Love match
On court Serena Williams is battling back to fitness after the birth of her daughter, Olympia, but off court, she’s happily married and opening up about her life as never before, finds Christopher Clarey
Serena Williams holds court on her new life as a tennis ace and mother
On a grey, gloomy Wednesday in Manhattan, Serena Williams is swaddled in bath towels to stay warm in an air-conditioned corner suite on the 41st floor of the Lotte New York Palace Hotel. The room’s normally panoramic view had been obscured by dense fog, making it a challenge to see even across the road.
That seems an apt metaphor for Williams’ tennis career as she comes back from maternity leave at the age of 36.
It remains unclear whether she will be able to return to dominance. As she heads to Europe to start her claycourt season, she has played in only two tournaments in 2018, winning two matches and losing two and struggling, understandably, to regain full fitness.
But her personal life is a much clearer, blue-sky matter. She is newly married to Alexis Ohanian, the internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Reddit, and is embracing the challenges of motherhood with their eight-monthold daughter, Olympia.
“We haven’t been apart from each other more than 24 hours, ever,” Williams says of her daughter, whom Williams’ longtime fitness trainer, Mackie Shilstone, calls Baby O.
Williams’ private sphere became much more transparent earlier this month with the premiere on 2 May of a five-part series on HBO called Being
Serena, which tracks her pregnancy, her life-threatening postnatal problems and her comeback in unvarnished fashion.
The cameras follow her and Ohanian through some of the most intimate moments of their lives: even into the labour suite during Olympia’s birth by caesarean section as Ohanian murmurs, “So proud of you,” into his wife’s ear.
The scene and the series are all the more surprising in light of Williams’ longtime reluctance to share much publicly about her previous relationships, or even acknowledge them.
But she is in a new phase, and she reveals herself with few limits: letting the public see her concerns, her fears, her puffy eyes, her extra pounds, her surgical scar and her sense of humour, which is rarely in evidence when she’s in her fist-clenching, turfdefending mode on the tennis court.
“A lot of people see me on the court, and they only judge and see that side of me, and there’s so much more to my life and to me,” she tells me. “That’s not me, actually to be honest, on the court. As much a part of my life as it is, I become a different person when I play tennis. ”
Williams says she was the one who initiated the process with the HBO series.
“It was super-organic,” she says. “When I found out I was pregnant, I was saying, ‘I really want to get some footage of me,’ because I remember my dad had all this film when we were younger, all this cool footage, and I wanted to start this journey for Olympia, even though she was the size of a raspberry at the time.”
Williams says: “My original idea was to do more just Olympia stuff, and then I thought if we’re going to do this, let’s go all out.”
Mission accomplished, though some will certainly wonder whether some of this qualifies as oversharing in an era seemingly dedicated to it. But there are scenes of raw emotional power: above all, the moment when Williams has finally left the hospital after being treated for a pulmonary embolism and other blood-clotting issues in the harrowing days after delivery.
As she and Ohanian arrive at their house in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Williams emerges from the car, struggling to put one foot in front of the other as she lugs Olympia in a baby carrier with her right hand as if nothing – truly nothing – is going to stop her from reaching the front door.
“I didn’t want to let her go; I don’t want to let her go,” Williams explains to me. “I like to believe, and I would like other people to understand, that I’m no different than anyone else. I have the same struggles a lot of women have had, and a lot of women are probably determined to carry their baby in the door. And a lot of women are determined to do a lot of the stuff that I do, and there’s literally no difference between me and them with the exception of the side of me that just so happens to play professional tennis.”
After the delivery, as Williams lies in a hospital bed applying make-up and looking into a hand-held mirror, Ohanian asks, “What did you say when someone said that our little girl was going to win Wimbledon in like 15, 20 years?”
Williams, as if on cue, puts the mirror aside and answers, “Not if I’m still on tour!” to which a deeply amused Ohanian responds, “You’re ridiculous.”
