Category Archives: serena williams

Goodbye to all that

Leave a reply

Serena Williams once was asked if there was any player out there whom she feared.

“Yeh,” she said, “Roger Federer.”

We are talking about a tennis superpower here. Gifted, fiery, relentless and justly self-confident. For years—and especially now with Williams’ stated intention of riding off into the sunset after this month’s U.S. Open—the question (albeit hypothetical) regards Williams’ possible status as the greatest tennis player in history. Without necessarily including the “female” qualifier.

It is a sports cliché to traffic in such definitive statements, a fool’s errand to compare eras, especially in what might be the sport most transformed over the decades because of advanced off-court training and revolutionary equipment. (Baseball, for instance, has stuck with wooden bats. Not tennis.)

So it’s all conjecture. But Williams’ 23 titles in Grand Slam events are more than any male player can claim. Rafael Nadal has 22, Novak Djokovic 21, Federer 20. And while the record is 24 by Australian Margaret Court, that total includes 11 wins at Court’s home Slam during a time when top American and European players regularly skipped the grueling trip to Melbourne.

If Williams, who will turn 41 weeks after this year’s Open commences, somehow were to conjure a 24th trophy, she would become the oldest—male or female—ever to win a major title. (Aussie Ken Rosewall, who also benefitted from players’ limited participation at his nation’s Slam, was 37 when he won the last of his 12 major championships in 1972.)

But here’s the deal with Williams: Beyond the current discussion of the gender handicap, her career having been interrupted by pregnancy, and aside from the reality that she hasn’t captured a major since 2017 while the wave of younger talent continues to storm the ramparts, there were roughly two solid decades when it was difficult to fathom how anyone besides Williams ever prevailed in a women’s major.

She has said that she probably should have 30 Slam titles by now and the record bears her out. Since her first Slam appearance 24 years ago, she has missed 18 major tournaments because of various injuries and health issues. She won one Australian Open while some 20 pounds overweight, another while pregnant. Twice in her career, she completed what she coined the “Serena Slam”—winning all four majors in succession—just not in a calendar year.

She has said that “I haven’t lost many matches where the player was playing unbelievably good. Usually, when I lose, it’s because I’m playing unbelievable bad.” A bit self-serving, but true.

The surgical tennis-otomies Williams repeatedly performed on opponents in the biggest matches were so skillfully precise that spectators’ focus typically fell almost entirely on her. On her powerful serve, her paint-the-line backhand, her cracking crosscourt forehand.

Though primarily a baseliner, she always played territorially, moving a step or two into the court as the rallies went on, ready to pounce. When she lost a point, it typically was a product of her aggressively missing wide or long. So often, the opponent was just…there.

It was Williams’ own occasionally uncontrolled passion that cost her at times: Her profane outburst, offering to shove the ball down a diminutive lineswoman’s throat over a foot-fault call, cost her a championship match point in the 2009 Open against Kim Clijsters; her premature celebratory shout in the 2011 Open final against Samantha Stosur resulted in the loss of a crucial game point; her rant against the chair umpire over a penalty point for illegal coaching led to her 2019 Open loss to Naomi Osaka.

In terms of dominating her peers, Williams’ consecutive weeks atop the women’s rankings is a record 186 (equaling Steffi Graf’s previous total). OK, Federer was the No. 1 male for 237 straight weeks. Maybe someone for Williams to fear.

She acknowledged a diminished interest in the tour beyond the majors, passing on plenty of lesser events, and the result is that others have won far more career titles than Williams’ 73—Martina Navratilova with 167, Chris Evert with 154, Graf with 107. But, as the credits roll on the Williams tennis story, it seems appropriate to recall a quote by Larry Scott when he was CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association earlier in the 2000s: “Being a champion is one thing. But being a superstar is another.”

Serena Williams, rules and fairness

Leave a reply

It’s complicated, of course. The Serena Williams incident in this year’s U.S Open championship final has taken us far beyond a discussion of tennis rules and proper sporting behavior. Almost immediately, the debate veered toward male privilege, identity politics, racism and crowd dynamics.

