I was too young to see Pele or Muhammad Ali or Bjorn Borg in their prime. But if one lives long enough another legend invariably comes along. I saw Diego Maradona, Mike Tyson and Roger Federer, all legends enough that the questions have been asked whether their respective achievements would stand up to the legends of yesteryear.
"At the end of August Serena Williams played what may be her last professional tennis match in the third round of the US Open, bringing to a close a professional career that started 27 years ago. To put that number into perspective, the current world number ones in both men’s and women’s tennis – Danii Medvedev and Iga Swiatek were not born when Serena, 40, turned professional in 1995...
That is a major part of her legend, that she could sustain
her presence at the highest level of the game for so long.
And what a career it has been. The highlight is that she has won 23 Grand
Slam singles titles, winning these major tournaments is the objective measure
of achievement in tennis. She is only second – man or women, to Australian
Margaret Court in major titles won, but experts point out that Court won 13 of her
24 titles during the amateur era, which means she was not necessarily the best
female player during that time.
In trying to tie Court’s record, Serena came one match short
in four events after 2017. 2017 is
significant because it’s the year she gave birth to her daughter. Her last two
grand slam finals losses were to Naomi Osaka and Bianca Andreescu, who were not
born by the time she turned professional.
The 2020 lockdown due
to Covid, arguably blunted her last charge for immortality. After Covid she was
never really the same and at this year’s US Open was ranked 605 in the world.
Her record also includes four Olympic Gold medals – one in
singles and three in doubles, where in all instances she partnered her sister,
Venus.
As if we need any more convincing, Serena won 85 percent of the 849 matches she played over the course of her career and is the highest earning female tennis player. At $96m, she has earned more than double the second highest earner, her sister, Venus, who took home $42m. And these were only on court earning she probably more than doubled that figure in product endorsements over the span of her career.
Technically she was sound in all departments. Her serve won
her many free points, its power and precision digging her out of many a hole.
The purists will frown at her double backhand, but that is
now accepted form, given how early kids are now taking up the game. While she
played mostly from the baseline, with power off both wings and a relatively
flatter ball than her rivals. One shudders to think what Serena would have
achieved if she had made more frequent forays to the net, to cut off the high
looping groundstrokes her contemporaries have often served up over her career.
At her prime she was mentally as strong as, if not stronger
than any female athlete before including Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova or
Steffi Graff the other legends before her.
For other mortals these achievements – her longevity at the
highest level and unassailable winning record on court, alone would be enough
to cement her place in tennis history.
But there is more.
The legend of Serena begins before her birth. Her father,
Richard had a light bulb moment in 1978 when Romanian Virginia Ruzici picked up
a $40,000 check for winning the French Open that year. The way the story is
told, he then convinced wife, Oracene, to have two more children, preferably
girls, through whom he would channel his ambition to get a piece of that money.
Owner of a small security company and quite well off, well
off enough to have a house in Long Beach, California, he moved his family to
Compton, a neighbourhood immortalised in rap music for its gang related crime
and violence.
Richard did this because he figured that for his daughters
to break into the lily-white world of tennis, they needed to get toughened up,
something living in Long Beach would not do for them.
The experiment could have gone badly wrong. Richard at one time confronted a gang member who was making passes at Venus and was badly beaten for his trouble, in front of his young daughters...
Richard taught himself how to play tennis and then set upon
imparting his homemade knowhow on his daughters.
They did not have a normal upbringing, spending hours on the
public courts of Compton while the contemporaries were out looking for trouble.
He upset the playbook on how to raise talented tennis
players – avoiding the junior tournament circuit, reluctantly releasing them to
outside coaching long after their contemporaries had joined full time academies
and rejecting the early endorsement deals that would have eased the financial
burden on his effort to develop world beaters.
Thanks to Richard’s tenacity, marketing savvy and
invariably, Venus and Serena’s superlative talent, by the time they were 14
they had each turned professional.
Funnily in Richard’s plans the girls were supposed to go to college and get degrees and only then would they become professional tennis players. They were ahead of schedule by almost 10 years...
One wonders about mother Oracene. She has a been a constant
presence at her daughters’ tournaments on whichever parts of the world her
daughters are doing battle. She has never spoken out of turn during the last
two decades, mainly because she allowed her now divorced husband represent and
let her daughters’ tennis do the talking. Her unvarnished account of what it
takes to deal with a manic husband and raise super talented daughters is
guaranteed to be a best seller.
There are many facets to the Serena legend and Venus plays a
major part of it. Venus taller, leaner and the more talented of the two when
they were younger, not only laid the path for Serena but they, must have offered useful support to each other a largely
white tennis community, which initially saw the girls as circus attractions,
before they started dominating the sport.
Venus has accumulated her own impressive numbers – seven
Grand Slam titles, winning 75 percent of all her matches and five Olympic
medals – four gold and one silver. And at 42 has not yet thrown in the towel on
her professional career.
The legend of Serena is only part of the larger legend of
the Williams.
The sisters have been successful for so long they have made
it look ordinary. They have inspired a host of ladies of colour during their
illustrious career, but it is hard to imagine another accomplished pair of
sisters or even one other tennis player who has so captured the public
imagination, come along soon.
Since the Covid lockdown, Serena’s mortality has begun to show. Where she would stare down an opponent and intimidate them into submission, everyone seems to think they have a chance against her; Where she was quick enough to get to the furthest ball and conjure a winning shot out of nothing, she has lately been barely reaching shots, leave alone muster a credible response...
But for us who have watched this legend grow and win,
nothing can diminish her and we are glad to let her go off to do other things.
The Cubans have a saying “You cannot cover the sun with your
thumb”. They may have been talking about the Williams.
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