong with me is a huge bonus. I know that my tennis can come back to me the more I play, the more I'm out here, the more I'm competing. I've done a lot of hard work over two years, so I'm hopeful that that will sustain me even though I maybe haven't done as much as I would like. Just the excitement of being back here. I mean, each year I've left the last two years, it's always been in the back of my mind, "Oh, gosh, I wonder if that was it." It's fun to come back here and try to make some more good memories.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: It's changed a lot. I focus most of my time on that. Enjoy that much more than I thought I could. Just enjoy the fact of trying to get stronger and trying to improve at this later age in tennis years, seeing how that transforms to me playing better on the tennis court. You know, I still love to play. I just don't feel like my body can take hitting ball after ball for hours and hours every day. So I keep that pretty short, try and get a little stronger, a little fitter off the court.

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: I guess wins, I don't know. You always never know. I mean, I almost died when they said my 15th US Open. That was pretty heavy to hear out there. But, you know, there's still something in me that wants to go out when I'm at home and practice and work out, something that still gets me to make my plane reservations and enter tournaments and agree to go places. I'm not sure exactly where that comes from, but I know that I would be empty without it at this point.