INDIAN WELLS, Calif - The first game of the tournament, and the favorite, Notre Dame is upset, delighting maybe everyone who didn't have the Irish winning in their pool.

Which is why basketball, any team sport, is so different from the tournament now going on here, the BNP Paribas tennis open.

The Irish got beat by Old Dominion. We love an underdog. It's the American way. Except in tennis or golf.

Fans come to see Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. Fans come to see a name. In basketball or baseball or football, they cheer for a uniform. Go Yankees. Go Red Sox. Go Giants.

In tennis and golf, they root for the personality, the individual they know. And in the United States, there aren't a great many tennis players they know.

The BNP (Banque Nationale de Paris) Paribas (a Belgian bank which merged with BNP) and the following Sony Ericsson tournament at Miami are arguably the biggest tennis events in the country other than the U.S. Open. Both go head-to-head, in part or in entirety, with a bigger event, the NCAAs.

The basketball didn't start until Thursday, by which time the BNP Paribas was into the quarters. But also by then both Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters were gone from the women's draw, which as usual didn't even have America's two best, Venus and Serena Williams, who have boycotted here since they were booed in 2001.

Then the great Roger Federer, seeded No. 1 on the men's side, was knocked out by Marcos Baghdatis on Tuesday night and Novak Djokovic, the No. 2 seed, was beaten on Wednesday. Forehands to the forefront.

That left defending champ Rafael Nadal and the top American male, Andy Roddick, as the attractions, unless you have a particular interest in Ivan Ljubicic or Andy Murray. For the ladies Caroline Wozniacki, who's the No. 2 seed and reached the Open final last year, and Jelena Jankovic, managed to stay in the sun. Literally.

How those people match up in effect against Villanova or Murray State is the question. There's an appreciably different audience for tennis than there is for hoops, but there's only so much space in the dailies or programming on TV.

When Danero Thomas hit that jumper for Murray State with no time on the clock up in San Jose you practically could feel the aftershock down here in the desert 450 miles away.

That the Williams sisters were no-shows for a ninth straight year is no shock, but it is a disappointment and has been one seemingly forever.

It's backlash from the day Venus was supposed to play Serena in the '01 semi at Indian Wells but withdrew at the last moment because of a claimed injury.

That was the time tennis people believed, correctly or not, their father, Richard, scripted matches when the sisters played each other. Those who had bought tickets for the 16,000-seat stadium didn't like that script at all.

When Serena showed up the next afternoon for the final, she was berated. Richard Williams called the Indian Wells gathering racist, and it was goodbye.

Larry Ellison now owns the tournament. He's the same guy who also owns Oracle and is listed as the fourth-richest person on the globe. But even he can't persuade Venus and Serena to appear. Neither can being docked big money from the WTA bonus pool, in 2009 Serena forfeiting $400,000 and Venus $150,000.

Yet, without the Williams ladies and with the competition from the NCAA basketball tournament, the BNP Paribas endures its own special bit of March Madness, the thermometer pushing 90 degrees and lower ranked players pushing some higher ranked ones out of the field.

Before Thursday, the men's draw had Nadal, seeded third; Andy Murray, fourth, Robin Soderling, sixth and Roddick, seventh but no others among the top 17. The women's side offered Wozniacki, the second seed; Agnieszka Radwanska, the fifth; and Jankovic, the sixth.

When Djokovic, who came here after leading Serbia over the U.S. in Davis Cup competition two weekends ago, was beaten Wednesday by Ljubicic he seemed more relieved than depressed. Novak had traveled 9,730 air miles, from America to Belgrade to America just to get to the BNP Paribas.

"I'm very glad I'm now going to have at least three, four days without any practice,'' said Djokovic. "I think I'm going to spend a day in Los Angeles (130 miles west), just to see what it's like.''

The BNP Paribas people would have preferred to see what their tournament was like with Djokovic still competing.