Mommy Serena back in action
Historically she follows other successful sport star mothers
STRICTLY speaking, Serena Williams cannot be called a trailblazer when she makes her competitive comeback in Abu Dhabi today, a little under four months after giving birth.
Plenty of others have plied a postpartum route back to tennis: Evonne Goolagong dominated the women’s game in 1980, becoming the first mother to win Wimbledon since Dorothea Lambert Chambers 66 years earlier, while Kim Clijsters achieved more major titles after the arrival of daughter Jada than she did before.
Even Victoria Azarenka, one of a vanishing few to hold a candle to Williams in recent years, was back at Wimbledon last summer as a parent, taking pictures of baby son Leo rolling on the grass and gnawing her accreditation badge.
None of them, however, returned clutching 23 Grand Slam trophies.
The difference with Williams is that she has nothing left to prove, either to herself or to the sport.
Indeed, her last match had the feel of a perfect bookend, as she vanquished sister Venus to claim her seventh Australian Open, not even deigning to drop a set during a tournament when she was deep in her first trimester.
It promises to be quite the tale when little Alexis Olympia describes how she helped lift the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup as an embryo.
One motivation, of course, is history. Margaret Court’s record haul of 24 Grand Slams is now an inconvenient roadblock just waiting to be bulldozed.
Patrick Mouratoglou, Williams’s coach, suggested in Melbourne last year that it was far more significant to have surpassed Steffi Graf’s 22, which for modern athletes had stood, rather like Bob Beamon’s 8.90m long jump, as a monument that might never be matched.
“It’s another era,” the Frenchman shrugged. “There is now a professional era, and the record was Graf.”
The heydays of Williams and Court are not remotely comparable. In Court’s time, the Australian Open, which she won 11 times, was a forgotten outpost, a victim of its geographic remoteness.
Billie Jean King (then Moffitt), a contemporary of Court, only bothered turning up three times in a 25year career, dismissing it as “minorleague“. Today, it is the glittering jewel of the Asia-Pacific region, offering a winner’s cheque of £2.27 million (about R37.8-million).
The challenge of seizing such a prize has, let us say, moved on. In truth, women’s tennis deserves a more unifying queen bee than Court.
Where Williams is a role model to millions, having fundamentally shifted the paradigms of race, gender and background in sport, Court, as a 75year-old pastor in Perth, is a figure blinded by religious zealotry, spending her dotage writing open letters to Qantas, the national airline, about why she refuses to fly with them because of their support of same-sex marriage.
Mouratoglou, once romantically involved with Williams, had dared not even speculate when his star pupil would grace the court again.
No woman, he acknowledged at Wimbledon, could be expected to say definitively how she felt about motherhood until it happened.
But the early signs are auspicious: Williams has wasted no time in committing to an exhibition match against Jelena Ostapenko this weekend, which, if nothing else, should offer an escape from baby teething traumas so acute that she asked for advice on Twitter.
It is encouraging that she will refuse to offer up the hormonal and physiological changes wrought by pregnancy as excuses for under-performance.
This is vintage Williams: either she wins or, as her increasingly minimal schedule attests, she does not even appear. And there is little reason to doubt that a woman who has won an astonishing 10 majors beyond the age of 30 can rewrite the manual for sporting mothers.
For a start, she can derive inspiration from athletics, where British icons have shown that childbirth need not equate to diminished endurance.
Paula Radcliffe won the New York Marathon within 10 months of delivering daughter Isla, while Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill was a mother in 2014 and a world heptathlon champion in 2015.
At her Sheffield base, Ennis-Hill found not only that she could complete extra training but that she had greater range in her previously stiff ankles, adding weight to the theory that the hormone relaxin, which floods the pregnant body, can contribute to a softening of the ligaments.
“Outrageous,” Williams has said of her plan to spring back with an eighth Melbourne triumph. But it need not necessarily be so. Elite athletes are hard-wired with the strongest coping mechanisms. — The Daily Telegraph