Williams getting in sync with her past
Legend is on whirlwind revenge tour as she goes after Court’s record
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—Entertainment options are limited in a lockdown, but Naomi Osaka had concrete plans for her Tuesday night.
After she extended her winning streak to 19 matches by beating Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei to advance to the semifinals of the Australian Open, Osaka said she planned to stay up to watch the evening match between Serena Williams and Simona Halep, though not necessarily to find out whom she would face next.
“I always watch Serena play,” Osaka said.
The Serena Williams she will face Thursday is a legend suddenly in sync with her distant past.
The veteran competitor on display in a near-empty Rod Laver Arena bore little resemblance to the Williams that Osaka beat in straight sets in the 2018 U.S. Open final or to the one that Halep humbled in the 2019 Wimbledon final. If Osaka dreamed of facing Williams at her best here, she fell asleep happy.
Williams’ 6-3, 6-3 quarterfinal victory was not as surgical as the dismemberment that Halep administered to her in that meeting at Wimbledon, a performance that Billie Jean King described as “one of the most perfectly executed matches I’ve ever seen.”
“I feel pretty good with that performance,” Williams said. “I feel like I needed to have a good performance obviously today, especially after my last match against her.”
The 2019 Wimbledon final was the third of four Grand Slam finals that Williams has played since she won the 2017 Australian Open to pull within one major title of equalling the career record held by Margaret Court.
She is one successful match from earning another shot at Court’s record, and appeared to get a break early Wednesday, when Karolina Muchova, the 25th seed, beat the top-ranked Ashleigh Barty, 1-6, 6-3, 6-2, ending any chance of the No. 1 meeting Williams in the championship match.
Williams still doesn’t have an easy path. After dispatching the second-ranked Halep, the third-ranked Osaka awaits Thursday.
In recent years, as Williams has become more and more famous for her rocket serve and guided-missile groundstrokes, she has seemed to have lost sight of the fact that before she was a champion, she was a grinder.
The coronavirus pandemic, now in its second lap around the calendar, has given Williams, like so many others, ample time for reflection.
And what she realized, she said Tuesday, was this: “I’m good at rallying, and I have to embrace the things I’m good at. I’m good at playing power, I’m good at hitting a hundred balls. And that’s one thing that’s unique about me that I just need to kind of accept and embrace and just be good at both.”