Williams faces Kerber with chance to tie Graf’s open-era record
WIMBLEDON, England — When the last ball sailed and plopped down just beyond the baseline, out, the 17-year-old in a yellow dress and white hair beads staggered backward a few paces. She placed a hand on her chest, as people sometimes do when stunned. Her smile glowed, but her countenance also flashed disbelief.
On Sept. 11, 1999, Serena Williams won the U.S. Open as a No. 7 seed and looked as if she did not expect it so soon. Yet as it became her first Grand Slam tennis title, it also set her off on a meandering path that has long since grown familiar, one that has found its way yet again to Centre Court here.
On Saturday, double her age from when she began her major-trophy collection, Williams will try again for a 22nd Grand Slam women's singles title. That numeral qualifies as rare tennis air. It would match Steffi Graf, who won 22 from 1987 to 1999, but it would be strewn across a 17-year span.
"I think I've been training my mind for years and years, and I've been preparing for these moments for decades," Williams said Thursday after she advanced to this Wimbledon final against Angelique Kerber, the 28-year-old German who defeated Williams in January in the Australian Open final. "I feel like it's been experience and it's been success. It's been failure; it's been everything that created the opportunity for me to be ready in these situations."
It has been a long, long career, and the numbers have piled up. When Williams walks out Saturday, it will mark her 96th Wimbledon match, in her 17th Wimbledon, and her ninth Wimbledon final (6-2 thus far). Her presence has become so familiar that even though Kerber just shared a warm hug with Williams after the Australian Open final, she still said her mission here would include "showing her I deserve to be in the final as well." Regarding Williams and her older sister Venus and their combined 11 Wimbledon singles crowns, Serena's most recent victim, Elena Vesnina, said, "There is something between Williams sisters and Wimbledon. There is love going on."
For Serena, the love began in 1998, when she debuted here in the first round against Italian veteran Laura Golarsa, who had lost narrowly to Chris Evert in a 1989 Wimbledon quarterfinal. By 1998, Golarsa was 30, Williams just 16. Golarsa already had lost to Williams in the heat of Sydney that year. She had never seen quite such an opponent.
"Already you could tell she was going to be a very good player and that grass was her surface, too," Golarsa said by telephone from Milan, where she runs a tennis academy and broadcasts tennis on television. "I played Chris [Evert]. I played Martina [Navratilova]. I played Lindsay [Davenport], and she was powerful, too. But no one ever had such a big serve where the ball was jumping so high. The ball was jumping higher than I had ever seen for a woman's serve."
Golarsa lost, 6-4, 6-3, on Court No. 2. She still has a tape. The opponent was a teenager, but not in the traditional sense.
"It was an extraordinary athlete on the court," Golarsa said. "For women's tennis it was something different. Steffi [Graf] was moving as well as Serena, but she was not so powerful." The serve, Golarsa said, "was like a man's serve. When the men serve, the ball is heavier. It's turning around differently. That's what I felt against Serena. It was a really heavy ball."
Evert, who is with Martina Hingis here for ESPN, remembered Friday her first sight of Williams.
"She played in my pro celebrity tournament when she was 11 years old and her sister was 13," Evert said. "And it was my first year of the Chris Evert Pro Celebrity tournament, and it was for charity, and I first saw her and Richard Williams, and she went on the court with her sister and hitting the ball with more power than I had ever seen an 11-year-old hit. And just with these big, long, loopy groundstrokes and just competitive and giggly and very, very normal."
Merely six years later, she had won that U.S. Open by 6-3, 7-6 (7-4) over No. 1 Hingis, fielded a call from President Bill Clinton shortly afterward and said of Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, "I talked to her also. She's really nice." She also dropped some hints of the indomitableness that would govern much of the ensuing 17 years. She referred to two earlier match points she lost in that final and said, "There comes a time when you have to stop caving. You just have to stop." Of the furnace of tiebreakers, she said even then, "When I get into tiebreakers, I feel like I can't lose. I don't know why."
From there to here, she has managed to tuck in extremely unusual feats, including two "Serena Slams," in 2002-03 and 2014-15, occasions when she held all four Grand Slam titles at once. In between those, in a matter often forgotten, she also left the game at times because of personal tragedy - the death of her half-sister Yetunde Price in 2003 - or injury or illness.
"I think the breaks in between have really helped her," Evert said. "I think the adversity that she has had in her life, whether it was illness or injuries or personal traumas, I think put her out of the game for a while, and I think they made her come back with a lot more appreciation of the game of tennis. It's like, she hasn't had 16, 18 years of solid, consistent time on the tour like Martina and I and Steffi, you know, did.
"It's been broken up a little bit, and there have been times even when she hasn't been in shape, in the early years, and she was distracted. So I think it all came together for her, almost, after 30. She saved her best tennis and her most focused tennis of her career for after 30 years old, and it's almost like she needed to go through all that to really appreciate and to understand her place in tennis history."
Of late, the triumphs have grown so frequent that only her defeats seem to register as newsworthy. In Australia, she reminded the media she is not a robot. Here, she has concluded, out loud, that this odd lot in life is desirable, all told. Were she to win Saturday, neither she nor anyone else would stagger backward in surprise. In the world she treads (and demands), her presence in all three Grand Slam finals this year has gone largely unrecognized largely because she lost the first two.
"I think it's great," she said of that consistency. "I mean, I think for anyone else in this whole planet, it would be a wonderful accomplishment. For me, it's about obviously holding the trophy and winning, which would make it a better accomplishment for me. For me, it's not enough. But I think that's what makes me different. That's what makes me Serena."