Hello again after a long time. Well, there actually is news about
Jana lately, and what she has been doing. You may know that she
recently played doubles with Serena Williams, against the team of
Venus Williams and Brenda Schultz-McCarthy, at the JP Morgan Chase
Tennis Challenge exhibition in Florida, to benefit Orascene Price's
(their Mom) OWL Foundation. This was shown on Fox Sports Net cable,
and Jana was great. She and Serena Williams won.
The other news, which I just learned from WTAworld.com, is really
exciting. Jana's real fans may recall her support of the Seat
tournament in Luxembourg--she is credited with helping to get it
started, by asking why Luxembourg didn't have an official WTA event,
always played and promoted it, and won it twice, and now it turns
out, she bought it! She is now the owner of this Seat tournament and
also the Ordina Open at Hertogenbosch, that they just played. If you
go to http://www.seatopen.lu/press.html and scroll down to about
the middle of the page, there is an article called "A new partnership
times three," about Jana and her agent Octagon purchasing the Seat
tournament, which will be organized, as before, by the International
Women's Tennis Promotion. She was also one of the tennis players at
a Cure4Kids Day during the Ordina Open, giving kids being treated at
St. Jude's Hospital a chance to meet and have a tennis clinic and
other activities, with several players. A picture of Jana with a
group of kids is at
http://www.wtatour.com/assets/story_image/cure4kids_group_061803.jpg .
I had read several times since she retired that Jana intended to
stay in professional tennis one way or another--not as a coach, as
any fan knows--but either playing exhibitions or in the business end
of things somehow, and now it really seems to be happening. So she
is still out there, doing things, and maybe fans near Luxembourg can
even make it a point to support the Seat Open now, especially.
By the way, does anyone have an opinion at all on what has been
happening with Daniela Hantuchova lately? She seems totally
miserable, very unhappy; does she even seem to want to play anymore?
She was one of my favorites.