Chile is still planning to host its Davis Cup series this weekend against Israel despite the devastating earthquake that has killed at least 700 people in the South American country.

Singles player Nicolas Massu arrived on Monday from Miami and expressed concern for the Chilean people but said he was ready to play.

Jose Hinzpeter, president of the Chile tennis federation, also said he wants the series to go ahead as scheduled in the northern port town of Coquimbo, which suffered little damage.

I don’t know about you. A tennis match seems unimportant when large amounts of people are dead or homeless. National pride from any win will just be transitory.

Venus Williams has ended Israeli Shahar Peer’s run at the Dubai Tennis Championships with a 6-1, 6-4 victory in the semifinals.

The defending champion and third seed needed 1 hour, 23 minutes Friday to defeat Peer, who was not allowed to play in the tournament a year ago when she was denied a visa by the United Arab Emirates government, citing security reasons.

The win by Venus Williams comes as no surprise. Peer was unranked for this tournament.

I hope Peer received more than the polite applause she was getting in earlier rounds. Sports should be about who is the best athlete at a particular point in time. A winning performer deserves to be congratulated by fans watching him or her.

Roger Federer dismantled Andy Murray in the Australian Open final Sunday to extend his own record to 16 Grand Slam titles and prolong the British drought.

Federer collected his fourth Australian Open title with a 6-3, 6-4, 7-6 (11) win at Rod Laver Arena that, apart from the tiebreaker, lacked the drama and raw emotion of his five-set loss here last year to then No. 1-ranked Rafael Nadal.

Last year, Federer sobbed when Rod Laver presented the winners’ trophy to Nadal, having missed a chance to equal Pete Sampras’ record 14 career majors.

This time, Murray was on the verge of tears, drawing deep breaths as he apologized for failing to end a 74-year-old drought for British men at the Grand Slam tournaments.

Fred Perry was the last in 1936. I’m not a big tennis fan, but recall who the last British woman is to win a Grand Slam title. It was Virginia Wade in 1977.

I did that without checking Wikipedia first. The only defect in my memory was I had Wade’s victory being in 1978 rather 77.

Serena Williams put an end to Justine Henin’s hopes of a Grand Slam title on her return from retirement with a 6-4, 3-6, 6-2 win in the Australian Open final on Saturday.

Williams withstood a determined challenge from Henin before securing her fifth Australian Open title and 12th Grand Slam singles championship.

Henin, who had most of the crowd support at Rod Laver Arena, couldn’t match her fellow Belgian Kim Clijsters’ feat of winning in her Grand Slam comeback tournament. Clijsters won last year’s U.S. Open on her return from a two-year retirement after getting married and having a daughter.

Williams won the last four games Saturday to clinch the championship in just over two hours, falling on her back in celebration after match point before shaking hands with Henin at the net.

Still, it was an impressive run by Henin. She lost in the final of the Brisbane International tournament to Clijsters two weeks ago.

Henin, who defeated four seeded players on the finals, is in the midst of an impressive comeback. Should players with a past track record like hers really be unseeded? I understand a player who steps away is going to drop ranking wise but when they begin a comeback and aren’t seeded, distortions in the pairings is going to happen.

Today’s win was Serena’s 4th Australian triumph in the last six years. The French Open is up in 4 months. Can she win there for the second time? Her only triumph at Roland Garros took place in 2002.

Andy Roddick took a tumble on his way to a first-round win Monday, tripping over the foot of a line judge.

Roddick rolled to the ground and angrily reproached the man when he stood.

“Move out of the way when you see a player coming,” Roddick told the official before resuming the match with Thiemo de Bakker of the Netherlands and winning 6-1, 6-4, 6-4.

Roddick, who is just coming off a knee injury, said he was all right after the collision. I do like that he felt good enough to joke about it afterwards.

In other Australian Open news-

A seagull walks on the court as French Fabrice Santoro looks on during their men’s singles first round match against Croatia’s Marin Cilic at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia Monday.

Where was the stadium police when this was happening? That trespasser should have had his wings clipped!

