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      Serena Williams’s Magical Last Week in Tennis

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      Serena Williams left the Lotte New York Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and folded herself into the back seat of a dark green Lincoln Navigator. She arrived at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center about 15 minutes later. Traffic’s bearable on Saturday mornings.Her five-person, one-dog entourage convened on Practice Court 1. With more weariness than joy in her face, and a bit of a gimpy shuffle in her step, she set down her orange bag. It held a Ziploc bag filled with clean socks and a pink skirt to wear after practice. She checked her phone, in a black case with an “SW” pop socket. Her black Nikes had a gold “SW,” too. She wore a wedding ring, the stone the size of a meatball.Sometime soon — maybe a couple of days, maybe two weeks — her tennis career would end. But not yet. There was one more tournament: the U.S. Open.A trainer smeared sunscreen on her face, then helped her warm up with elastic bands and stretches. There was little small talk.Would she miss mornings like this?“Honestly, I can’t wait to wake up one day and literally never have to worry about performing on such a high level and competing,” she had told Meghan Markle — yeah, the Duchess of Sussex and a good friend — on a podcast days before the tournament. “I’ve actually never felt that.”She began swatting balls to her hitting partner. Whatever morning and middle-age lethargy she had soon disappeared in an arsenal of sharp forehands and two-handed backhands.She was nearly ready. Serena glowed in sweat.A Time CapsuleLet’s agree to call her Serena, because only chair judges call her Williams. To fans at the U.S. Open, “Serena” was her last name and her first name was “C’mon.”The story started last month, when Vogue magazine published an essay in which Serena said she was “evolving away from tennis” to grow her businesses and her family.“I have never liked the word retirement,” she wrote. “It doesn’t feel like a modern word to me.’”Immediately, stories were written about her career and legacy, almost as if she had died. In New York, plans for a proper send-off were jump-started. The U.S. Open made a plan: Turn Serena’s opening match into a prime-time celebration. Fill Arthur Ashe Stadium with celebrities and a record crowd. Create videos narrated by Oprah Winfrey and Queen Latifah. Cue the tears.But then Serena invited herself back to play another night, and another, and another.At almost 41, she whipped shots and chased balls as if birthed from a time capsule. Then along came momentum, the elixir of the sports gods.Was Serena surprised? Hardly.“I’m just Serena,” she said, as good an explanation as any.And this is Serena’s New York story, seven days and a career in the making.Williams practicing in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Two days later, the stands would be full as she took on Danka Kovinic.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesDerick Pierson, Williams’s trainer, applied cream on her face.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWilliams the day before her first match at the U.S. Open.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesJessica Wynne, foreground, shot video of Williams warming up. “I’m going to give my kids her warm-up drills,” Wynne said. “Then we’ll zoom in to catch her footwork.” Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times‘She’s Not a Superhero’As Serena practiced the weekend before the celebration, the most experienced member of Serena’s on-court entourage was Chip, a Yorkshire terrier and Toto replica, jaunty with a bow tie around his neck.Chip has made more U.S. Open appearances than most players in this year’s field. The dog was a constant sidekick when Serena tried to complete the calendar Grand Slam in 2015.But the rest of the crew came to Serena’s circle only in her twilight. It included coach Eric Hechtman, hitting partner Jarmere Jenkins, trainers Kristy Stahr and Derick Pierson (who doubled as Chip’s handler), and recent addition Rennae Stubbs, a multiple Grand Slam winner in doubles, bringing experience and levity.As Serena warmed up in the cool of morning, there were few witnesses. But a few feet behind Serena, hidden behind the blue gauze that covered the chain-link fence, a 36-year-old tournament volunteer named Jessica Wynne pantomimed Serena’s steps and swings. She danced to Serena’s on-court rhythm.Wynne tried to commit Williams’ movements to muscle memory and she recorded them on her phone. She wanted to show the moves to her 6-year-old twins, a boy and girl, back home in Michigan, just learning to play tennis. She considers Serena the greatest athlete ever.“No one has had more pressure on her,” Wynne said. “No one has grown with more grace. It doesn’t mean that she’s more than a person. She’s not. She’s not a superhero.”Soon the gates to the tennis center opened to the public. People ran — ran — to find Serena, like the early arrivals at Disneyland who sprint to be first on Space Mountain. They crowded into the bleachers and stuffed themselves behind the fence near Wynne. They nudged one another to celebrate their communal good fortune in doing nothing more than being somewhat close to Serena Williams.The fans were a full spectrum of ages and races. That’s New York. That’s Serena. There might be no athlete, ever, as popular with such a patchwork of humanity.“This is her! This is her!” a 37-year-old New Yorker named Randy Cline said in whispered excitement. He pogoed up and down.He and his wife pressed their four children, ages, 9 months to 12 years, close to the fence.“You don’t usually get this close to greatness,” Cline said. “I’m just absorbing it. I hope my kids are absorbing it.”‘She Never Settled for Less’The concrete-block corridor outside the players’ locker room is lined with framed photos of former champions. Serena resides in glossy color between Roger Federer, in a graceful follow through, and her sister Venus, smiling while holding the U.S. Open trophy.Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open was very likely the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Glorious Goodbye: Even as Serena Williams faced career point, she put on a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.The Magic Ends: Zoom into this composite photo to see details of Williams’s final moment on Ashe Stadium at this U.S. Open.Her Fans: We asked readers to share their memories of watching Williams play and the emotions that she stirred. There was no shortage of submissions.Sisterhood on the Court: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to each other’s.Serena is frozen in full grimace, teeth bared and white beads flying in her braided hair. The photo was from her first U.S. Open title, at 17. It marked her arrival, as a player and a presence.A few feet away, the real 40-year-old Serena was laughing with Taylor Townsend, a Black player in her 20s.How many of today’s players, of tomorrow’s players, owe something — inspiration, belief, a less-rocky ride — to Serena Williams? There would be plenty of tennis players if she never existed, but would they be these tennis players?Ten of the top 30 Americans in the latest women’s singles rankings are Black or biracial, none of them named Williams.“Sometimes being a woman, a black woman in the world, you kind of settle for less,” Coco Gauff, the 18-year-old American, said. “I feel like Serena taught me that, from watching her, she never settled for less.”It was the day before the tournament began. Townsend teased Williams for not returning text messages. Serena apologized and laughed, hard, something she does more often the farther she is from a camera lens.Fans did their best to catch a picture of Williams entering the practice court on the day of her match against Kovinic.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesChatting with Taylor Townsend in the player tunnels.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWilliams arriving to practice in her signature pink skirt.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIga Swiatek, the world’s top-ranked player, a 21-year-old from Poland, spotted her. She was nervous. The two had never met, largely because Swiatek was intimidated by Serena.“I wanted to say ‘Hi’ a few times, but it’s tough because she always has so many people around her and I’m pretty shy,” Swiatek had said a couple of weeks earlier. “And when I look at her, I suddenly kind of forget that I’m here as the world No. 1. I see Serena and it’s, ‘Wow, Serena.’ You know?”Chances were running out. Swiatek made her move.“So I finally found the courage and this happened,” she wrote on Instagram, with a photo of Swiatek and Serena with their arms around each other. “Congratulations on your amazing journey and legendary career.”A New Era of AthleteThe Williams sisters were outsiders, in obvious ways — Black girls from the public courts of Compton, crashing a cotillion of a sport. Their tennis success was filled with the “buts” of detractors — but the braids, but the clothes, but the muscles, but the outbursts.They were human Rorschach tests. The world projected and exposed its own biases onto Venus, then Serena. Venus knocked down doors; Serena barged through. She was the bigger, brasher and ultimately more successful one on the court.“I think people could feel my confidence, because I was always told, ‘You look great. Be Black and be proud,’” she told Time magazine in a cover story before the tournament.She also helped usher in a new era of athlete — the icon, the mogul, the brand. Like top athletes of this age, she maintains a curated persona, keeping a bit of glossy distance from those who cheer her. It is telling, of course, that her retirement/evolution was announced in her own words in a cover story for Vogue.Before the tournament, Serena rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, alongside business partner Alison Rapaport Stillman, representing Serena Ventures, a venture-capital firm focused on minority businesses. She wore a dress that she later sold at her clothing company, S by Serena, for $109. Later she promoted her first children’s book “The Adventures of Qai Qai.”It was almost as if she was in New York for the next phase, not the last phase.And then she took the court.‘I Could Feel It In My Chest’Arthur Ashe Stadium buzzed like a hive. It was the last Monday night of August, maybe the last singles match for Serena. Dusk settled, bringing the anticipatory air of a prize fight and a record-setting U.S. Open crowd of 29,402.There were celebrities everywhere: Mike Tyson. Hugh Jackman. Queen Latifah. Former President Bill Clinton. Spike Lee, predictably. Dr. Ruth, less so.But the most important witness, at least to Serena, was in the players’ box in the northeast corner. Her daughter Olympia, three days shy of her fifth birthday, wore a miniature version of the black dress that her mother wore on the court.A poignant ode to Olympia’s mother dangled in her hair. It was braided and held strings of white beads. They were a symbolic bookend to Serena’s career.“It was either her wear beads or me,” Serena said. “I wanted to do it, but I just didn’t have the time.”Danka Kovinic, a 27-year-old tour veteran from Montenegro, ranked 80th in the world, had the fortune, good or bad, of drawing Serena in the first round. She was introduced first, to polite applause, then sat in her courtside chair and waited.And waited.First came a video tribute for Serena that brought fans to their feet. Then came Serena, racket bag over her shoulder, water bottle in her hand, buds in her ears that muffled the roar of the crowd.Williams’s dress was dappled in sparkles, meant to evoke the night sky. The lacy skirt had six layers, one for each of her U.S. Open titles. “But I took four out because it was too heavy,” she said.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesWilliams’s husband, Alexis Ohanian, and their daughter, Olympia, visited on the court.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesAfter defeating Kovinic, Williams paused to take a selfie with fans.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe U.S. Open planned a tribute for Williams after her opening match whether she won or lost. She won.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesShe wore a cape-like jacket and black Nike shoes with diamond-encrusted swooshes. The laces on her right shoe had an ornamental tag that said “Mama.” The left shoe said “Queen.”Once play began, Serena got the first big ooh-aah-ovation when she lunged to scoop a Kovinic drop shot, deftly volleyed at the net, and then dropped back, with the movement of a dancer, to smack a sidearm winner.The play was at turns stirring and shaky, never uninspired. There was no sense that Serena was in a hurry or wanted to be anywhere else.It was sometimes quiet enough to hear the 7 train rattle nearby. It was sometimes so loud “I could feel it in my chest,” Serena said.Kovinic did not shrink from the moment. But the whole thing — Serena, the atmosphere — wore her down.When Serena won match point, she ran in place, overjoyed and relieved. Kovinic slipped out of sight. Serena was directed to stay. A post-match celebration had been planned, win or lose, without her knowledge.Olympia came to the court, in the arms of her father, Alexis Ohanian. There was Oracene Price, the mother of Venus and Serena, and Isha, one of their sisters.Billie Jean King, a spry 78, told of meeting Venus and Serena at a camp in Long Beach, Calif., when they were 7 and 6. She remembered fawning over Serena’s service motion that day.