CIAO, SERENA
An unseeded Italian ends the summer of Serena and Williams’ Grand Slam chase,
NEW YORK— She sensed this was coming, Serena.
In retrospect, the un-thinkable was always there, the looming risk of it.
She might have suspected it in the back of her mind — which is why the questions displeased her, ever since Wimbledon, about going for that Grand Slam quadfecta that has been the sports story line of the summer.
Summer came to an early end for Serena Williams on Friday afternoon. And so did the U.S. Open, which was supposed to be her crowning glory.
Everybody assumed so. Not Williams herself, however. It was a subject she preferred to avoid, just as she’d called a moratorium on the Serena Slam — four majors in a row, flanked across back-to-back years — at Wimbledon.
That was, allegedly, the superstitious Serena, who didn’t want to jinx herself while simultaneously putting a sock in media interrogations. She was clearly fed up with that line of enquiry. But there was also, on occa- sions of fatigue and utter exasperation — as when Williams admitted at her post-game news conference after beating sister Venus in three quarter-final sets, “To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t want to be here” — a hint of the haunted and the hunted about her.
Everybody so desperately wanted this pure Grand Slam — the four most prestigious championship titles in one calendar year, last achieved by Steffi Graf in 1988 — for Williams. She wanted it for herself. But in recent months, doubts began to slip in, penetrating that ferocious self-confidence, a vulnerability exposed, perhaps more from within than without.
Where it all led, yesterday, was a three-set defeat in the semifinal at Flushing Meadows against unseeded Italian, Roberta Vinci, a woman playing in her first Grand Slam final, which she reached by luck of the draw and injuries and top contenders ousted, without having to face any opponent in the top 20.
Vinci would have played in the quarterfinals last Sunday against Eugenie Bouchard, had the Canadian not fallen and suffered a concussion. So there’s something else for the 21year-old from Westmount, Que., to ponder, the what-ifs.
It was a stunning upset in Queens yesterday, leaving the tennis universe speechless. Williams did not wish to speak about it, to turn herself inside out for reporters to get a good look at the disappointment of a 2-6, 6-4, 6-4 elimination. “I don’t want to talk about how disappointing it is for me. If you have any other questions?”
A glum and terse Williams, maybe at the end of her emotional rope but keeping it together in front of the cameras, reached for a grace note towards the woman who vanquished her: “I thought she played the best tennis of her career. She’s 33. She’s going for it at a late age. I think she played literally out of her mind.”
Odd that Williams would characterize Vinci as long in the tooth, when she is less than two weeks from her 34th birthday. But Serena, of course, is a legend, in an ageless class and a distinction of her own. She is still — as two Italian ladies are set to face off in the Open final — the best female tennis player on the planet, arguably the best player ever, maybe even the best player in any sport ever. Just not on this afternoon.
Keep in mind, though, that Williams lost to an 18-year-old teenager, Switzerland’s Belinda Bencic, at the Rogers Cup last month. She lost to Petra Kvitova in Madrid in March. There were omens.
Williams is No. 1 in the world — she has been forever, it seems — but she is not invincible on a bad day for her and a great day for her opponent, as happened in Toronto.
The pressure building up must have been staggering and, ultimately, crushing. She denied it.
“I told you guys, I don’t feel pressure,” Williams reiterated in her record-brief newser yesterday.
“I’ve never felt that pressure to win here.”
But she hadn’t lost here since 2011. She arrived on a 33-match majors winning streak. And she’d won all 10 of her three-set matches on her search for the Slam. In retrospect, there may have been more dropped sets than most would have predicted and some of those triumphs were laborious. Against a clever tactician like Vinci, for possibly the first time ever on a tennis court, Serena Williams ran out of fight.
Even Vinci felt the need to apologize for being the spoiler.
“For the American people, for Serena, for the Grand Slam and everything: Sorry, guys.”