There is much more of this banter, and at one stage, Williams expresses surprise that she and Ohanian “are such a good fit.”
“I’m an athlete,” she says. “He’s a business guy. I’m black. He’s white. We are totally opposite. I think we just complement each other. I think we understand hard work in different ways.”
Anyone who has read Richard Williams’ 2014 memoir, Black and
White: The Way I See It, knows how much resentment he felt about the racism he faced growing up in the American South and how intent he was on preparing his tennis-playing daughters to handle being outsiders in a predominantly white sport. Racist comments that he says he heard at the tournament in Indian Wells, California, in 2001 were a big part of the reason Serena and Venus Williams boycotted the event for more than a decade.
I ask Serena, who had dated black men and white men, what message her marriage to Ohanian sends.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Literally all I tell Alexis is, ‘well, you know, there’s such a difference between white people and black people.’ He always
“I’m an athlete, he’s a business guy. I’m black. He’s white. We are totally opposite. I think we just complement each other”
gets to hear about the injustices that happen; that wouldn’t happen if I were white. It’s interesting. I never thought I would have married a white guy, either, so it just goes to show you that love truly has no colour, and it just really goes to show me the importance of what love is. And my dad absolutely loves Alexis.”
She adds, “Ultimately I wanted to be with someone who treated me nice, someone who was able to laugh with me and someone who understood my life and someone that loved me.
“And you know, I’m sure there’s other people out there,” she says, pausing for effect and then laughing. “But you know, Alexis is the one I connected with, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Williams’ comeback to tennis has not been without setbacks or indignities. She has needed more time than she expected to lose weight and go deep in tournaments. After her most recent match, an errorstrewn first-round loss to Naomi Osaka at the Miami Open, Williams skipped the mandatory postmatch news conference, incurring a fine, and headed straight for her car with her bags to drive home.
“I played ... obscenity,” she says, pausing and managing to avoid the four-letter option.
“So I just thought after match point, I just thought there’s no need,” she adds, referring to the news conference. “Such an easy shot, and I think I almost hit someone in the stands.”
Shilstone, her trainer, says he told her after Miami: “Serena, you know how to play tennis. You are just not fit.”
More than five weeks after the Osaka defeat, Shilstone says, Williams’ fitness level is back up to “about 75 per cent” of what it was when she won the 2017 Australian Open.
“Let me tell you, yesterday over at the hotel, we just did over 500 repetitions on the whole body with cords and cables,” he says. “It was unbelievable, 500, and we did it in 45 minutes. Serena says: ‘Mackie, now that I have a baby, I can’t go two hours or whatever. We’ve got to get it done quick.’ And I say, ‘No, we’ve got to get it done smart.’”
Williams has a protected ranking of No. 1 that guarantees her entry into tournaments. But just like players returning from long-term injuries, she does not have a protected seeding that would help her avoid playing high-ranked players in early rounds. There has been a push within the WTA to reconsider that rule for players returning from pregnancy. Williams is in favour of protected seedings, arguing that women should not be discouraged from having families during their careers.
“I think it’s more of a protection for women to have a life,” Williams says. “You shouldn’t have to wait to have a baby until you retire. If you want to have a baby and take a few months off or a year off and then come back, you shouldn’t have to be penalised for that. Pregnancy is not an injury.”
It certainly has cost Williams physically, though. She calls this comeback “the biggest challenge” of her career.
“I never felt winded like that,” she says of her early practice sessions. “And it felt like no matter what I do, the weight is taking forever to get off, and it was crazy. Finally I was able to get better, but it took forever.”
Whenever the end of her career comes, she wants a big-bang finish.
“Eventually I’m going to have to drop that mic, and I would like for it to be a mic drop moment,” she says.
Winning the 2017 Australian Open with Olympia along for the ride would, of course, have been an excellent one.
“It could have been the one,” Williams says, the fog still obscuring the view of the Manhattan skyline. “But I’m still here, still playing.”