“Her serve is by far the most beautiful serve in the history of our sport,” King said.There was a video narrated by Oprah Winfrey. Then Serena took the microphone, moved by the moment.“Sometimes I think it’s harder to walk away than not,” she said.Serena Had a SecretOn Wednesday, the day before Olympia’s fifth birthday, she was in the players’ lounge on her father’s lap.“Tickle me, tickle me, tickle me!” she begged, and when he did, she squealed. She wore a sweatshirt from her mother’s collection that read “GOAT.” Nearby, Oracene wore one, too.Out the windows to the west, on the practice courts, Serena warmed up in the final strips of sunlight. Fans crowded around, but the mood was muted compared to Monday — less anxious, less celebratory. At the main doors to Ashe Stadium, there was no blue carpet. The phalanx of paparazzi was gone.Serena’s ranking was deep in the hundreds when she made the “evolution” announcement. Expectations in New York were muted. The U.S. Open would be a celebration, and probably a short one.But Serena had a secret.Despite not playing for most of a year and losing in the first round at Wimbledon and early in two August tournaments, she had privately practiced well all summer.And she had experience. A 41-0 career record in the first two rounds of the U.S. Open. A home-court advantage unlike any other. And confidence. Always confidence.Kontaveit felt the brunt of all that on Wednesday night.Warming up on Aug. 21.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWilliams arrived for her second-round match to roaring cheers.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWilliams won the first set, dropped the second, but ultimately pulled out the win in the third.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesFans could be heard both inside and outside Arthur Ashe Stadium.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe match sizzled from the start. Serena won the first set in a tiebreaker. Kontaveit broke her serve to start the second set, and stayed stout to send it to a third.The chair umpire routinely had to hush fans who shouted “I love you, Serena!” between points or murmured in excitement when Kontaveit missed a first serve. The rules of decorum stretched, all in Serena’s direction.Tiger Woods, his cap spun backward, cheered her on. Venus was two seats away. Behind them was Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, with her bob and saucer-sized sunglasses.Serena seized control and finished off a victory, 7-6 (4), 2-6, 6-2. Along the way, the celebratory mood shifted into an expectant one.The bracket showed that she would not play another seeded opponent before the quarterfinals, if she advanced that far.Serena described the “big red ‘X’ on my back” since first winning the Open. She spent parts of four decades trying to uphold a standard that she created. No more.“I don’t have anything to prove, I don’t have anything to win,” she said on court after the match. “And I have absolutely nothing to lose.”In a Moment, They Were GoneIt was Serena’s idea to play doubles with her sister again. If this truly was her last spin in tennis, it felt right to do it alongside her sister.Maybe there was magic left in the partnership. They were 14-time Grand Slam champions, never losing a final. Now they were a wild-card entry, added just before the tournament, infusing it with another titillating dose of Williams.The opening match against Lucie Hradecka and Linda Noskova of the Czech Republic, playing together for the first time, was placed in prime time at Ashe Stadium, in front of another sellout crowd.Serena walked out first, in a black skirt and black T-shirt. Venus, 42, as statuesque as ever, wore a green and white outfit and white visor. After each point, they slapped hands or fist-bumped, and then whispered strategy to one another while covering their mouths — afraid of doubles-hacking lip readers.At the net, Serena showed off her fast reflexes. Venus loped along the baseline chasing shots.But they lost a first-set tiebreaker, then fell behind quickly in the second set. Mistakes piled up. The crowd deadened. The sisters grinded back to 4-all, but lost the match on Serena’s serve.Venus and Serena embraced. In a moment, they were gone to an appreciative ovation — Venus with a quick wave, Serena without. And soon after that, they were driven back to Manhattan, separately.The doubles match represented the beginning of the end of Williams’s U.S. Open stay.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, battled hard, losing the first set in a tiebreaker.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWith the loss, Venus was completely out of the tournament.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times‘You Got Me Here’This is where things began to turn. And this is where you will hear an answer to a Serena-specific trivia question, and you may have to double-check the spelling: Ajla Tomljanovic.“No one’s going to pronounce my name right,” she said later. “That’s going to suck.”For the third match in a row, Serena was pitted against a veteran opponent in her late 20s whom she had never played before. They were character actors plucked into starring roles in Serena’s big-budget production.Dusk came, the stadium filled and Serena came out in her caped robe, like a boxer. The scoreboards flashed GREATEST OF ALL TIME and only if you like underdogs did you like how this ended.The match was great theater, a passion play lasting more than three hours. Tomljanovic was as steady as a ball machine, set on high.She has been playing Grand Slams for 10 seasons and has never been ranked higher than No. 38. Playing in a floral dress and a red visor, she found that she could match Serena from the baseline, stroke for stroke.She received unexpected help from an unlikely source — Serena’s serve. Tomljanovic broke Serena three times while winning the first set. The crowd whipsawed from frenzy to disappointment, sometimes on the same long point.Serena nearly gave the set away after going up 5-2, but rescued it in a tiebreaker. But something was gone. Soon it would be Serena.The key number from the match was six. It was fitting, since that is how many times Serena has won the U.S. Open.Serena lost the last six games of the match. But on the way out, she fought off six match points. She ran and chased until she was out of breath. She backhanded and forehanded and overhanded and tried to fit a life’s worth of highlights into her final encore.It was 10:22 p.m. when she fired a forehand return, hammered another forehand, and then — in her final shot, moving forward just inside the baseline — hit one more, this time into the net.The crowd groaned, then stood and cheered. The ball rolled past Serena as she reached to shake Tomljanovic’s hand. Serena moved toward her bag, instinctively, then backed onto the court to wave in every direction. Tomljanovic applauded, too.