Marion Bartoli loses early in Los Angeles and doesn’t feel so good about it.

It’s not just Marion Bartoli’s forehand and backhand that are funky – they’re both two-handed so which is which? – it’s the serve too. It’s a Rube Goldberg contraption with a funny wrist bend followed by toe tips and it stays that way. Honest, she puts both feet together, gets up on her toes and stays there. I’ve never seen that before and as I write this, she just served her second double fault in the first game of the first set here at the East West Bank Classic just south of Los Angeles.

Everything tells you that serve will never work and you wonder why no one ever corrected it until you learn that Bartoli’s father is her coach. I doubt he ever worked as a coach with the French Tennis Association.

On top of all that, Bartoli is a perpetual motion machine. When she’s serving she bounces, kicks and stutter steps between points and when she’s receiving, it’s bounce, bounce, forehand swing, backhand swing, another stutter step and only then does she turn back to the court to receive a serve from her impatient opponent.

Then there was this from a media session at Wimbledon after Bartoli had just beaten Justine Henin. She’d lost the first set 6-1 before coming back to win the match.

Q. 1-6 in the first set to the No. 1 player in the world. How did you come back?

MARION BARTOLI: Well, I was focusing on Pierce Brosnan because he is so beautiful. I was just watching him. He was the only one.

Either she’s an instinctive, quirky player or she’s joking with us and she’s very funny. Right?

When I turned up at the open media session on Monday, I found neither. She’s a rather serious person with a monotone, almost deadpan delivery. She’s heartfelt, absolutely, and talks openly about herself but not at all what I expected.

About that that Wimbledon, by the way. Bartoli got all the way to the final by beating Henin before losing to Venus Williams and she’d reached the semifinals in the two previous grass tournaments she’d.

I couldn’t figure out how she’d done all that from looking at her game today. Her serve went over 100 mph (161 km/h) exactly once by my count and she had a few second serves in the seventies. She is French and the French burned up the grass this summer but those players had a volley while Bartoli has a swinging volley and that is, of course, two handed off both sides.

One thing she does have is an excellent return of serve and there’s not that much windup on either of her strokes – how could there be with two hands? – so her game is well suited to picking up those low skidding balls on grass.

Since Wimbledon, Bartoli’s road has been much tougher. She shot up from a ranking of 19 to 11 and that gave her a seed in all three of her tournaments since then. On the plus side, that gave her a bye in the first round. The problem is that her first match is her opponent’s second match and that’s why she played Maria Kirilenko – who’s currently ranked number 35 – today instead of some stiff in the 100’s or a qualifier.

Bartoli isn’t quirky or fidgety or a jokester and, like most every other player on the tour, she gets her confidence from winning a few matches and when she’s not winning, she finds something to blame.

Of course I was not as comfortable as on grass, for example, when I have ten victories in a row and I know what I’m doing out there. And you are changing cities every single week and the surface, even if it looks the same it’s not the same …and everything is changing. It’s not like on clay or on grass courts where it’s the same clay or the same grass every week. Here on hard court it’s not the same tournament.

She’s blaming the variation in hard court surfaces but that’s a complaint of someone who is out of sorts. She played in a different city every week when she played well on grass too. Luckily, her mother is turning up next week and that will make her feel better about herself:

Whereas Bartoli’s father is so indispensable that she refuses to play Fed Cup for France unless he can be on the coaching staff, her mother isn’t a tennis fan and doesn’t really get the significance of having reached a Wimbledon final. Her father introduced her to tennis when she was six years old and gave up his job as a doctor to coach her after she won the junior US Open title, while her mother, well, her mother just loves her. It works for them.

Bartoli and Kirilenko broke each other eight times in their match. Kirilenko won the first set in the tiebreaker and got a crucial break to go up 4-3 in the second set. When it counted, Kirilenko served well and won the match, 7-5(3), 6-3.

Bartoli will move on to Toronto with her mother and father and see if she can get herself back on track:

I will try to take my courage with the two hands and come back with the hard work and hopefully it will go my way next time.

I don’t know whether “taking courage with the two hands” is a French saying or a comment on her two-sided two-handedness – perhaps our reader Maria can fill me in – but either way I hope she gets herself sorted out.

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