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Gustavo Kuerten won his third French Open title Sunday, defeating Alex Corretja 6-7(3), 7-5, 6-2, 6-0.

Corretja and Kuerten have somewhat similar styles, but Kuerten has the greater firepower. Both hate playing in the wind, but Corretja somewhat less than Kuerten, whose strokes are longer. The first set and a half of the match was quite windy, and Kuerten was not lining up his point of contact well enough to go for his biggest shots. Once the wind settled down, Kuerten began to unleash his superior firepower and angles, and Corretja was overwhelmed.

Kuerten won 23 of the first 25 points in the final set, and by then, Corretja was struggling just to avoid embarrassment. After having produced some brilliant shots in the earlier parts of the match, especially off his backhand, he couldn't get anything to land toward the end. One of the best sportsmen in tennis, Corretja got frustrated enough to whack a ball into the stands. His hanging head and a particularly bad streak, highlighted by a double fault, briefly drew boos from the fans.

Gustavo Kuerten's run through this French Open is a memorable illustration of the value of never giving up. Down two sets and match point, he managed to escape Michael Russell in the fourth round. On that match point, he hit one forehand right on Russell's baseline. Had he tilted his racquet upward by a fraction of one degree on that shot, he would have been out of the tournament. Instead, he had occasion, as he did at the end of the Russell match, to draw a heart in the Roland Garros clay, and this time, in celebration of a complete victory, he lay upon his back inside the heart as an expression of thanks to the French fans.

While Kuerten's mastery of clay and his likeable personality have won him a worldwide base of fans, his popularity in England will be somewhat dampened by his announcement that he will skip Wimbledon this year. He cites a need to rest and heal some minor injuries as his main reasons, but he has also objected to the tournament's seeding system, which has favored grass-court specialists.

Alex Corretja has been particularly outspoken on this issue, and his complaints, supported by many other players who generally do best on clay, led to changes in the seeding system just announced Monday. Grand Slam seedings will be weighted according to a player's record on the given surface, but the number of seeds will double to 32 to help prevent early upsets. At Wimbledon, this should mean that a highly ranked clay-courter will not have to play a top grass-courter in the early rounds. The women's events will adopt the surface-weighting part of the system next year.

In women's doubles, Virginia Ruano Pascual and Paola Suarez cruised past Jelena Dokic and Conchita Martinez 6-2, 6-1. Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi reunited to take the men's prize 7-6, 6-3 over Petr Pala and Pavel Vizner. Virginia Ruano-Pascual and Tomas Carbonell defeated Paola Suarez and Jaime Oncins 7-5, 6-3 in the mixed doubles final.

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