Kim Clijsters hung on to win a momentum-swinging all-Belgian final at the Brisbane International in a vintage finish Saturday in Justine Henin’s tour comeback.

Clijsters, only five tournaments into her own comeback which has already netted the U.S. Open title, saved two match points and then wasted three before winning 6-3, 4-6, 7-6 (6) over the seven-time Grand Slam titlist.

Clijsters started strongly and led by a set and 4-1 before Henin staged a dramatic rally.

Need the scores from any match played in today’s tournaments? Results

Henin, playing in the top tier for the first time since she quit while holding the No. 1 ranking in May 2008, won eight of the next nine games to take a 3-0 lead in the third.

Clijsters rallied to 3-3, then gave up a break and gave Henin match points in the 10th game.

She held her nerve and, 15 minutes later, held her arms in the air, celebrating what she thought was a championship-winning backhand down the line in the tiebreaker when the umpire overruled.

Henin got back to 6-6 in the tiebreaker but then double-faulted to give Clijsters a fourth match point. She made no mistake this time, with a forehand that Henin couldn’t get.

“Huh, what a match!” Clijsters told the crowd at Pat Rafter Arena. “I think we set the bar pretty high for ourselves for the rest of the year.

What a return for both these players. Clijsters left the game to get married and have a child. She then became the first mother to win a Grand Slam event in almost 30 years at last year’s U.S. Open. Hennin is much earlier in the comeback process but on the way to the Brisbane finals she defeated both the #2 and #3 seeds in the tournament.

Clijster’s daughter and husband were in the crowd on Saturday, when she donated her tournament winnings to Brisbane’s Royal Children’s Hospital, which she had visited earlier in the week.

A very nice gesture by Clijster. One I’m sure will ingratiate her with Australians, whether they like tennis or not.

Update- Henin has suffered a leg injury which has caused her to withdraw from a tournament to be played in Sydney next week. No word as of yet if this will keep her from playing in the Australian Open slated to begin January 11th.

The Tennis Integrity Unit has fined Ekaterina Bychkova $5,000 and barred the Russian from playing for 30 days, saying she failed to report that she was asked to provide inside information and throw matches.

The ruling was announced Friday and takes effect immediately.

An anti-corruption hearing officer said there was no evidence Bychkova accepted any compensation. She was penalized because she didn’t disclose the offer until being questioned by investigators from the Tennis Integrity Unit, which was formed by the Grand Slam committee, International Tennis Federation, and the ATP and WTA tours.

There has been more than one recent incident of betting irregularities involving a tennis match. There is also the case of Czech player Jan Hernych who said he was asked to lose a match. The integrity of professional tennis is still solid at this moment, but the sport has the potential for a serious problem. Aggressive action needs to be taken or the sport’s image will be tarnished if incidents like those that I link to occur again.. The Tennis Integrity Unit IMHO took the right actions with Ekaterina Bychkova

The United Arab Emirates assured the WTA in writing it will allow Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer to play at next month’s Dubai tournament after barring her last year.

Peer had been denied a visa apparently because of anti-Israel sentiments in the Gulf state following a three-week war between Israel and Islamic militants in Gaza. The UAE does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

The Dubai Tennis Championships start Feb. 15, and the WTA said Wednesday it received word from the UAE Ministry of Interior that Peer may compete.

The tournament was fined $300,000 last year and told to meet certain requirements – one of them written confirmation about Peer.

Should the UAE renege on their written promise, the Dubai event should be canceled and no WTA event again scheduled for that country. The host country of a open sporting event shouldn’t be able to determine who can and can’t participate.

The Tennis Channel has filed a complaint with federal regulators accusing Comcast of discriminating against its programming.

The Tennis Channel alleges that Comcast isolates the network on a premium sports tier that reaches only a small fraction of subscribers, even as it carries Comcast-owned networks such as the Golf Channel and Versus on basic tiers that reach many more customers.

The Tennis Channel filed its complaint with the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday.

