MAKING IT LOOK EASY
Serena powers her way into Wimbledon’s third round
Serena Williams reacts after taking out Bulgaria's Viktoriya Tomova during second-round action at Wimbledon on Wednesday. Williams won the match 6-1, 6-4. The seven-time champion lost just five of 32 points on her first serve as she took a little over an hour to triumph.
Seven years ago at the Rogers Cup, I ventured into the Rexall Centre’s third deck to interview fans in the nosebleed section for a piece on Serena Williams, then grinding out a three-set quarter-final win over Lucie Safarova.
That week, Williams faced now-familiar challenges, battling opponents and high expectations while coming back from medical situation that prompted a long layoff. On Wednesday at Wimbledon, she dispatched Viktoriya Tomova in straight sets to advance to the third round. And when I watched her overtake Safarova she had played just three tournaments in the previous 12 months, a stretch that included a foot laceration, two surgeries and near-fatal blood clots on her lungs.
That Friday-night match marked a milestone in my career — the last byline of my first stint as a sports reporter at the Star. Three days later I moved to the business department and spent the following four years writing about the sports industry.
Over that span, Williams’ career would provide fascinating insights into how race and sexism influence the business of sport, with double-standards tied to her Blackness and womanhood shaping public perception of her. This setup has likely cost Williams sponsorship dollars, and means the 36-year-old could retire as both the greatest player ever and among the most underappreciated.
According to Forbes, Williams didn’t surpass Maria Sharapova as the world’s highest-paid female athlete until 2016 despite winning 90 per cent of their career head-tohead matchups. Until then, Sharapova topped the list by earning more endorsement income than any other woman in sports. In 2015, the Russian tennis star pulled in $23 million (U.S.) in endorsements, compared with $10 million for Williams.
At the time, Williams at once acknowledged and dismissed racism’s potential role in fattening Sharapova’s endorsement portfolio at Williams’ expense.
“If (companies) want to market someone who is white and blonde, that’s their choice,” Williams told the New York Times Magazine. “I have a lot of partners who are very happy to work with me.”
Williams, who gave birth to a daughter last September, entered this year’s Wimbledon tournament with 23 career grand slam titles, one short of Margaret Court’s all-time record
Those numbers alone present a compelling case for Williams as a tennis G.O.A.T. And Williams’ medical history renders her résumé even more impressive. If she returns from a late-career pregnancy to win even one more major, Williams should cement her legacy as the best ever, whether or not she breaks Court’s record.
When evaluating other athletes, we recognize circumstances matter. Joe Louis might be the longest-reigning heavyweight champ, but Muhammad Ali remains The Greatest largely because he lost his prime years to a three-year court battle over his refusal to join the army, yet regained the heavyweight title twice more anyway.
Yet with Williams, subplots often emerge to deflect attention from the magnitude of her accomplishments.
Often those storylines focus on her body; curvy enough to fill out catsuits, sturdy enough withstand career-threatening health scares and strong enough to inspire bad opinions from writers and rivals alike.
In 2009, Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock dismissed Williams as lazy because the ideal women’s tennis physique of his imagination didn’t include what he called “thick, muscled blubber.” That muscle and fat are two different substances didn’t alter his thinking, nor did the reality that Williams remained fit and strong enough to win two grand slams and finish 2009 as the WTA’s top-ranked player.
Two years later, veteran columnist Greg Couch ripped Williams for a Twitter avatar that featured her wearing lingerie, arguing that posting a sexy photo weeks after a man was arrested on suspicion of stalking her “suggested something about common sense and hypocrisy.” Couch’s blog post included a poll asking whether Williams’ avatar “crosses the line,” but never discussed whether would-be stalkers could avoid such controversies by simply behaving themselves.
And in 2015, Williams occupied the centre of a New York Times story exploring body image issues in women’s tennis, in which rival players maintained they chose not to emulate her musculature.
“It’s our decision to keep her as the smallest player in the top 10,” said Tomasz Wiktorowski to the Times, referring to Agnieszka Radwanska, who he coached. “Because … she’s a woman, and she wants to be a woman.”
The notion that womanhood can’t coexist with physical strength is as absurd as the contention that elite women’s players could choose to match Williams’ build — and her results — but willingly sacrifice wins to appear more feminine. Nobody would believe an NFL player who claimed he could equal J.J. Watt’s production but didn’t want the hassle of buying new clothes to fit Wattsized muscles. Involve Williams, however, and similarly farcical assertions gain traction.
Meanwhile, every Williams victory is also a triumph for the idea that no single perfect body type exists, and that players can tailor their games to their natural physical tools.
And Williams’ penchant for flaunting her physique — both in swimsuit photo shoots and the mom-bod catsuit she sported at the French Open — signals to her followers that a broad cross-section of women’s bodies are worth celebrating, even if only a narrow range conforms to mainstream North American beauty norms.
The cheap-seat dwellers I met at the 2011 Rogers Cup got the message.
“If you have it, you can sell it,” said Williams fan Farah Karim, who high-fived an eavesdropping stranger who agreed with her.
“She has this healthy body image, which is positive for young women. If you’ve got it, there’s no use in hiding it.”