“When it ended, it almost didn’t feel right,” she said.Serena was pulled into an on-court interview with Mary Joe Fernandez. That is where she thanked her aging father, Richard Williams, who has not traveled in years. “Thank you, Daddy. I know you’re watching,” she said.Serena looked to the players’ box and thanked her mom, and the last vestiges of her trademark on-court toughness melted away. She was no superhero. She was just a person.People sold Serena Williams merchandise outside Billie Jean King Tennis Center ahead of her match against Ajla Tomljanovic.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWilliams and Tomljanovic went back and forth in a three-hour, three-set match, with Tomljanovic ultimately prevailing.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesWilliams thanked the fans after the match. “You got me here,” she said.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times“Oh, my God,” she said. “These are happy tears, I guess. I don’t know.”And then she called out Venus.“And I wouldn’t be Serena if there wasn’t Venus, so thank you, Venus,” she said. “She’s the only reason that Serena Williams ever existed.”Then she thanked the fans, all the ones who told her to “go” or to “c’mon” or who just lived their lives quietly inspired by this girl from Compton.“You got me here,” she said.Here did not last long. Soon she was gone to there, wherever there is, out of the lights and into whatever comes next. More

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      How Ajla Tomljanovic Faced Down Serena Williams and 24,000 Others

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      On the advice of her father, Tomljanovic channeled Kevin Costner to beat the six-time U.S. Open champion in front of a raucous, partisan crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium.When Ajla Tomljanovic was a little girl, she asked her father about a prized photograph of him holding a big trophy on his head. Ratko Tomljanovic was a great professional handball player, winning two European Championships for Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and was the captain of the Croatian national team; before that, he was a member of the Yugoslavian team.His daughter wanted to know where that shiny trophy was, because she had never seen it in their home. Ratko Tomljanovic explained that it had been a team award, and that he did not get to keep it. Unimpressed, Ajla told him that she would not play handball.“I want the trophy just for myself,” she said.So Ajla Tomljanovic chose tennis, and she is still striving for that big trophy, for a professional championship. She has shown the talent for it, though her nerves have betrayed her at times — what she calls “the bad Ajla.”But on Friday night, Tomljanovic, who is ranked 46th, demonstrated to herself and the world that she had the mettle and the shotmaking ability to win a trophy of her own. If she wins four more matches in the coming week, it will be one of the most coveted in sports.That night, Tomljanovic beat the six-time U.S. Open champion Serena Williams, 7-5, 6-7 (4), 6-1, in front of a raucous, partisan crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York to advance to the fourth round of the U.S. Open for the first time.“I feel like I belong here now,” she said.That was not necessarily what she was thinking in the moments before she took the court.Tomljanovic was nervous, and for good reason. Williams was her idol, and Tomljanovic had never played her before. She had never played in Ashe. In fact, she had never even practiced on that court. She had asked tournament organizers if they could find a time for her to hit some balls in the largest tennis stadium in the world at least once, but nothing was available.Then there was the matter of her playing the role of villain, of facing down nearly 24,000 fans, virtually all of them screaming for Williams to win, and millions more watching on television. It would make anyone a tad edgy.Ratko Tomljanovic, once captain of Croatia’s national handball team, gave his daughter advice on facing tough crowds.Matthew Stockman/Getty ImagesTomljanovic confided the anxiety to her father, who was happy that his daughter admitted to the nerves. Better than hiding them, he thought. Ratko Tomljanovic also knew about playing in hostile environments, especially in Europe, where handball is intensely popular and the stakes are high. He tried to calm Ajla by evoking the almost comical role of the hard-bitten veteran of scrappy handball matches — the kind of yarn he had spun to her and his other daughter, Hana, many times before.“Don’t tell me you are afraid of the crowd,” he told Ajla. “I played in some terrible places with 5,000 people booing and spitting, and one time the crowd came on the floor and there was a big fight. Don’t tell me it’s hard because some guy in the 35th row is yelling at you.”It was not exactly Mickey yelling at Rocky. It was a speech designed to lighten the mood, and it worked. Ajla laughed. “She doesn’t care about what I did, at all,” Ratko said, chuckling.But then he brought out another motivational tool. He mentioned one of his favorite movies, “For Love of the Game,” in which a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, played by Kevin Costner, reflects on his life and career in the midst of a perfect game.“But she didn’t know the movie, so I had to explain it to her,” he said. “I told her, ‘You have to be Kevin Costner today.’”In the film, he told her, the pitcher focuses explicitly on the catcher’s glove and ignores everything else in the stadium. Ajla understood, and she followed the advice with her own unique resolve.She blocked out all the noise, the roars for Williams, the indecorous cheers when Tomljanovic missed a serve, all the celebrities in the stands, the video tributes to Williams and her own childhood adulation for Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam champion standing across the net and playing as well as she had in years. But Tomljanovic was better.