Serena beats Wozniacki in exhibition match

NEW YORK — Serena Williams beat good friend Caroline Wozniacki 7-5, 6-4 in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden Tuesday. The 21-time Grand Slam champion hasn’t played a match since losing the Australian Open final Jan. 30, pulling out of two tournaments because of illness. She’s scheduled to return to competition at Indian Wells this week. There were plenty of mistakes — many punctuated by a shriek — for Williams early Tuesday, but as she does so often, she somehow was still ahead at the end of the set. The game started to look more familiar: the court coverage, the well-rounded repertoire, the big serves to escape trouble. She even tried quite a few drop shots with mixed results. Proving she was moving just fine, Williams earned her first set point when she sprinted to the net to run down a drop shot, and then immediately raced back to chase down a lob. With her dogged defense, Wozniacki forced Williams into some long rallies. But as was the case in 10 of their 11 career meetings — which includes the 2014 US Open final a few miles away — Williams’ offense was too much. In the first match of the BNP Paribas Showdown, 16th-ranked Gael Monfils of France beat two-time major champion Stan Wawrinka 7-6 (6), 6-3. Two games midway through the second set were played as mixed doubles — Williams and Wozniacki came onto the court in their warmups, and Williams teamed with Wawrinka and Wozniacki with Monfils. Pound questions Sharapova praise Praising Maria Sharapova for honesty after she admitted to a doping offense creates a misleading impression, former World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) president Dick Pound said Wednesday. Tennis superstar Sharapova, 28, risks a four-year ban and has lost a slew of big-name sponsors after admitting Monday that she had failed a drug test at the Australian Open. Rivals including Serena Williams praised her for coming clean about her use of Meldonium, which was added to WADA’s list of banned substances on Jan. 1, but Pound said that it was wrong to depict the Russian’s announcement as some kind of mea culpa. “If it had been a spontaneous acknowledgement that she had taken this stuff and somehow didn’t realise it was a banned substance (you could praise her honesty), but she got caught,” he said. “She tested positive. If you think it’s a bad analysis, you can analyze the B sample. But she said, ‘No, not necessary. I acknowledge that I’ve taken it.’ So you’ve been caught and then you’re saying, ‘Well, it was a good cop.’