I have both Comcast(Our homeowner’s association has a deal with the cable company) and Directv. TTC(and NHL network) is on a high tier with Comcast and one I rarely go to. Golf Channel, FSN Florida, and NFL Network are on lower tiers but in NFL’s case, it is part of Comcast’s digital package.

On the other hand, Directv has NFL, NHL, GC, and TTC all in a row right after ESPN. Versus is up in the stratosphere along with all the FSN channels. Is Comcast biased? Probably. Should they be forced to move TTC downward? I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but why didn’t TTC just ask Comcast? The Cable company has to have many tennis fans, and with competition from satellite providers, should have a desire to keep them happy.

The stadium where the ASB Classic women’s tennis tournament is being played was briefly evacuated Tuesday after an unattended bag was found.

The discovery of the bag coincided with a protest against the presence at the tournament of Israeli player Shahar Peer, but organizers said the events were apparently unconnected.

Players and spectators were forced to leave the tennis complex and streets around the central Auckland stadium were sealed off while emergency services dealt with the incident.

The evacuation occurred shortly before the scheduled start of play.

The New Zealand protest group Global Peace and Justice earlier Tuesday said it had written to the 22-year-old Peer asking her to withdraw from the tournament “as a demonstration of your commitment to peace.”

Some of the off the court tennis news in 2009 involved involved a Israeli tennis player being denied a visa to enter Dubai and a Israel-Sweden Davis Cup match played in Sweden without spectators present.

Global Peace and Justice doesn’t like the way Israel treats Palestinians. So they protest athletes in tennis tournaments. What will that accomplish? In a way the peace organization is choosing targets the same way terrorists do. They look for easy victims. One tennis player or a bus full of unarmed civilians. Their goals are also alike- to disrupt people’s lives who have little or no connection to their causes.

1 Cleveland beats the LA Lakers for the NBA Championship
2 Indianapolis defeats Arizona in the Super Bowl
3 San Jose defeats Washington for the Stanley Cup
4 St. Louis beats the Los Angeles Angels in the World Series
5 Tiger Woods returns to golf, wins at least one tournament but no major championships. That is a risky prediction in light of the fact that Tiger has won majors on 3 of this year’s host courses.(Augusta National, Pebble Beach, St. Andrews)
6 Phil Mickelson wins the US Open
7 Michelle Wie wins at least two tournaments, one of which is a major championship
8 Ji Yai Shin is LPGA player of the year
9 A non-Korean golfer will be LPGA rookie of the year
10 Yu-Na Kim wins figure skating gold at the 2010 Olympics
11 The Miami Dolphins don’t make this year’s playoffs but have a winning 2010 season
12 The Miami Heat make the playoffs but lose in the 1st round
13 The Florida Marlins have a winning record but don’t make the playoffs
14 Urban Meyer doesn’t return as coach of the Florida Gators
15 Joe Paterno announces his retirement after the 2010 Penn State season is complete
16 The Florida Panthers don’t make the playoffs
17 The Florida Panthers trade Goalie Tomas Vokoun
18 Manny Pacquiao loses to Floyd Mayweather
19 Kansas defeats Purdue for the NCAA Basketball Championship
20 Texas defeats Alabama in the BCS Championship game
21 Army has a winning football season and gets a bowl invitation
22 Washington Redskins fire Coach Jim Zorn
23 Serena Williams wins at Wimbledon
24 Versus and Directv finally settle their dispute
25 A North American horse racing track closes its doors.
26 Sebastian Vettel wins the Formula World Drivers Championship
27 New York Rangers fire Coach John Tortorella
28 The New Jersey Nets don’t finish with the worst record in NBA history
29 Connecticut defeats Tennessee for the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship
30 At least half these predictions are wrong

We’ll come back on December 31st 2010 and see how I did.

French tennis player Richard Gasquet was cleared of any wrongdoing Thursday when the Court of Arbitration for Sport accepted his claim that he tested positive for cocaine by kissing a woman in a nightclub.

The CAS dismissed appeals by the World Anti-Doping Agency and International Tennis Federation, which wanted Gasquet banned for up to two years.

