Williams can make return as Mother Superior
Just four months after giving birth to her daughter, the 23-time Grand Slam winner is determined to raise the bar further by breaking Margaret Court’s record
Strictly speaking, Serena Williams cannot be called a trailblazer er when she makes her competitive comeback eback in Abu Dhabi tomorrow, morrow, a little under four months after fter giving birth. Plenty of others rs have plied a post-partum route back ack to tennis: Evonne Goolagong dominated the women’s game me in 1980, becoming the first mother other to win Wimbledon since Dorothea othea Lambert Chambers 66 years s earlier, while Kim Clijsters achieved more major titles after the arrival of daughter Jada a than she did before. Even Victoria ia Azarenka, one of a vanishing ng few to hold a candle to Williams s in recent years, was back at Wimbledon last summer as a parent, taking pictures of baby aby son Leo rolling on the grass and d gnawing her accreditation badge. adge.
None of them, however, returned clutching 23 Grand nd Slam trophies. The difference with th Williams is that she has nothing hing left to prove, either to herself elf or to the sport. Indeed, her last match had the feel of a perfect bookend, okend, as she vanquished sister Venus nus to claim her seventh Australian an Open, not even deigning to drop a set during a tournament when she was deep in her first trimester. ter. It promises to be quite the tale e when little Alexis Olympia describes bes how she helped lift the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup as an embryo. o.
One motivation, of course, e, is history. Margaret Court’s record ecord haul of 24 slams is now an inconvenient roadblock just t waiting to be bulldozed.
Patrick Mouratoglou, Williams’s lliams’s coach, suggested in Melbourne urne last year that it was far more significant gnificant to have surpassed Steffi Graf af ’s 22, which for modern athletes had stood, rather like Bob Beamon’s mon’s 8.90-metre long jump, as a monument that might never er be matched. “It’s another era,” the Frenchman shrugged. “There ere 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 25-year career, dismissing it as “minor-league”. Today, it is the glittering jewel of the Asia-pacific region, offering a winner’s cheque of £2.27 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 75-year-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 when I spoke to him 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 h has won an astonishing 10 majors b beyond the age of 30 can rewrite th the manual for sporting mothe mothers. For a start, she can deriv derive inspiration from athletics, where British icons have shown th that childbirth need not equate to diminished endurance. Pau Paula Radcliffe won the New Yor York Marathon within 10 month months of delivering daughter Isla, w while Dame Jessica Ennis-hill wa was a mother in 2014 and a world heptathlon champion in 20 2015. At her Sheffield base, Ennis-h Ennis-hill found not only that she c could complete extra trainin training, but that she had greater r range in her previously stiff a ankles, adding weight to the theory that the horm hormone relaxin, which flood floods the pregnant body, can contribute to a softe softening of the ligaments. Williams, we can rest assured, will leave n no detail unexplored in her quest to make this fascinating next pha phase a success. She is so fanatically meticulou meticulous that she has designed a nursery nu for Alexis that features a mounted medieval Fren French poem by Charles Charle d’orleans. H Her husband, t the Reddit coco founder Alexis A Ohanian, a admits that he has discovered th the one person who drives dr him to be even more self-discipline self-disciplined. “Outrageou “Outrageous,” Williams has s said of her plan to spring spr back with an e eighth Melbourne triumph. triu But it need not necessarily be so. Elite athletes are hard-wired hard-wi with the strongest cop coping mechanisms. Williams has already alread faced down far more daunting obstacles: in 2011 she cut her foot open on a broken bottle in Munich Mun and developed potentially fatal blood clots on her lungs. lun Carrying a child heightened heigh the risk of such clots recurring, as she continued contin to inject herself daily with anti-coagulants. Against Agains that backdrop, the prospect of some tennis seems as soothing so as an Australian summer summe breeze. Sport’s ultimate ultimat alpha female is about to rein reinvent herself, aptly enough, as Mother Superior.