Serena met her match

It wasn’t nerves that did in Serena Williams on Friday, though it was hogwash from her to suggest that she never gets nervous. And it wasn’t just the accumulated force of history, as she tried to join Maureen Connolly and Margaret Court and Steffi Graf as the only women to ever win a calendar Grand Slam in tennis.

Serena, having an off day at the worst possible time, ran into the most dangerous opponent in this world, whether most of the world had heard of Roberta Vinci or not:

Serena ran into a player having the day and the match of her life.

Late on the night when Rollie Massimino’s Villanova team shocked the country and beat Georgetown in the 1985 NCAA basketball finals, I ran into Rollie at a party.

“I told them before the game,” he said, “that if we played them 10 times, they’d probably beat us nine. But then I told them we’re not playing them 10 times. We’re just playing them tonight. And to go out and play the game of their lives.”

Vinci did that, with speed and toughness and imagination, changes of speed, and a sliced backhand that seemed to confuse Williams like she was a baseball hitter seeing a curveball for the first time.

And when she saw that Williams was getting slower and more tentative as the match went along, it was Vinci who seized the moment and the day and more and more became the aggressor, no matter how much Williams kept yelling at herself to do the same, yelling sometimes as if Vinci wasn’t even there. Or didn’t matter. But it’s what the old clubfighter named Butterbean used to say: “When they cry, you hit them harder.”

It would have been a wonderful thing for Williams, one of the great champions of all time, men or women, to finish off the Slam.

What it became instead was an example of why we watch sports and care about them, and how wonderful sports can still be.

There is an expression from that sport that still covers days and moments like this:

It’s why they put the net up.