Was Williams the victim of a power imbalance in which a chair umpire is not to be challenged? Was that exacerbated by the fact that the umpire, Carlos Ramos, is a man and the player, Williams, a woman—and a woman of color at that?

Did Williams, without question the superstar of women’s tennis, deserve special consideration regarding the application of the sport’s arcane regulations at such a crucial time in such a big match? Did Williams’ past fits of pique, profanely threatening a lineswoman at the 2009 Open and fuming, “I truly despise you,” to a female chair umpire at the 2011 Open, factor into the Ramos-Williams dispute?

And what about the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd, which poured fuel on Williams’ fiery protests with sustained booing that ultimately diminished 20-year-old Naomi Osaka’s eventual victory?

That last aspect recalled the chaos of a 1979 second-round Open match between John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase who, by the way, embodied what Williams cited as past behavior by men that she rightly said was worse than her on-court actions. That night, opponents widely disparaged as “Nasty” and “Super Brat” baited each other with whining and childish delays until chair umpire Frank Hammond—unable to control the non-action or the booing spectators—defaulted the match early in the fourth set.

Hammond had struggled to enforce the rules, as well as an order by tournament referee Mike Blanchard to “put Nastase on the clock—or else.” Yet when an exasperated Hammond finally (and correctly) proclaimed a premature end to the match, he was taken out of the chair and replaced by Blanchard to appease the unruly crowd. The craziness resumed toward a McEnroe victory.

Then even Hammond admitted afterwards that the players’ star power had superseded tennis law, calling Nastase, the more guilty of the two parties that night, “very colorful. He’s great for tennis.”

Last Saturday, Carlos Ramos chose not to apply a similar immunity to Serena Williams, in spite of her unprecedented accomplishments and vast popularity. After what amounted to a formal warning when Ramos cited Patrick Mouratoglou‘s illegal coaching hand-signals to Williams—a violation Williams denied but Mouratoglou acknowledged—Ramos docked Williams a point for smashing her racket, then a game when she called him a “liar” and “a thief,” leaving her on the brink of defeat.

Ramos’ series of verdicts were cast by Williams, and many observers, as evidence of a double standard applied to women—not only in tennis but in all of society’s venues.

Rebecca Traister, in The Cut column for New York Magazine, wrote that “a male umpire prodded Serena Williams to anger and then punished her for expressing it….She was punished for showing emotion, for defiance, for being the player she has always been—driven, passionate, proud and fully human.”

Furthermore, Traister wrote, Williams’ rage was an understandable means to “defy those rules designed and enforced by, yet so rarely forcefully applied to, white men.”

It is beyond dispute that McEnroe, Nastase, Jimmy Connors and—early in his career, Andre Agassi—were among male players repeatedly guilty of crass and offensive displays. And that, because large crowds paid to see them, they often got away with such boorish behavior. But Martina Navratilova, whose 18 major-tournament singles titles compare nicely with Williams’ 23, argued in a New York Times opinion piece, “I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of ‘If the men get away with it, women should be able to, too.’ Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?”

A core ideal in sports—theoretically the one true meritocracy, no matter the participants’ ethnicity, appearance, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, economic status—is fairness. The “level playing field” and all that. In protesting Ramos’ application of code violations against her, by complaining, “It’s not fair,” Williams was reminding that sports can be as imperfect as the real world, populated as it is by flawed humanity; that the same rules in fact are not always applied to everyone.

So. In the end, was it fair—to both her and Naomi Osaka—to apply the rules to Williams?

 

 

Tennis seeding: Fair warning?

Leave a reply

Today we’re going to discuss seeding in Grand Slam tennis tournaments. Is it fair to all concerned that Wimbledon officials have included Serena Williams, seven times the event’s champion but currently ranked 183rd in the world, among the 32 seeds? By contrast, had this year’s French Open visited an injustice upon Williams, who hadn’t competed in 16 months while on maternity leave, by refusing to seed her there?

