Hong Kong is not a big sports town. People don’t seem to talk about sports much, and they certainly don’t have much on the local sports menu. A low-level soccer league everyone ignores. And we’re about done.

Aside from a handful, a small handful of one-shot, bigger-picture events.

Such as the JB Group Classic, a tennis event that often draws some of the top women’s tennis players in the world.

Including, this year, Venus Williams, world No. 1 Jelena Jankovic and No. 7 Vera Zvonareva.

Anyway, what made this event memorable, for me, was getting credentialed to cover it, on the final day, and see major-league tennis in a way I had never seen before.

From the front row, at mid-court.

The first thing about good tennis, up close?

Like every other sport that involves speed or strength, you are struck by how fast the action is.  In tennis, that means the pace of every return. The power on the serves. Especially from the physically big players like Venus Williams, currently ranked No. 6 in the world.

I was there when Venus played Zvonareva in a match that could clinch the championship for “the Americas” over “Russia” in the semi-goofy but oddly compelling four-team competition.

Venus just kills the ball. Not like the elite guys do, no. Far as I have heard. But in the context of the rest of us?

Venus is 6-foot-1, and she has all those angles going on,  all that leverage, when she strikes a serve at the top of her swing. And it comes over like a rocket. The top speed I noticed for one of her serves was 199 kilometers per hour — or just over 130 miles per hour.

Luckily for Zvonareva, and anyone else who plays Venus (or her sister, Serena, or the other big, powerful women), not all of Venus’s first serves are fair. If they were, she would be winning at love-and-love most of the time.

Then there are the ground strokes, delivered with violence and a verbal release of internal air pressure. “Uhhh!”They get over the net in a hurry, and clear it by inches, and land deep in the court. Return after return.

I can just imagine a young, or second-tier player getting out there with one of the top 10 and … trying not to freak out. Just trying to hang on. Get a few balls back over the net.

Anyway, the match before, I had watched Zheng Jie of China, who is 5-foot-4, which is just too small to last long on the world stage, play against Portugal’s top player, one Michelle Larcher de Brito. The women were quick, and hit fairly hard. But that match had not prepared me for Venus-Zvonareva.

I have covered big-league tennis before. But never so close that an errant return landed at my feet — as it did. These days, in the rest of the world, reporters almost always are parked in remote corners of a tennis stadium, or high at one end of the action.

But not here in Hong Kong, where the 3,600-capacity Victoria Park stadium wasn’t quite full and the media gets parked in the front few rows, across from the chair referee.

Venus played very well, as she had throughout the competition, overwhelming her Russian opponent with guile and even some shot-making — as well as her monster serve and scorching pace. It was 6-2, 6-2 — the same score of the match a few days earlier when Venus blistered Jankovic. And, remember, those two are ranked Nos. 7 and 1 in the world. And Venus just trashed them both.

Anyway, who knew that I would find out something about sports that I didn’t already know — while in Hong Kong? But there you are.

I could have guessed it, but now I know: Top-flight tennis is played at speeds the average Joe and Joetta can hardly imagine.