Serena Williams burnishes her legend
Just a mere 10 months after giving birth, Williams on verge of 24th Grand Slam title
Serena Williams won the Australian Open last year while in the early stages of pregnancy. She will play for the Wimbledon title Saturday after giving birth just 10 months ago. If she beats Germany’s Angelique Kerber for her 24th Grand Slam singles victory, it is hard to imagine what she could do for her next act.
Win a Slam while preggers with twins? Win one while holding a baby in her arms? That latter option would make the two-hand backhand tricky, but I feel Serena could give it a go. If she could train the baby to toss the ball in the air for her serves, she at least goes a couple of rounds deep.
You have to imagine fanciful scenarios that Williams would find hard to overcome because, at this point, she is long past being hobbled by any of the normal scenarios. There is Serena, and then there are the rest of us humans.
When she won that 23rd Slam in Melbourne last year — breaking the record for major singles titles in the Open era that she held with Steffi Graf — there was a sense of urgency about it, at least to her. The public didn’t know she was pregnant — she wouldn’t announce it until later that spring — but she was aware the Aussie final might have been her last chance to surpass Graf ’s total.
It turns out she needn’t have worried.
Even though her daughter, Alexis, was delivered in September and required multiple surgeries including one for blood clots in her lungs, and even though she is playing in only her fourth tournament since becoming a mother, Williams, at 36 years old, routinely dispatched Germany’s Julia Gorges on Thursday in London, 6-2, 6-4, to reach the final.
“It’s crazy,” she told the BBC after the match. “I don’t even know how to feel.”
She is right about the crazy part. But that’s also what we have come to expect from Serena, who has an entire second half of her career that utterly defies logic. She won her first Slam as a 17-year-old at the U.S. Open in 1999, not long after Graf won her last Slam at the French Open that same year. For that first title, Serena had to beat Martina Hingis, who was a little over a year older than her but had already won five Slams.
Hingis would never win another major singles title, which isn’t all that unusual in a sport often dominated by youngsters who rise quickly and then fade almost as fast. Serena, though, won a pile of titles in her teens and early 20s, as one does, then appeared ready to have the normal descent into mediocrity, only to became dominant again later in her career.
Along the way she has seen off the entire careers of world-class players. Justine Henin won her first Slam in 2003 and her seventh and final one in 2007. She has since retired, made a comeback, retired again, opened two tennis academies, had two kids, and starred in two reality shows on Belgian television. Serena has just kept piling up victories. She won five Slams before Henin won her first and has won 15 of them since Henin won her last.
The only other woman to win as many as seven Slams in the Serena era is her sister Venus, who won her last at Wimbledon a decade ago. Serena has won 15 of them since Venus’ last.
Before this Wimbledon began, ESPN analyst Chris Evert, who won 18 major titles, said she was surprised motherhood hadn’t “taken the edge away a little bit” for Serena “because I know when I had my first child, I just didn’t want to do anything else in life.”
But she didn’t mean that as a criticism.
“This is Serena, and she does the unimaginable, the unpredictable,” Evert said. “You can never count her out.”
Still, you should be able to count her out when she’s coming back from childbirth, when she’s played only a handful of matches in 16 months, and when she’s not that far removed from what she described Thursday as being unable to walk to her mailbox.
Apparently you cannot. Serena Williams, all these years later, is inevitable.
The final on Saturday, with the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex (Kate and Meghan for you laypeople) watching from the Royal Box, could yet be the moment when Williams is proven to be mortal. The incredible story unfolding in London is reminiscent of 2015, when Serena battled through three straight Slam wins and was in the semis against an unseeded Roberta Vinci at the U.S. Open that September. The calendaryear Serena Slam looked like a lock. Vinci had even booked a flight home for the day after their match. And then Vinci won.
Kerber, a finalist at Wimbledon just two years ago, and a twotime Slam winner, should be a much tougher test. It is simply nuts to imagine Williams beating someone of Kerber’s talent in a Grand Slam final so soon after she became the world’s baddest tennis mom. It is nuts that she is even there to have the chance.
But then, you remember, she is Serena.
We probably should have seen this coming.