CHAMPION OF THE YEAR
SHE HAS APPEARED, QUIETLY AND WITHOUT FANFARE, ON THE BACKYARD PATIO OF HER PALM BEACH GARDENS, Florida, home, where I have been waiting with Chip, her tiny 5-year-old Yorkie. She slides her fantastic, superhuman body onto the white couch without so much as a sigh. ‘I’m struggling a little bit,’ she says, apologising for being late. ‘It’s a baby. You’re never on time with a baby.’ She’s in a pink top from her new independent clothing line, Serena, and she’s wearing grey sweats, no shoes. Really, the only remarkable thing is her makeup, fresh and glistening, full-on contoured cheeks, shiny lips, woolly lashes. It strikes me as the kind of effort you’d put into a photo shoot, or a press conference. She said she would do this thing, so she’s going to do it. It’s part of the job. A professional athlete today is supposed to provide thoughts after the big game, help make sense of the whole thing, put it all in cultural context – and let’s face it, that last one was loaded.
The 2018 US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium all the world watching Serena Williams, the most enduring athlete of all time, perform, impossibly, in top form at age 37, and just a year after having a baby, after battling life-threatening blood clots, after marrying a tech giant, Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit), and then... what? What is happening to Williams? She’s, well, pretty upset with chair umpire Carlos Ramos for giving her a ‘coaching’ code violation, and, what? Of course she is, after all, losing. Defeated in the first set and trailing in the second – but she’s arguing with Ramos, and, what? Now she’s smashed her racket on the ground, and she’s demanding an apology: there are men out here that do a lot worse, but because I’m a woman, you’re going to take this away from me? She’s pacing, calling Ramos a ‘liar’ and a ‘thief ’ for removing the point, and so he docks her a whole game, and thus her opponent, 20-year-old Naomi Osaka, wins her first Grand Slam, in a way no one ever wants to win her first Grand Slam, the crowd booing the umpire, Osaka sobbing, apologising for winning, Williams telling the crowd to stop it, to let Osaka have her moment, and then of course come the tweets, and the opinion pages, and a racist cartoon, everybody shouting. The noise. The noise. The noise. Yes, yes, yes, discuss! It’s part of the job. »