Tennis star and crusader Billie Jean King understood that for a sportsperson to be heard, they must win. When former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs challenged Australia’s Margaret Court, more than 20 years his junior, to a match in 1973, King said to Court: “You have to win. This is not just a tennis match, it’s about society, culture, changing people’s minds.”
When Court lost, King knew she would have to challenge Riggs in what became known as the Battle of the Sexes. “I just knew it was really important to win,” she said. She did, and for nearly 50 years she has leveraged that – along with her prolific everyday successes – to work for the betterment of women.
Her last major: Williams after winning the 2017 Australian Open.Credit:AP
Serena Williams’s career, as towering as it is vast, has been a quarter-century exercise in this syndrome in excelsis. To an extent that brooks virtually no argument, she’s removed gender and race from contemplations of supremacy in sport. She’s not one of the greatest female tennis players of all time, she’s simply one of the greatest players. In 2018, Roger Federer, no less, said she was the best, man or woman.
Williams is not an all-time great black athlete, she’s an all-time great, period. “We took colour out of it, and we just became the best,” she said in an interview with NBC this year. “Records are proof. That’s what we did.” Society, culture, people’s minds: she’s changed them all.
“We”, incidentally, is not a royal affectation. It’s Serena and older sister Venus. Serena may not equal or break Court’s tantalising close record of 24 major singles titles, but the Williams’ family tally of 30 will never be surpassed. “Without Venus, there would be no Serena,” the younger sister once said.
Serena Williams broke new ground in the way tennis is played, how a player should look, what she should wear, where she might do with her money; no one before her had made so much.
Williams in action in the 2017 Australian Open final.Credit:AP
“With her standing, and her empire, she’s created a counter-voice and a new perspective,” said journalist and author Howard Bryant, who wrote a book called The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America and the Politics of Patriotism.
“It’s changed how we scrutinise behaviour. You can’t just gang up on her or make off-handed comments about her body. She has the stature of any great male athlete. In 100 years, if we ask, ‘When did that shift happen?’, we’ll come back to Serena.”
Yet, Williams has never really been an emancipist in the sense of a stormer of barricades or thumper of tubs. She’s rarely taken a stance other than on the baseline. When she has spoken out, it has usually been on account of a perceived personal wrong or slight.
When specifically invoking gender or race, she has sometimes been clumsy. Witness her meltdown in the 2018 US Open final that overshadowed the first major championship for another woman of colour, Naomi Osaka. It ended in all their tears.
Serena and Venus Williams conspire.Credit:AP Photos
Williams’ activism was in her being. She has made what will likely be her most enduring marks in ways so subtle she might not have fully realised herself she was making them. Sometimes it was by her absence. After being subject to racial abuse that reduced her to tears, at Indian Wells in California in 2001, she did not return to that high-profile tournament until 2015.
Her strength became others’. As she “evolves” away from tennis, more than half of the top 50 women players in the US are black. Catalysed by Williams, the sport has evolved.
“By force of serve and personality and long-running achievement, she has become synonymous with tennis while managing to transform it as a black champion with symbolic reach, even if she long eschewed political or social commentary,” said veteran New York Times tennis writer Christopher Clarey. He suspects that her decision to let her racquet do the talking is founded in her upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Per Billie Jean, Serena Wiliams had to win. It wasn’t necessarily because she was a black athlete in a predominantly, almost cartoonishly white sport. Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe and others had blazed a little of the trail. It was more that her provenance was so, well, unusual that no one would have taken her seriously without the gravitas of her playing record.
Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams after the 2018 US Open finalCredit:AP
It’s a well enough known story, revived (and in truth a little gilded) in film last year; she and Venus were set for tennis superstardom by their father, the bombastic Richard, before they were born. He’d watched on TV an obscure Romanian player collect a cheque for $US30,000 and liked what he saw.
Really, it could and should have become just another cautionary tale about meddlesome sporting parents and the scars they leave. But Williams won, and won, and won. She beat her sister, then her peers, then everyone. She beat women twice her age, and later women half her age. She won in four decades, she won in seven presidential terms.
She did it with a style of game not really seen before in women’s tennis. Previously, it was thought that you could have craft or – for a rare few – power, but not both. A serve once was merely a way to introduce the ball to play. Williams’s serve was the biggest the women’s game had seen, but she was deft with it, and deceptively quick around the court, too.
