Corretja Gets a Ruud Awakening

MELBOURNE, Australia — The nicest guy in tennis hits a ball boy with a tennis ball?

No, second-seeded Alex Corretja of Spain did not suddenly turn nasty in his second-round loss to unheralded Christian Ruud of Norway, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4, on Wednesday at the Australian Open. After the third game of the fourth set, Corretja softly practiced his backhand, trying to hit it over to the other side, and the ball sailed into a running ball boy with about the same force as a balloon.

The crowd laughed. So did Corretja and the kid. Just when Corretja was apologizing to the ball boy, he was given a warning by the chair umpire.

“Many times, I do it, like this, just like I wanted to push the ball on the other side of the court,” Corretja said. “And the ball kid was running in the middle. So I just hit him, but he was really slow.”

Corretja’s appeal to the chair umpire failed.

“You feel bad, because if you do it on purpose you have to say, ‘OK, sorry I won’t do it again,’ ” he said. “And the chair umpire was telling me, ‘Yeah, but still you hit him, so imagine if you could have hit him just harder.’ I said, ‘Harder, I’m not going to hit him.’

“If I have to pay [a fine], I’ll pay.”

It was that kind of day for the Spaniards, with none of the male players surviving the second round.

“It was not that bad,” Corretja said of Spain’s showing. “It was terrible.”

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The service yips of 12th-seeded Anna Kournikova of Russia continued, even against Miho Saeki of Japan in the second round today. Kournikova, who double-faulted 23 times in the first round, had 31 more against the 80th-ranked Saeki but still won, 1-6, 6-4, 10-8.

Kournikova double-faulted three times when she served for the match at 5-0, twice on match point.

“If I get upset, you know, it’s going to be even worse,” she said. After a series of questions about her serving woes, Kournikova said: “Can we talk about something nice?”

“I feel bad for her,” top-seeded Lindsay Davenport said. “ . . . I think you feel bad for anybody who kind of goes through that. And it definitely has to be embarrassing.

“But she has a lot of people telling her what to do, and maybe that’s the reason. Maybe too many people are telling her what to do.”

Kournikova is playing doubles here with Martina Hingis, and Davenport joked that Hingis might be the solution to Kournikova’s problems.

“I know Martina is not going to let her double fault that many times,” she said. “Martina wants to win, so she’ll probably turn around and tell her what to do.”