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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The Age of Serena
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The Age of Serena

As she aims for yet another Grand Slam, can we now call Serena Williams the best player ever to grace the women's game?

If Serena Williams wins Wimbledon, it will be her second ‘Serena Slam’. Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFPPremium
If Serena Williams wins Wimbledon, it will be her second ‘Serena Slam’. Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFP

On 6 June, in her French Open final against Czech Lucie Safarova, Serena Williams served two double faults to concede her service game. She was up a set and leading 4-1 in the second, when the most-feared service in the women’s game started unravelling. Williams lost the set.

The day before the final, the 33-year-old American had gone down with flu. She could hardly walk on court, let alone play, and had doubled up in pain when she had tried to come out and hit a few on the practice courts. In fact, she had struggled throughout en route to the final: In five of her seven matches, she had been stretched to three sets. Through sickness and nerves, she had given her opponents a tiny window of opportunity. Then slammed it on their face.

In the final, she did it again. Two games to nil down in the third set, Williams found a whole new level of play, one that Safarova could find no answer to. Williams won the next six games, and with it, her second Slam of the year.

Within that hour, when Williams screamed at herself a lot, the crowd reaction had changed from, “What is she doing?" to “How is she doing this?"

“When she feels in danger, she often suddenly clicks and then raises her level to a point that the other players can’t compete any more," says Patrick Mouratoglou, who has been coaching Williams since June 2012, in an attempt to somewhat explain the phenomenon. “This Roland Garros was one of the toughest Grand Slam to win for her as she had been so sick. Serena is an unbelievable competitor. She has this ability to refuse losing."

If she continues to refuse to lose, are we looking at the year when Williams will finally be considered as the greatest woman to play the sport ever? Can she win the Calendar Slam in 2015? She has already won the Australian Open and the French Open—two of two, and two to go, starting with Wimbledon.

The last time a woman did that was in 1988. That was Steffi Graf, who also won the Olympic singles gold that year, a feat that was named the “Golden Slam". For the men, the last time a Calendar Slam happened was even further back, in 1969, by Rod Laver. Pete Sampras hasn’t done it, Roger Federer hasn’t done it, Rafael Nadal hasn’t done it. The closest anyone has come since Graf is Williams herself, when she won four straight majors from 2002-03: The French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open in 2002, and the Australian Open at the beginning of the 2003 calendar. It was called a “Serena Slam".

But forget these technical squabbles, these rhetorical milestones, and look at the way Williams has played since 2012, at a time when most tennis fans and experts had written her off as being over the hill (who can blame them? By tennis standards, 33 is pretty much the end of the line, even for the greatest players—look at Federer, also 33). This French Open was her 20th Grand Slam victory and her third major in a row. She has now won seven of the last 12 Slams, and is, at 20, only two short of Graf’s record of most Grand Slam singles titles in the Open Era (which began in 1968, when tennis opened entry to professionals in Grand Slams. In fact, If she wins Wimbledon, it will be yet another “Serena Slam" (she won the year-ending 2014 US Open as well), 12 years after her first. She has already crossed Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert’s Slam records, and Evert has already declared that Williams is the best ever.

“It seems so near, yet so far," Williams said post her victory at the French Open, referring to Graf’s record.

“She is not obsessed with beating Steffi’s record," adds Mouratoglou.

“She has this ability to refuse losing": Mouratoglou has got that exactly right. It has defined Williams all her life. It was distilled down to her at an early age, from her parents. It is one of the best-known stories in tennis: Her father Richard taught himself tennis, then passed on his passion for the game to his two youngest daughters: Venus and Serena. In her book, On The Line, Williams mentions that she doesn’t have a “first tennis memory" simply because tennis was always a part of life since she started remembering. All their early tennis, their dream of becoming champions, was honed in a tough neighbourhood in Compton, California, US, on cracked public courts strewn with broken glass, soda cans, weed and rubbish. Sometimes while practising she could hear gun shots ring.

“If you can keep playing tennis when somebody is shooting a gun down the street, that’s concentration," she once told journalists. And from the beginning, Serena and Venus, the two tall, athletic African-American girls in a predominantly white, predominantly European sport were the outsiders. Even now, even as she has dominated women’s tennis with an almost magical combination of skill, strength, and grit, she is in a sense an outsider.

The Canadian tennis newbie, Eugenie Bouchard, blonde and light-eyed, and with all of one Grand Slam final to her credit, was recently named in SportsPro magazine as the most marketable athlete in the world. While Williams still has to put up with endless taunts about her body and the colour of her skin. In October 2014, Russian Tennis Federation president Shamil Tarpischev referred to Venus and Serena as the “Williams brothers" in a radio show.

In an article in the New Yorker in 2014, after Williams won the US Open, the writer says “…Williams has been a spectacular and constant yet oddly uncherished national treasure…

“Part of this is owing to the duelling-isms of American prejudice, sexism, and racism…"

Williams is criticized for both being “too manly" (her muscular build, powerful game) and for her “feminine" side (flashy clothes, interest in fashion).

She has had to carry that hurt. It’s a battle she should not have had to fight, but she did it with guts and grace.

“My father has taught me, winning is not winning if it’s only on a tennis court," Williams had said in a televised interview in 2007.

But she and her sister Venus knew that the first step was winning on court, perhaps even as early as 1995, when Williams made her pro debut at the age of 14 (Venus had done the same a year earlier). Their father had already told the world that they would be champions, and the world had sniggered.