Richard and Serena Williams in 2002.Credit:Reuters
Underpinning it all was a competitive instinct so fierce you could hear it. This might have been Richard’s dream, but it was his daughter’s doing.
Australian darling Ash Barty only played Williams twice, for two defeats. “She is an incredible competitor, one of the best I’ve ever seen, one of the best I’ve ever come up against because of her relentless nature and doing whatever it takes to win,” Barty said.
“And when her back’s against the wall – that’s when you see her true colours. I think time and time again over her career she won matches she shouldn’t have through that sheer will and competitive spirit.”
As a one-on-one sport, tennis thrives on rivalries. Williams had none. Maria Sharapova was touted as a worthy challenger; the record between them was 20-2. Williams sat at No. 1 for six years cumulatively, three-and-a-half of them unbroken.
In truth, it could have been more. Williams’s career was impacted by injuries – an occupational hazard over such a stretch – family tragedy and most recently a traumatic birth and motherhood.
Serena Williams with daughter Alexis Olympia in New Zealand in 2020.Credit:Getty Images
She also played fewer week-in-week-out tournaments than her peers and forebears, increasingly concentrating on the majors that, in these times, much more than in, say, Court’s, are the benchmarks of excellence. She’s won 23 (setting aside the 14 doubles titles she won with Venus), the most recent by beating her sister while pregnant with her daughter.
That was in Melbourne five years ago. Her quest to add one more has taken on the guise of Greek legend, a vain pursuit of the Golden Fleece that would confer ultimate and unarguable authority, stretching her into her 40s, and foundering now on her body clock. It was as if she was haunted by a woman she only ever briefly met.
In truth, her pursuit of Court wasn’t necessary. Her era and Court’s are apples and oranges, neither bearing nor needing comparison. It’s just that it’s innate in sport to have a reckoning, and it’s innate in Williams to have to win.
It means she has not always been as gracious as she might. No opponent ever beat her, they just sometimes caught her on off days. And she sometimes has overplayed her hand, when abusing a lineswoman at the US Open in 2009 for instance, or by claiming victimhood in the final in 2018.
Serena Williams with Margaret Court at the Hopman Cup in Perth in 2016.Credit:Getty Images
She came from a long way back, and she did it her way, but there can be no dispute that she is now, with Oprah, the most privileged black woman in the US.
It means that even her edginess is mainstream. She’s always careful to propitiate sponsors in public appearances, she foreshadowed her retirement in an interview with Vogue magazine and one of her projects now is to expand her venture capital firm, because the world needs another one of those.
It’s not ground-breaking for tennis players to dabble in fashion, finance and, for some, philanthropy. But as in all things Serena, it’s the scale that awes.
“I’d like to think that thanks to the opportunities afforded to me, women athletes feel that they can be themselves,” she said in Vogue. “They can play with aggression and pump their fists. They can be strong yet beautiful. They can wear what they want and say what they want and kick butt and be proud of it.”
Serena Williams lost in the first round at Wimbledon to France’s Harmony Tan.Credit:AP
These are the many sides of the same coin. All great sports folk, in their different ways, fight to master and/or disguise the winning imperative without neutering it. For all the motherhood statements, sport is first and last about winning and losing.
This is especially so in tennis: you, me, mano a mano, every match a knock-out, week after week. This has been Williams’s milieu for 27 years, and it has suited her like no other. All that Williams is and means has flowed from there.
Former champion Chris Evert has watched in awe. “She’s transcended tennis and become a leader on many important cultural, social and gender issues,” she told AP. “She has lived an extraordinary life, and will undoubtedly continue to crash the glass ceiling in the future.”
Ah yes, the future. For women’s tennis, it has already arrived. In the last 15 months, Williams has played three matches and won one. She’s been a ghostly presence. Her ranking reads more like a serial number.
Serena Williams as she will be remembered.Credit:AP
Her world is swarming with usurpers: Barty for a while, Iga Swiatek now, but also legions of qualifiers forging deep into tournaments. They’re fit, quick and smooth ball-strikers, but none have Williams’ aura. None will for a while. It’s not a regression, it’s just the way of the post-Williams era.
Williams herself faces the existential question all retiring athletes face. Where now can she get the satisfaction the tennis court gave her? How will she sate her competitive instinct? It won’t retire with her. She has many irons in the fire, but will they fulfil her? Despite the hyperbole you sometimes read, the skill set is not necessarily and wholly transferable.
All you can be sure of is that she will play to win, because she just has to win.
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