Serena catches the eye but Rubin steals the show

For someone who did not eat properly for much of last week, Serena Williams has recovered her appetite with alacrity. Yesterday she showed too how she has regained her taste for the fray, needing only 80 minutes to swallow up Kim Clijsters 6-4, 6-2 and reach the final of the Nasdaq-100 Open.

Williams has powerful emotions driving this recovery from a virus. Last year she felt it her duty to become champion after beating her sister for the first time in a major event; this time she is upset at Venus's early departure and wants to atone for it. "Upset at what happened - not with Venus," she said, wary of any scribe who might seek to slide a wedge between them.

The Williamses have grown up with feelings of something to prove. Perhaps now there is nothing more to prove, so something has to be invented. Serena played as though keen to succeed for today and also to prepare for tomorrow. There were the usual snarling drives which sound like therapy for anger, plus moments when she tried newer and subtler elements.

When she broke serve at the start of the second set there was one softly spun, tightly angled backhand, which worked brilliantly. When she tried to consolidate her break at 4-3 she attempted a sequence of net attacks, which didn't.

There should have been opportunities for Clijsters, but there were not. She was not able to make them. Only the week before last the third-seeded Belgian had captured the first tier-one title of her career in Indian Wells, and she had won 10 matches on the trot. But yesterday's player was quite different from last fortnight's.

She missed two break points in the second game. She found it hard to keep her second serve out of trouble and she overhit her ground strokes too often. Once at the start of the second set, when she drove a ball long and dropped serve, she bounced her racket angrily. This was not the calm and formidable player who had earned two pulsating match points against Serena in Australia. She was taking a month off, she said.

But then it had been a morning of incongruities. Williams appeared in an all-orange outfit and orange-striped shoes, with a white bandana and a bouncing pigtail, making her unrecognisable as the person on the toothpaste ads. For the world's best woman, and an adopted Floridian, the stadium was two-thirds empty. It was a rare grey day, yet sunshades were still raised over players between games. There was a tornado alert, but the mood was tinged with lethargy.

Williams was more cheerful about her attire than her tennis. She had not played well, she admitted. But she recently received an image award at the National Association of Advancement for Colored People, of which she was so proud that she had, she admitted, considered shifting the Wimbledon trophy aside. "That's the top honour of the year for me," she said.

"And Denzel Washington came up to me and said: 'This is what I've been waiting for the whole night. I watch you guys, Venus too, every match. I can tell you what outfit you wore in every match.' I was really, really shocked." Tennis purists may not have been pleased by what they watched yesterday but it seems likely Washington was.

Serena and Venus are the first black players at the pinnacle since Althea Gibson, twice a Wimbledon winner in the 1950s. But the woman who for so long was touted as Gibson's possible successor is Chanda Rubin, who has spent longer still making one of the most underpraised comebacks in the game.

Seven years after falling from the world's top 10, and three surgeries later, Rubin is up among the 10 again for the first time this week, and celebrating with some of the finest performances of her career.

A trouncing victory over Amélie Mauresmo, the eighth seed, was followed yesterday by another, 6-3, 6-2, over Justine Henin-Hardenne, the fourth-seeded former Wimbledon finalist. It carried Rubin to the semi-finals.

"I've worked for 11-plus years to be in the hunt in moments like this. It's definitely been a road," said the lady from Lafayette with very un-American understatement.