“From the first moment I walked on court, I didn’t really look around much,” she said. “I was completely in my own little bubble.”From the outside, as she engaged in furious rallies and traded sensational shots with Williams, it looked like the best Tomljanovic had ever played, especially given the circumstances. But she cited her fourth-round win over Alizé Cornet at Wimbledon in July, which vaulted her into the quarterfinals there for the second year in a row. Those results reflect her best performances in a major tournament, for now.Tomljanovic may have won Friday’s match in the set that she lost.Jason Szenes/EPA, via ShutterstockOn Friday, Tomljanovic, who plays for Australia, may have won the match in the set she lost. Even though she was trailing 0-4 and 2-5, she refused to give the set away, fighting all the way back to a tiebreaker, which Williams won. But it took its toll on Williams, 40, who had played doubles the night before, and it showed in the third set when fatigue took over. The key to it all was a monster game that lasted over 15 minutes.“I know how much I hate playing players that don’t give up anything so freely that you have to work for every point,” Tomljanovic, 29, said. “I hate playing players like that.”That day, she was the hated player with all the mental toughness and savvy. She said that she felt bad for Williams, and that she always identified with her because Williams was initially coached by her father and played alongside her sister Venus. Tomljanovic was also coached by her father and grew up playing with Hana, who played at the University of Virginia.After Ajla won, Ratko Tomljanovic sat quietly in the player garden, barely 10 feet from where Williams and a large group of family and friends gathered before leaving the grounds. He reflected on the mentality his daughter exhibited on Friday and traced it back to when she decided she wanted that trophy for herself, and when he took Ajla and Hana to a handball camp when they were schoolgirls. Ajla would never pass the ball. She would keep shooting until Ratko told her she had to pass.“She said, ‘No, no, Daddy, when I have the ball, I just go and score,’” he said.He saw a little of that again in Ashe. He also saw a little of Kevin Costner. More

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      Serena’s Magic Comes to an End

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      After 23 Grand Slam titles, 73 singles titles and 319 weeks at No. 1, Serena Williams’s run at the U.S. Open ended Friday in the third-round to Ajla Tomljanovic. Williams, who has said she is “evolving away” from tennis, played her last match before a heaving Arthur Ashe Stadium. Zoom into this composite photo to see details of the final moment.

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      Serena Williams Willed Her Way to a Glorious Goodbye

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      Her last match — at the U.S. Open and probably of her career — was a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.It was match point, which Serena Williams had faced many times before. It was career point, which was startlingly new territory for one of the greatest athletes of any era.But Williams, on this night like no other at the U.S. Open, remained true to herself and her competitive spirit on Friday, with the end of her 27-year run as a professional tennis player suddenly becoming very real.Yes, Ajla Tomljanovic was about to serve for a place in the fourth round, at 40-30 with a 5-1 lead in the third set. But Williams, clearly weary after nearly three hours of corner-to-corner tennis, was not yet prepared to accept what looked inevitable.She saved one match point with a swinging backhand volley. She saved a second with a cocksure forehand approach that Tomljanovic could not handle. She saved a third with a clean forehand return winner that had fans in the sold-out Arthur Ashe Stadium shouting: “Not yet! Not yet!”“I’ve been down before,” Williams said later. “I think in my career I’ve never given up. In matches, I don’t give up. Definitely wasn’t giving up tonight.”She saved a fourth match point. She saved a fifth, and by now it was clear, as the winners and bellows and clenched fists kept coming, that Williams would get a fitting finish.A record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title in her farewell tournament at age 40 was always going to be a long shot. An inspiring last dance was no guarantee, either, given all the matches and miles in her legs and all the rust on her game in recent weeks.But she salvaged it in New York. She conjured it with all of her pride, power and sheer will. She found a familiar gear in the second set of her opening-round victory over Danka Kovinic. And she stayed in that groove as she defeated the No. 2 seed Anett Kontaveit in the next round before coming up against Tomljanovic, a tall and elegant baseliner who represents Australia but lives in Florida, and who was born and raised in Croatia.A capacity crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium roared for Williams throughout Friday night’s match. Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBarring a major change of heart from her much more famous opponent, Tomljanovic will be the answer to the trivia question “Who was the last player to face Serena Williams in an official match?”But while Williams could not fend off the sixth career point, striking a low forehand into the net, she did strike a much more appropriate final note at Flushing Meadows than if she had chosen to forgo this final comeback.At last year’s Wimbledon, she retired with a leg injury before the first set of her first-round match was done, crying as she hobbled off the Center Court grass where she had won so often.Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open was very likely the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Glorious Goodbye: Even as Serena Williams faced career point, she put on a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.The Magic Ends: Zoom into this composite photo to see details of Williams’s final moment on Ashe Stadium at this U.S. Open.Her Fans: We asked readers to share their memories of watching Williams play and the emotions that she stirred. There was no shortage of submissions.Sisterhood on the Court: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to each other’s.She was 39 then and took nearly another year to return to competition. But as the tears came for a different reason on Friday night on court in her post-match interview, and then again in her news conference, it was evident that she had gotten a measure of what she was searching for by returning to play.She gave herself a suitably grand stage to thank her fans and her family, including her parents, Richard Williams and Oracene Price, and her big sister, Venus Williams, who was watching from the players box just as she did when Serena won the family’s first Grand Slam singles title at the U.S. Open in 1999. They went on to win 29 more, Serena finishing with 23 and Venus, though not yet retired, almost certainly finishing with the seven she has now.