Garhi Shot First
Hall of Fame
In Fader:
Serena Williams seems invincible. Over the course of a 20-year professional tennis career, she’s succeeded more often and for longer than anyone ever, winning all four Grand Slams consecutively, twice, and matching Steffi Graf’s record of 186 weeks ranked at No. 1. Her record-tying 22 wins in major tournaments, and the staggering fact that when she’s been in major finals she’s only lost five times, make a Williams win a more reliable proposition than investing in Apple or casting Tom Hanks as the lead in your movie. In a world where people often confine what they think women are capable of, there are no limits to how much winning Serena Williams can do.
That’s not the best part. Even when she’s robot-marching through her competition, Williams’s matches are events. Her draws at this year’s U.S. Open were attended by a trail of disparate celebrities —Jay Z and Beyoncé, Carmelo and LaLa, Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin and Uzo Aduba (separately), and Pharrell Williams and adidas tennis legend Stan Smith (together) — giving tennis matches in 2016 the see-and-be-seen cachet of a Lakers game in the ’80s or a Floyd Mayweather fight in the aughts.
When Williams, now 34 years old, takes on Yaroslava Shvedova on a Sunday in the tournament’s fourth round, the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium builds a sonic wall of approval for every 116-m.p.h. ace raining down on the poor upstart. Queen Latifah jumps up and fist pumps after one, and Michael Strahan casts a shadow over roughly two rows of seats when he gets on his feet. In contrast, when Shvedova manages a point, one of her lone countrymen chants “Ka-zhak-stan, Ka-zhak-stan” to giggles from the home crowd. Williams eviscerates her in one hour and eight minutes.
Days later, when Williams gets bounced from the Open by the No. 6-ranked Karolina Pliskova, the result is as much a shock for the outcome as it is for the way she loses: on a double fault in the tiebreak set. She’s conditioned us, through so many nail-biters, to believe that no deficit is unsurmountable. Time and time again, Williams has played best when her back is up against a wall — the same quality that’s made icons of American athletes from Muhammad Ali to Michael Jordan.
Which is why it was so galling, after this year’s Wimbledon semis, when a reporter asked Williams whether she should be considered one of the greatest female athletes of all time. Her perfect response: “I prefer the words ‘one of the greatest athletes of all time.’”
Most of us need to be told we could be like this or that role model — remember the Be Like Mike campaign? But when Serena Williams’s mother and father told her that she could be the greatest of all time, rather than looking around for an imitable path, a target to match, she took it as permission to be fully herself. Whether she was an unranked understudy to her sister Venus or the sport’s marquee player, her game has never been tentative, her outfits have never lost their color, and her emotion has never been restrained.
Williams emphatically and frequently salutes her foremothers: she is a reverent student of history who read Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”at her Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year dinner last year and name-checks Althea Gibson and Zina Garrison in post-match press conferences. With all due respect, though, there’s never been a Serena Williams before Serena Williams. There has been no blueprint for an athlete to arrive at the intersection of gender and race and dominance and scrutiny that she has. Perhaps even more than her wins, Williams’s greatest feat has been the very act of breathing herself into existence.
Greatest American athlete. Most dominant black tennis player. Highest-paid woman in sports. Whatever. Serena Williams is also a very, very bad loser. When we first meet this summer in Palm Beach, Florida, she’s just returned home from an early exit in the Olympics. With four gold medals from three past Olympiads, Williams has never failed to medal until now. Coincidentally, as the two of us begin to talk, her sister and closest friend on the planet is competing in Rio in the mixed doubles final, though Williams doesn’t so much as check her phone to track Venus’s progress.
“I just… I can’t watch her,” she says. “I watch her in person at a tournament, but I get so nervous on TV. I feel like in person she can hear me say, ‘Come on!’ — cause I know when I hear her say ‘Come on,’ a familiar voice, it really helps me. It doesn’t really help when I’m screaming at the TV, and I get so nervous. Like, it’s really crazy how nervous I get after all these years."
It’s probably for the best: minutes into our hour-long conversation, Venus’s match ends in a loss. After Serena gets the news that her sister will settle for her first silver medal, she moves on quickly, stroking inches of bone-straight black hair laid over her right shoulder and expectantly awaiting my questions about her legacy.
