Serena Williams’ coach says she will return for French Open

ROME » Serena Williams’ coach says she will play the French Open beginning in two weeks.

The tournament will mark the 23time Grand Slam champion’s first major since returning to the tour from maternity leave.

Coach Patrick Mouratoglou tells the WTA tour’s website, “Serena will play the French Open to win it.”

Williams returned to the tour briefly this year, after a 14-month absence to give birth to her daughter. But she withdrew from last week’s Madrid Open and this week’s Italian Open.

Mouratoglou says when Williams arrived to train with him in France late last month, “We realized that she was not ready yet. The time she lost after the delivery with all the medical issues she had to go through, was missing.”

Mouratoglou adds, “That is the reason why we decided to skip Madrid and Rome as she needed five weeks to be perfectly ready . ... I am very satisfied and confident that she will be ready for Roland Garros.”

Williams, a three-time French Open champion, has not played since a firstround loss to Naomi Osaka in March at the Miami Open.

Roland Garros starts on May 27.

Belly-putter ban lifts game for Players winner Webb Simpson

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, FLA. » Webb Simpson credited everyone around him for winning The Players Championship, his fifth career victory and in some respects his most important. And he didn’t stop with those he considers to be part of his team.

Thank-you notes also are in order for the USGA and the R&A.

Golf’s governing bodies outlawed the anchored stroke that Simpson had used with his belly putter since he was a teenager. Simpson won the 2012 U.S. Open at Olympic Club, one of three major champions in an 11-month span to use a belly putter.

Simpson struggled mightily when forced to learn an entirely different way to putt. That’s no longer the case. He led the field in putting during his four-shot victory at The Players Championship, and that wasn’t just one great week. Simpson was 10th on the PGA Tour going into the TPC Sawgrass. Now he is at No. 5 in the key putting statistic.

“It’s funny how those things happen,” Simpson said. “This is probably the first time I can say I’m glad they banned it because I wouldn’t have ever probably swayed away from the belly putter.”

He was always determined to play by the rules. He just wasn’t successful at the onset.

The ban took effect in 2016. Simpson decided to switch a year earlier, though he started to waver. On his way to Japan for the Dunlop Phoenix in late 2014, he told caddie Paul Tesori he was bringing the belly putter with him for just one more tournament. Instead, he took a drastic measure. “I see my bag in the garage, and I see the belly putter, and for whatever reason I had an urge to just break it,” Simpson said. “If I break it, I can’t take it with me. And so I go over there and snap it over my knee.”

Instead of pitching it in the trash, his wife persuaded him to keep it. Both pieces are in his trophy case. But it wasn’t smooth sailing. Simpson had an average ranking of 36th in putting his first six years on tour with the belly putter. Once he went conventional, he fell to No. 174. He put the broken pieces in the case, but he didn’t add any trophies with the regular putter.

The low point was 2016 at the start of the FedEx Cup playoffs, when he started to get short with his caddie, and they sat in the car in the parking lot at Bethpage Black talking about how to move forward.

The low point became a turning point. Simpson, stubborn about being a conventional putter, became more open-minded about other ideas. He called other players to see what they tried, and what worked.

“I think I was too closed-minded and just tried to learn a lot about putting and what’s important,” Simpson said. “Talking to great putters helped. Aaron Baddeley and Brandt Snedeker, had tons of conversations with those guys.”

It led him to use a longer putter that runs up the left side of his arm, which Matt Kuchar made popular. And then he found what Simpson calls the “missing link,” provided by former Players champion Tim Clark. They were at Sawgrass a year ago when Clark suggested that Simpson use a claw grip with that style of putter.