Serena Williams has whacked out five singles championships in the Sony Ericsson Open, but for 25 minutes of a sauna-like Wednesday she couldn't win even one lousy game.

Li Na, the Chinese stroker with the shortest name in sports, had Williams down 5-0 in a match starting out on the border of astonishing.

It never made it.

No one was really surprised when Williams came back to win their quarterfinal match, 4-6, 7-6 (7-1), 6-2 and set up a semifinal showdown with big sister Venus.

She was supposed to win with ease. At No. 1, Serena ranks 39 places ahead of the Chinese sprinter.

As for comparative power, this was a sledgehammer against a toothpick. And Serena was disgusted with the way the sledgehammer was landing.

She graded herself ''8 percent'' out of a possible 100 for her performance. On a scholastic level, she tendered herself an F.

Not quite fair, that, taking an F when you win, is it? But that's how hard Her Serenaness is on herself.

And there's this: Low-rating your own game so severely does no great kindness to someone you have just beaten. However, this is pro stuff, and Li hauled off some $60,000 just for making the quarters, so there is no point in getting all choked up with sympathy.

She did a lot better than most do against Serena.

There's always the temptation, given Williams' stunning combination of power and technique, to rate her as a potential No. 1 all-time.

Facts force us to resist the temptation, because she simply doesn't play often enough to catch up with the dozen-odd players who have won many, many more singles titles, starting with Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert and going down through Martina Hingis and Justine Henin.

Serena is 27, which is getting up there in top-of-the-line tennis. So some perspective is in order in trying to align Serena's potential with actuality.

Give her points for maintaining her interest in fashion design all the while she is belting tennis' women around those striped rectangles.

Simultaneously, you wonder what she could do out there if she put her mind exclusively on tennis.

To me, the wonder is that someone trying so hard to compartmentalize her life can can stay zeroed in on tennis as much as she does.

Is it any wonder, then, that she contracts occasional cases of the walkabouts when tennis seems the farthest thing from her mind out there?

''I definitely wasn't moving my feet at all,'' Williams said, floundering for explanation. ``. . . I just wasn't doing anything that made any sense at all [at the start].''

Now, let's not get carried away with pity for either Serena or Li.

The latter got herself a nice payday (Serena's will be $700,000 if she wins the whole Sony Ericsson), and it is safe to surmise that Serena and Venus are the richest sisters sports has ever had, or ever will, with $46 million in prize money alone between them.

The Williamses haven't done so badly in Grand Slams, either.

Ten for Serena. Seven for Venus.

I'm guessing the surname Williams will be engraved on an least two more sets of Grand Slam hardware this year.

Maybe, just maybe, all four.

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