It struck me as funny that a rumor started swirling on several tennis sites that NBC was planning to cancel its weekend coverage of the French Open and hand it over to either ESPN or the Tennis Channel based on the fact that two "unknowns" familiar only to hardcore tennis fans were to meet in the Women's Finals. Contracts and advertising dollars aside, the fact that NBC's coverage of the event, often berated for being taped delayed and/or edited for length, became a bigger story than the event itself, speaks to how media savvy audiences have grown over the years.

In any event, the final between Francesca Schiavone and Sam Stosur turned out to be not a ratings disaster but actually a firm hold on the status quo. According to SportsMediaWatch.com, Saturday's final earned a 1.7 rating up 21% from last year's nervy finals between Dinara Safina and Svetlana Kuznetsova. And the women were actually ahead of the Men's Finals which, let's face it, was a foregone conclusion before Rafael Nadal stepped on court.

But let's not jump up and down. The rating is still low compared to the Federer/Nadal final a few years ago which got a 2.2 rating and nowhere near the 1999 final where Andre Agassi won the event to a tune of a 4.0 rating. Of course that was over ten years ago before the web took over a large part of media consumption.

So what does the Schiavone/Stosur final have to say about American audiences which NBC caters to? Do Serena Williams, Venus Williams or even Maria Sharapova still have to be there to get casual tennis fans or even casual sports fans to watch? Probably. But Stosur, based on her own tremendous run to the final and Schiavone, with her personailty alone, created a unique moment of curiosity and excitement as both went for their first Grand Slam title that compelled viewers to at least check out the pairing to see what would happen.

But never count out sports fans and their innate need to root for underdogs who have a chance to grab one shot at glory. Ted Robinson said it best when he compared Schiavone's title run as her Olympic moment complete with national anthem. You got the sense this was the Italian's "one moment in time" and sports is always built around those stories of an athlete working in obscurity for years before finally seizing the day when everyone expects just the opposite.

Any sports fan will tune in for that.

Erik Gudris writes and moderates the tennis news and commentary site Adjustingthenet.com