Much more at the link.
Serena Williams seems invincible. Over the course of a 20-year professional tennis career, she’s succeeded more often and for longer than anyone ever, winning all four Grand Slams consecutively, twice, and matching Steffi Graf’s record of 186 weeks ranked at No. 1. Her record-tying 22 wins in major tournaments, and the staggering fact that when she’s been in major finals she’s only lost five times, make a Williams win a more reliable proposition than investing in Apple or casting Tom Hanks as the lead in your movie. In a world where people often confine what they think women are capable of, there are no limits to how much winning Serena Williams can do.
That’s not the best part. Even when she’s robot-marching through her competition, Williams’s matches are events. Her draws at this year’s U.S. Open were attended by a trail of disparate celebrities —Jay Z and Beyoncé, Carmelo and LaLa, Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin and Uzo Aduba (separately), and Pharrell Williams and adidas tennis legend Stan Smith (together) — giving tennis matches in 2016 the see-and-be-seen cachet of a Lakers game in the ’80s or a Floyd Mayweather fight in the aughts.
When Williams, now 34 years old, takes on Yaroslava Shvedova on a Sunday in the tournament’s fourth round, the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium builds a sonic wall of approval for every 116-m.p.h. ace raining down on the poor upstart. Queen Latifah jumps up and fist pumps after one, and Michael Strahan casts a shadow over roughly two rows of seats when he gets on his feet. In contrast, when Shvedova manages a point, one of her lone countrymen chants “Ka-zhak-stan, Ka-zhak-stan” to giggles from the home crowd. Williams eviscerates her in one hour and eight minutes.
Days later, when Williams gets bounced from the Open by the No. 6-ranked Karolina Pliskova, the result is as much a shock for the outcome as it is for the way she loses: on a double fault in the tiebreak set. She’s conditioned us, through so many nail-biters, to believe that no deficit is unsurmountable. Time and time again, Williams has played best when her back is up against a wall — the same quality that’s made icons of American athletes from Muhammad Ali to Michael Jordan.
Which is why it was so galling, after this year’s Wimbledon semis, when a reporter asked Williams whether she should be considered one of the greatest female athletes of all time. Her perfect response: “I prefer the words ‘one of the greatest athletes of all time.’”
Most of us need to be told we could be like this or that role model — remember the Be Like Mike campaign? But when Serena Williams’s mother and father told her that she could be the greatest of all time, rather than looking around for an imitable path, a target to match, she took it as permission to be fully herself. Whether she was an unranked understudy to her sister Venus or the sport’s marquee player, her game has never been tentative, her outfits have never lost their color, and her emotion has never been restrained.
Williams emphatically and frequently salutes her foremothers: she is a reverent student of history who read Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”at her Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year dinner last year and name-checks Althea Gibson and Zina Garrison in post-match press conferences. With all due respect, though, there’s never been a Serena Williams before Serena Williams. There has been no blueprint for an athlete to arrive at the intersection of gender and race and dominance and scrutiny that she has. Perhaps even more than her wins, Williams’s greatest feat has been the very act of breathing herself into existence.
Greatest American athlete. Most dominant black tennis player. Highest-paid woman in sports. Whatever. Serena Williams is also a very, very bad loser. When we first meet this summer in Palm Beach, Florida, she’s just returned home from an early exit in the Olympics. With four gold medals from three past Olympiads, Williams has never failed to medal until now. Coincidentally, as the two of us begin to talk, her sister and closest friend on the planet is competing in Rio in the mixed doubles final, though Williams doesn’t so much as check her phone to track Venus’s progress.
“I just… I can’t watch her,” she says. “I watch her in person at a tournament, but I get so nervous on TV. I feel like in person she can hear me say, ‘Come on!’ — cause I know when I hear her say ‘Come on,’ a familiar voice, it really helps me. It doesn’t really help when I’m screaming at the TV, and I get so nervous. Like, it’s really crazy how nervous I get after all these years."
It’s probably for the best: minutes into our hour-long conversation, Venus’s match ends in a loss. After Serena gets the news that her sister will settle for her first silver medal, she moves on quickly, stroking inches of bone-straight black hair laid over her right shoulder and expectantly awaiting my questions about her legacy.
Much more at the link.