In both cases, it should be noted, Williams was welcomed into the competition. (She withdrew from the French with an injury after winning three matches, two against seeded players.) An essay on the website The Undefeated by Michael Fletcher argued that failing to seed Williams again “would have punished sports fans, who want to see the biggest stars perform on the biggest stages.” Fletcher’s comparison was that Tiger Woods “is eligible to play the Masters and PGA Championships for life” in spite of a long absence from the golf tour because of a back injury, and that the same applies to former champs however far past their prime.

But withholding a seeding position is not the same as banning Williams from the biggest stages. The Women’s Tennis Association, in fact, allows women who miss time because of childbirth to enter events based on their pre-absence ranking—in Williams’ case, No. 1—just without a guarantee of seeding.

And while Williams complained at the French that she should have been afforded a spot among the seeds—that she should not be penalized for becoming pregnant—there hardly is full agreement among her peers. Mandy Minella, a 32-year-old pro from Luxembourg, told the New York Times that she expected to have to earn her seeding, which is based on world rankings, after giving birth last October.

And what exactly does seeding accomplish? Belgium’s Kim Clijsters was unseeded when she won the U.S. Open in 2009, 17 months after giving birth. She had been away from competition for almost three years, but was gladly accepted as a wild card based on her Open title four years earlier.

So, the point?

Theoretically, by seeding the top 32 players in a Grand Slam field of 128, tournament officials “protect” those with the highest ranking against having to face any other seeded player through the first two rounds. That not only is considered a reward for the best players but also a guarantee to spectators and TV executives that the big names will be around longer.

The flip side of that premise is that players good enough to be seeded 17 through 32 might prefer facing one of the top 16 early—when the pressure is on the more accomplished player—rather than in the third round or later, when the stars are rolling.

It was only in 2001 that the major tournaments doubled the number of seeds from 16 to 32. The late Bud Collins, who was the sport’s premier historian as a newspaper and television reporter, said he preferred the maximum of eight seeds in effect prior to 1971. “Why not have some first-round fun?” he reasoned, by putting the best players in immediate danger.

Collins furthermore was mystified by the primary source of women’s seeding, the WTA rankings computer, which he nicknamed “Medusa” after the female in Greek mythology with living venomous snakes in her hair.

But back to Serena Williams.

In 2006, when she was 24 years old and already had won seven of her open-era record 23 major tournament titles, Williams had been kept inactive by a chronic knee injury for so long that her ranking plummeted to No. 91 by the time she entered the U.S. Open. As a consequence, she was unseeded.

Her reaction then? “I don’t really feel like an unseeded player ‘cause I don’t think about it. Obviously, I am. But I just feel I am who I am and I’m out there to perform. I don’t know too many people that see ‘Serena Williams’ next to their name and they’re, like, ‘Yes!’”

No kidding. It’s not as if having an unseeded Williams disables opponents’ alarm systems. Surely that still applies.

So she’s seeded 25th and her Wimbledon draw is a kind one. After her first-round victory over the Netherlands’ Arantxa Rus, ranked 107th, she will face Bulgaria’s Viktoriya Tomova, No. 136. Then, either No. 57 Tatjana Maria of Germany or No. 62 Kritina Mladenovic of France.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Dominika Cibulkova, the 2014 Australian Open finalist who was bounced from No. 32 to unseeded when Williams got the 25th spot, must play No. 44 Alize Cornet of France, with the likelihood she next would have to deal with Johanna Konta, seeded 22nd and playing for her British home crowd, in the second round.

And Poland’s Agnieszka Radwanka, who inherited Cibulkova’s apparent No. 32 seed, has dispensed with No. 195 Elena-Gabriela Ruse of Romania and gets No. 66 Lucie Safarova of the Czech Republic next.

“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” Cibulkova told BBC before the tournament. “I think it’s just not fair.”

Discuss.