By Liza Horan

Is Mercury in retrograde? Tennis has gotten testy in the last few days.

We saw Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi—facing each other in the BNP Paribas "Hit for Haiti" at Indian Wells, Calif.—dig into each other a little too hard. The tenseness in stadium court was awkward for Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the best servers-meet-best returners duel. Fed's attempt to add some levity was appreciated by witnesses, but not exactly effective. See a bit of the weirdness here.

And Nikolay Davydenko's playing Prince and Dunlop against each other. The loser? His left wrist. The Russian was wildly successful with a Prince racquet in 2009, and, seemingly, equally frustrated to have been free publicity for the brand. Even his fans rallied Prince to sign him officially. Last week Dunlop announced Davy joined their roster,  yet Prince released official word that they had a deal in place as of Jan. 18.

Is God punishing Davy for playing both sides? Or is Davy using the wrist as a cop-out to punish Prince? Or is this playing out as planned?

Only he knows for sure, but for someone as competitive as he is, he may be either crying for missing the chance to win Indian Wells and Key Biscayne (injury will keep him off-court for four weeks) or laughing that he can sit it out while Prince and Dunlop duke it out for the (likely) increasingly expensive privilege of putting his name in their ads.

Time will tell, and the planets will realign*.

*One savvy reader emailed me that Mercury does not go into retrograde until April 18 and that things really won't smooth out 'til May. We may be in for some more drama, kids. Fasten your seat belts.