“I’m absolutely relieved. This is the end of a crazy story,” Gasquet said. “I’m happy to be 100 percent cleared.”

The court in Lausanne accepted Gasquet’s claim that he inadvertently consumed cocaine by kissing the woman in a Miami club hours after withdrawing injured from a tournament in March.

“It was impossible for the player, even when exercising the utmost caution, to know that in kissing a woman who he had met in a totally unsuspicious environment, he could be contaminated with cocaine,” the court said in a statement.

A CAS panel of three lawyers said the quantity of the drug in Gasquet’s urine test was “minute” and the 23-year-old Frenchman was “clearly not a regular cocaine user.”

One kiss on a cocaine user is supposed to then make the substance show up in a non-user’s bloodstream. This sounds implausible to say the least.

A Belgian anti-doping tribunal has suspended U.S. Open semifinalist Yanina Wickmayer for one year for allegedly failing to report her whereabouts to anti-doping officials three times.

The Flemish regional tribunal said in a statement issued Thursday that the minimum one-year sanction is “reasonable.” Tribunal spokesman Koen Uman says the suspension takes immediate effect, but can be appealed by Wickmayer.

The 18th-ranked Belgian has denied any wrongdoing and said on her Web site she planned to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The suspension came as a surprise to the prosecutor who only wanted a suspension issued. Someone may say the panel should learn the phrase ‘guilty till proven innocent’ but Wickmayer violated the rules three times not once.

Bottom line- I think she should be suspended but not for a whole year.

Tennis authorities are looking into a WTA Tour match involving U.S. Open finalist Caroline Wozniacki that apparently sparked bettors to pile money on her opponent when she was on the verge of losing in straight sets.

Wozniacki, a 19-year-old Dane ranked sixth in the world, retired from the first-round match at the Luxembourg Open with a hamstring injury on Wednesday while leading Anne Kremer of Luxembourg 7-5, 5-0.

Wozniacki’s father, Piotr, told his daughter at 3-0 in the second set to retire before winning because her injury would prevent her from playing in the next round. His comments, apparently spoken in his native Polish, were picked up by microphones and heard by viewers watching the match on the Internet.

“I went onto the court and said to her: ‘Caro, it does not matter whether it’s going to be 5-0, 4-1 or 3-2. You can not play the next round, so you shouldn’t take the risk,” Piotr Wozniacki said Thursday on Danish radio. “I’m very proud of Caroline, because she stopped the fight and gave her opponent a chance.”

The father’s comments during the match led to a surge in online bets for Kremer to win.

The governing bodies of tennis created a Tennis Integrity Unit last year to combat gambling and match-fixing.

Without making any kind of judgment in Ms. Wozniacki’s case, I will suggest that what happened in Luxembourg be thoroughly investigated and in a open fashion. This is not the first recent allegation that a tennis match may not have been kosher or there was large sums of money bet at suspicious times on it. The integrity of professional tennis could be at stake if the sports fans come to believe results are being rigged.

Serena Williams is likely to find out whether she will be further punished for her outburst at a line judge at the U.S. Open before the end of the year, WTA chief executive Stacey Allaster said on Saturday.

The Australian Open and Wimbledon champion was fined $10,000 for the verbal attack on the official during the semifinals at Flushing Meadow last month.

Williams still faces possible exclusion from future grand slam events after a further review by the Grand Slam Committee, which oversees the four major tournaments in tennis.

“First of all, I’d like to say I think Serena is a fantastic champion and a great person,” Allaster told reporters at the China Open.

“She has acknowledged the incident in New York as being a mistake, and something that she’s not proud of, and she’s apologized for that.

“That is under investigation, it is ongoing. … it would be safe to assume that they will make a decision before year-end.

In case you haven”t seen last month’s incident, here is the video.

As for what Stacey Allaster said, it was very vague. IMHO the WTA would be more than justified in giving Serena Williams a multi-tournament suspension. Her behavior towards the judge was a disgrace to the sport.