Germany’s Tatjana Maria was a 6-4, 6-3 winner over Venus Williams in the first round of the Hobart International on Tuesday in a match that had historic implications on the WTA Tour.
The first-ever meeting between the two players featured the oldest combined age between competitors, with Maria entering the tilt at age 38 and Williams at 45, since the 1973 founding of the WTA Tour by nearly three years. The mother of two broke serve six times in the 1 hour and 27-minute victory, with her unorthodox, slice-centered game perfectly suited to the windy conditions on Day 2 of main-draw play in Tasmania.
But her first win of the season, a week after she was upset by 17-year-old Emerson Jones in the first round of the Brisbane International, came much to the chagrin, perhaps, of her two daughters: Charlotte, 12, and Cecilia, 4.
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Maria joked afterwards that the girls profess the former World No. 1 to be one of their favorite players, though she hoped they were rooting for her. “Everybody loves Venus, I love her too!” the German, who makes her family home near Williams in Florida, said afterwards. “For me, to play her was such an honor because I never played her before. It was not easy with all the wind but it was amazing.”
Maria’s win capped what proved to be a difficult day for the two major champions that featured on Hobart’s order of play.
Earlier, Barbora Krejcikova was slowed by knee trouble in a 2 hour and 32-minute contest against Peyton Stearns, the American’s first victory since the US Open. The Czech received a medical timeout after the first set and carried on admirably over an eventual 6-4, 1-6, 7-6(3) defeat.
Stearns served for the match twice in the final set, and missed two match points, before she converted her third chance for victory in the tiebreak.
Other winners on Day 2 in Hobart included third seed Iva Jovic, who like Hungary’s Anna Bondar, won the first 11 games of her 6-0, 6-1 romp against Indonesia’s Janice Tjen, Magdalena Frech, who pulled away in a 6-4, 6-0 win over France’s Elsa Jacquemot, and Slovakia’s Rebecca Sramkova, a three-set winner against Jacquemot’s countrywoman Varvara Gracheva. Bondar won 11 straight games to start against German lucky loser Ella Siedel en route to a first-round win.