“I wouldn’t be Serena if there wasn’t Venus, so thank you, Venus,” Serena said. “She’s the only reason that Serena Williams ever existed.”Though Williams was still struggling to use the word “retirement” herself on Friday, the WTA Tour was not as it congratulated Williams on a grand career. Nor did Williams give herself much wiggle room when asked what it might take to bring her back for more.“I’m not thinking about that; I always did love Australia, though,” she said with a smile, referring to the next Grand Slam tournament on the calendar: the Australian Open in January.But that sounded much more playful than serious, and she soon turned reflective, talking about motherhood and life away from competition, which she has already experienced at length during the coronavirus pandemic and in her latest year away from tennis.“It takes a lot of work to get here,” she said of the U.S. Open. “Clearly, I’m still capable. It takes a lot more than that. I’m ready to, like, be a mom, explore a different version of Serena. Technically, in the world, I’m still super young, so I want to have a little bit of a life while I’m still walking.”It is Williams’s call, of course (of course!), but it seems the right choice and the right time. Though she is correct that her level was often remarkably and surprisingly high this week, it is also true that the last time she lost this early in singles at the U.S. Open was in her first Open appearance in singles in 1998.Tomljanovic did herself proud on Friday, effectively countering Williams’s signature power and handling the deeply partisan and sometimes unsportsmanlike crowd with great composure and dignity. Fans cheered for Tomljanovic’s missed serves and errors, and with the match in its final stages, some shouted “Serena!” in the midst of her service motion.She said she borrowed a trick from Novak Djokovic, who won the 2015 U.S. Open men’s singles final against Roger Federer in a very pro-Federer atmosphere by, he said, imagining that they were cheering “Novak” instead of “Roger.”Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia proved a formidable challenger for Williams. She won the final six games of the match.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“I mean, I used that,” Tomljanovic said. “And I also, just, really blocked it out as much as I could. It did get to me a few times, internally. I didn’t take it personally because, I mean, I would be cheering for Serena, too, if I wasn’t playing her. But it was definitely not easy.”Tomljanovic gathered herself impressively after Williams seized the second set in a tiebreaker and then broke Tomljanovic’s serve in the opening game of the third set. Tomljanovic also graciously and respectfully hit all the right notes in her on-court interview, even though she had been reluctant to follow Williams to the microphone.“I have known Ajla since she was 12 years old, and I have never been prouder of her,” said Chris Evert, the former No. 1 who has been a mentor to Tomljanovic but watched the match from afar, in Aspen, Colo., where one of her sons was to be married on Saturday.Tomljanovic’s victory will certainly provide premium content for Netflix, which has been following her and several other players closely all season as it films the tennis version of “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” its behind-the-scenes automobile racing series.But Tomljanovic, who swept the last six games of what is almost certain to be Williams’s final match, is also an unseeded 29-year-old veteran who has never been ranked in the top 30 in the world and has yet to advance past the quarterfinals in a major tournament. That she had the tools to stand toe-to-toe with Williams and prevail is one more hint that Williams’s time at the top of the game has truly passed.What was also clear on Friday as the match extended well past two hours and into a third set was that Williams’s stamina and speed were fading. That is understandable with her lack of match play in recent months and in light of all the physical and emotional energy she was absorbing and expending with the public roaring her on. She also had played an intense doubles match the night before in Ashe Stadium, losing in two close sets with Venus.But understandable does not negate the reality that she looked late to the ball, and often nowhere near the ball, as Tomljanovic broke up baseline rallies by firing winners to break her for a 5-1 lead.It looked, just for a moment, as if Williams, one of the most ferocious competitors in tennis history, would have a sotto voce finish.Instead, she dug in and dug deep, drawing strength from past revivals and again showing no fear of swinging for the lines with a Grand Slam match at stake.Should we really have been surprised?As the points and great escapes piled up, Pam Shriver, the ESPN analyst sitting courtside, turned to those of us in the same row and said wide-eyed, “There should be a documentary just about this game.”Not a bad call, but perhaps better to make it the final act of a documentary about this week, when Williams shook off the rust for three final rounds and gave the crowds and all those who have followed her for nearly three decades, through triumphs and setbacks, an extended reminder of what made her great. 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      Serena Williams Loses in Three Thrilling Sets to Ajla Tomljanovic