The only way to prove him right was on the court. Venus had a breakthrough run in 1997, when she made it to the final on her US Open debut. On that Centre Court, named after Arthur Ashe (a former player and symbol of African-American pride in tennis), Serena announced her arrival two years later. She defeated world No.1 Martina Hingis to win the US Open in 1999, and become the first African-American woman since Althea Gibson in 1958 to win a Grand Slam singles title.

For the next four years, just as their father had predicted, the Williams sisters ruled the tennis world. They changed the game, tossed it into a high-octane sphere. Even then there were few who could stand up to the younger Williams’ firepower. She had the best serve in the game, was the most athletic mover and struck the ball cleaner than anyone else. She was controlled aggression cast in an iron will. In full flight Williams was, as she is now, untouchable.

But soon after the “Serena Slam", Williams had her first major injury. She underwent a knee surgery in August 2003 and took a prolonged break from tennis, almost lasting eight months. The biggest blow came when her half-sister Yetunde Price was killed in 2003, after being shot by a stray bullet in their Compton ghetto. Williams took time to recover from that, to find joy in tennis. Her love for fashion and acting threatened to overtake her career. She ambled in and out of tennis at her own convenience.

Her coach Mouratoglou believes Williams has no “regrets" of spending some time away from the game. “You have to be a philosopher," he says. “Sometimes you need to make mistakes to learn."

Until Williams could make her mind up about where exactly tennis figured in her list of priorities, women’s tennis went through a period of anarchy sometime in the mid-2000s to 2012. From 2003-10, five players rose to world No.1 without having won a Grand Slam: Kim Clijsters, 11 August 2003 (won her first Slam at 2005 US Open); Amelie Mauresmo, 13 September 2004 (won her first Slam at 2006 Australian Open); Jelena Jankovic, 11 August 2008; Dinara Safina, April 20 2009; and Caroline Woznicaki, 11 October 2010. No one was quite sure what the pecking order was.

With no clear hierarchy or identity, the women’s game was crying out for a leader. A leader only Williams could have become. A leader Williams had, till then, refused to become. Williams was a great champion, but also a wilful one.

In June 2012, a few months short of her 31st birthday, she added French coach Mouratoglou to her team. The mandate was clear: “She asked me to propose her a strategy in order to start winning Grand Slams again and come back to the top. She was already a big champion, but I wanted to bring her to the next level. Make her more consistent in the results, make her win even more and make history," he says.

One of Williams’ favourite affirmations was given to her by her mother, Oracene: Whatever you become, you become in your head first. Now in her head, she knew exactly what she wanted to become.

Her focus as sharp as that forehand, Williams began her march towards making history. Mouratoglou helped her strategize, provided her with the outsider’s perspective, and Williams took care of everything within those white lines. She won the next two Grand Slams: Wimbledon and US Open in 2012. In February 2013, Williams took her rightful place at the top of the rankings. One that she has held on to without any more interruptions.

“She has always been a great athlete," says former player and US Davis Cup coach Patrick McEnroe. “Now she’s become more of a student of the game; that is why she has become more consistent. She takes it more seriously; more seriously than she did about five-six years ago. It’s great to see her maximizing all of her abilities, and there’s plenty of those. Now there’s nobody else even close to her level."

On the current WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) rankings, she has more than a 4,421-point lead over the second-placed Petra Kvitova. The closest rival she has in terms of Slam-winning ability is Maria Sharapova. But Williams has owned the Russian since 2004, beating her 16 times in a row over the last 11 years.

“Well, replace Serena as No.1, who knows," says Martina Navratilova of any possible challengers to her throne. “...You’re talking about pretty big shoes to fill.... It would be interesting if someone could do it while Serena’s still playing, but she has to quit first to give somebody else a chance."

At any Slam, on any surface—as she proved by winning the French Open on clay, her weakest surface, Williams is the only name to beat. Has been for a while.

“Yeah, it’s not so easy," she said before the French Open semi-final about being the one hunted by the pack. “Some days are better than others. Some days I’m like, I feel it; some days the pressure gets to you. It’s kind of hard when you go to every single match and you’re the favourite to win and it’s bigger news when you lose than when you win."

Even though she has become a one-woman force in tennis, the ladies game as a whole now has a better structure to it. Williams has set the benchmark, and challenged the rest to rise up to it. They have to be faster, stronger to beat her. By being her best, she’s forcing them to be better.

“I think that she is doing exactly the same thing as Roger on the woman’s side," says Mouratoglou, referring to Federer leading men’s tennis to a higher-achieving era after a brief transition period post-Pete Sampras. “Most of them play their best tennis against her because they have nothing to lose."

Williams feels she has nothing to lose either. Just before winning the 2014 US Open, she told reporters that she had changed the way she thought about the game. “I don’t need to do anything at all. Everything I do from this day forward is a bonus. Actually, from yesterday. It doesn’t matter. Everything for me is just extra."

Yet, she will refuse to lose. It’s a strange and beautiful combination, and for Williams, it is working just fine.

“She respects history a lot but winning a Grand Slam is already something so incredible that her motivation to win any of them is big enough," Mouratoglou says. “Of course, she probably has this record somewhere in the back of her head (Graf’s 22 Slams) but she also knows we have to go step by step, Grand Slam by Grand Slam. She shouldn’t look at the top of the mountain. Only the next step."

The next step is here, on the perfectly clipped grass of Wimbledon.

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Published: 27 Jun 2015, 12:44 AM IST
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