Serena Beats Bartoli To Win 38th Title

Serena Williams won her first non-major title since the 2009 Tour Championships by withstanding a stiff early challenge from Frenchwoman Marion Bartoli to win  the championship match 7-5 6-1 at the Bank of the West classic in Palo Alto, CA.

Bartoli came out strong early, serving well and out-hitting Serena by blasting balls into the corners of the court. She was consistently hitting her second serve well above 100 mph and her first serve even harder. Bartoli quickly broke Serena to go up 2-1 and both players held serve until 4-2. In the seventh game of the match Bartoli had multiple chances to go up 5-2 (win the "insurance" break) but Serena prevailed and managed to stay just one break behind. Serving at 4-3, Bartoli opened with a double fault and Serena  started playing longer, more controlled points and Bartoli's balls started landing less deep in the court, eventually leading Serena to get the break back to even the match at 4-all. Both players held relatively easily the next two games. Then Serena quickly fell behind 0-30 in the 5-all service game but managed to get out of trouble to force Bartoli to hold serve in order to play first set tiebreaker. Unfortunately for Bartoli she started missing her first (and second) serve and began pressing a bit much from the back of the court, leading to Serena getting a break point (and set point) at 5-6, 30-40. They then played a very long point with Serena ending up at the net and Bartoli missing a backhand pass. First set Serena, 7-5. The second set was all Serena with Bartoli having called for the trainer to look at her right hand during the set break and the French player repeatedly looked down at the hand and shook it but quickly fell behind 3-0. Bartoli again started putting up resistance in the second set's 4th game but Serena was in full flight and won the insurance break to go up 4-0 and then easily won her own service game to hold a 5-0 advantage. Bartoli was finally able to hold serve and Serena closed out the match relatively quickly with a service winner.

This was a pretty important match for Serena and must be pretty terrifying for the rest of the field. In just her third tournament back after not playing for a year, Serena beat three of the players who performed the best in the last major tournament, in a row: Maria Sharapova (finalist), Sabine Lisicki (semifinalist) and Marion Bartoli (quarterfinalist), losing a mere 13 games. Her hardest match of the tournament was against an in-form Maria Kirilenko, which she gutted out with a 6-2, 3-6, 6-2 win following her 6-0 6-0 blowout to begin the week.

She's also committed to playing several of the North American summer hard court tournaments (Canada and Cincinnati) and should be considered to win her 14th major title in New York in September.