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      As Serena Williams walked onto the court at the U.S. Open this week, the question was how the greatest player in modern tennis would handle the pressures of what she said could be her last Grand Slam tournament.She had looked rusty and slow all summer, but over the course of four days and two prime-time matches, it looked like the 40-year-old just might mount a magical, storybook run for a 24th major title.That dream ended on Friday night in a heartbreaking three-set loss to Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia. To the end, the almost 24,000 fans who packed Arthur Ashe Stadium shouted and cheered her every point as she fought against an opponent who was 11 years younger.“It’s been the most incredible ride and journey I’ve ever been on in my life,” Williams, wiping tears, said on court after the match.The loss, 7-5, 6-7 (4), 6-1, likely spelled the end of a 27-year career that forever changed the world’s perception and understanding of women — especially Black women — in sports. The highlight reels will show that Williams went kicking and screaming, saving five match points, blasting away to the end, making every stroke count as the match passed the three-hour mark.“I don’t give up,” Williams said. “Definitely wasn’t giving up tonight.”Williams has been the hottest ticket in New York this week and that continued on Friday in a match that was witnessed by some of the biggest names in sports and pop culture. And for long spells Williams delivered what they came for — the power and ferocity, the precision and passion for the game that have characterized her career for a quarter of a century.On another night, in another season years ago, it might have been enough. But on this night, a few weeks before her 41st birthday, Williams could not maintain the rarefied level of play that has powered so many of her victories. She served for both sets and had four set points in the second only to let Tomljanovic, who had never played on this court in the biggest stadium in the sport, climb out of a 5-3 hole in the first and second sets. She matched Williams’s power and edged her in both steeliness and accuracy, and also faced down a crowd that was entirely in Williams’s favor.“I just thought she would beat me,” Tomljanovic said. “She’s the greatest of all time, period.”Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWilliams’s loss came on the same court where she won her first major title in 1999 at the age of 17. The fans this week came to Ashe to say goodbye, but with each match it was clear that no one wanted to see Williams go, not from the tournament she has won six times and not from tennis. Just 24 hours before Friday’s match, Williams had lost a doubles match with her sister Venus Williams. And as play moved into a third set on Friday, Serena Williams struggled to catch her breath and keep up with the pace of the match.Her play this week though could make people wonder if she was really ready to quit. Through three matches and eight sets of tennis over five days that few will soon forget, Williams proved that she could still be great on a tennis court. However, she has said that she wants to have a second child and cannot do so while traveling the world and competing.Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open was very likely the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Glorious Goodbye: Even as Serena Williams faced career point, she put on a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.The Magic Ends: Zoom into this composite photo to see details of Williams’s final moment on Ashe Stadium at this U.S. Open.Her Fans: We asked readers to share their memories of watching Williams play and the emotions that she stirred. There was no shortage of submissions.Sisterhood on the Court: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to each other’s.She could always choose to return to tennis. But in an essay published in Vogue magazine last month, Williams wrote that she was “evolving away from tennis” — effectively announcing that she planned to retire. And in speaking to reporters after matches at the Open, she has not altered the plan.Williams has played infrequently since injuring her hamstring at Wimbledon in 2021. She lost in the first round at Wimbledon in June, and after her announcement in August that she would be playing her final few tournaments, a fortuitous run at the U.S. Open looked unlikely. In three matches in Toronto and Cincinnati knee tendinitis kept her from moving well. Williams, though, kept working, focusing on improving her lateral movement, and trying to regain her feel for the ball and the timing that allowed her to play with unmatched ferocity during a career spanning parts of four decades.Williams had a golden opportunity to take the first set after breaking Tomljanovic for a 5-3 lead. But she failed to close it out and coming up short appeared to rattle her. She committed a series of errors, hitting balls long and into the net as Tomljanovic pounced on her opportunity and finished off the set with a forehand cross-court winner that Williams barely moved for.It was a stunning end to a set that during the first eight games saw Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam champion, repeatedly send the big-hitting Australian backpedaling on so many points, moving her across the baseline and riding the energy of the crowd to gain the early edge.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesFor the first half-hour the match looked destined to follow the pattern of her first two, with Williams mostly getting better with each set. But two errors on one of her signature shots — her swinging forehand volley — and a serve that became unreliable and wobbly did her in. After 49 minutes, she was in a hole.Few players react to a deficit the way Williams does. When she is healthy and in form, Williams takes losing a set almost as an insult, an attack on an aura of invincibility that she will stop at almost nothing to maintain.And that is exactly what she did Friday night. Her grunts grew louder, her serves harder and more precise. She dove across the pavement for one volley, and stabbed and thumped others. She surged to a 4-0 lead, then stumbled briefly but regained her form in time to get to the brink of drawing even. She held four set points at 5-2, and served for the set once more at 5-3, but could not make the shots she needed to when she needed them most. Somehow, though, Williams came alive in the tiebreaker, pushing into the court and layering her shots so close to the lines and clinching it with a stiff backhand return of Tomljanovic’s serve that the Australian could not get back.The New York crowd, which has not always been in her corner, especially during some of her ugly run-ins with officials at this tournament, now smothered her with every ounce of sound it could muster, making the match as hard for Tomljanovic as it could.“So much support, so much love,” Williams would say later. “The whole crowd was really wanting to push me past the line. I’m so thankful and grateful for that.”Onto the third set they went. Once more Williams took an early lead, breaking Tomljanovic’s serve in the first game but then frittering away her advantage as her 40-year-old gas tank edged toward empty.Tomljanovic reeled off six straight games. In the last one, Williams ripped a ferocious forehand winner and unleashed a throat-busting scream, sending the stadium into a frenzy once more. And once more, Tomljanovic let the noise fall over her and set herself to the task at hand. It would take her six match points to induce that last error from Williams, and then with one final stroke into the net it was done.Speaking to the crowd through tears, Williams said her tennis career had been the ride of a lifetime.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“It all started with my parents, and they deserve everything. I’m really grateful to them,” she said. “These are happy tears.”She gave a nod to her sister: “I wouldn’t be Serena if there wasn’t Venus,” she said.She has said she planned to focus on growing her family and working with her venture capital firm. But as she played three rounds of tennis that conjured so many moments of the Serena Williams of old, even she had struggled before Friday night to say firmly that tennis was gone for good. Then she nearly did.“Clearly I’m still capable,” she said. “It takes a lot more than that. I’m ready to, like, be a mom, explore a different version of Serena.” More

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      At the U.S. Open, Coco Gauff Is Playing With a Veteran’s Confidence

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      On Thursday, Coco Gauff saw a photo memory from five years ago. It had the caption “courtside seats” at Arthur Ashe Stadium as she had watched one of her idols, Venus Williams, play.“I was trying to flex to my friends that I had courtside seats, and now I’m on the court,” Gauff said while laughing in a post-match interview.A day after that five-year anniversary, the No. 12 seed Gauff handily defeated the 20th seed, Madison Keys, 6-2, 6-3, and warmed up the court at Arthur Ashe Stadium for the second time this week for her other idol, Serena Williams, who was scheduled to play at 7 p.m. The win avenged a loss that Gauff had against Keys in Adelaide, Australia, in January.“I just told myself I’m going to go down swinging,” Gauff said. “The last time, I think I got a little bit passive, so she just overpowered me, and today I was like, I’m not going to let that happen.”Serena Williams and Gauff are in the bottom half of the single’s draw. Gauff has been watching Williams’s matches closely, not only because she is one of Gauff’s favorite players and biggest inspirations, but also because she is hoping to face her.Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open could be the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Strong Showing: As her successes on the field prove, Serena Williams did not come to New York to receive a ceremonial send-off, but to put her best on the line against the world’s finest players.Tournament Prep: Analytics, scouting first-time opponents, additional coaching input, new footwork drills and treating doubles like practice — so far it’s adding up to winning.Her Fans: We asked readers to share their memories of watching Williams play and the emotions that she stirred. There was no shortage of submissions.Sisterhood on the Field: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to one another.“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine,” Gauff said.Gauff will take on Shuai Zhang, who is ranked 36th in women’s singles and defeated Rebecca Marino on Friday, in the fourth round.The fourth round is the furthest Gauff has reached in singles at the U.S. Open. Three years ago, Gauff, then 15, left the court in tears as she was overpowered by Naomi Osaka, then the world No. 1, in the third round. Fighting through tears in the post-match interview that Osaka suggested she do, Gauff then said she would learn from the loss.Gauff will play Shuai Zhang in the round of 16 on Sunday.Cj Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockSince then, she’s lost in the first and second rounds at the Open, but on Friday her evolution on the court showed. Gauff, now 18, looked like a confident veteran, wearing her blue, pink and light green “Coco CG1” signature shoe and responding to everything Keys threw her way.“I was really delusional then,” Gauff said of that 2019 match with Osaka. “It was my first U.S. Open, and I thought I was going to go out flying colors. And, yeah, I didn’t.” She added: “I’m definitely happy that people expected things of me, but I think it’s more focused on my expectations of myself than other people’s.”After Keys won the opening game of the first set, Gauff won six of the next seven to take the set. The victory did not come as easily as the game differential would indicate, though, as Keys forced Gauff to sprint across the court and hit shots from strenuous angles.In the second game, both struggled to secure a win, constantly going from an advantage back to deuce. As Keys forced Gauff to run seemingly everywhere on the court with powerful shots and with Gauff holding the advantage, it seemed as though the game were heading back to deuce. But Gauff connected on a forehand close to the net that landed just behind Keys to take the game and let out an emphatic scream as the crowd roared with her.Gauff, one of the most popular players in tennis, has had a significant crowd advantage through her first two matches, receiving a stadium’s worth of roars when she wins and sighs of disappointment when her opponent gets the best of her. Friday was slightly different as the crowd consistently celebrated Keys, a fellow American. It was a luxury Gauff’s other opponents didn’t enjoy. Three siblings sitting next to each other close to the court seemed to be having a match of their own as one screamed, “Go Madison!” as loudly as possible while another yelled, “Go, Coco!”The cheers for Keys faded, though, as she launched a ball and let out a frustrated scream while the crowd clapped for Gauff. Then, she bounced back, and so did the crowd roars, winning that game and the next to bring the total to 4-3 in the second set. But Keys’s run ended there, and Gauff dominated the remainder of the set to win the match.Gauff and Zhang have faced each other once in singles. Gauff won, 7-6 (1), 7-5, at the Miami Open in March. Last year, they played each other in doubles as Zhang and Samantha Stosur won the U.S. Open women’s doubles title over Gauff and Caty McNally.Zhang, 33, remembers Gauff’s talent from the match in Miami and how “cute” Gauff’s younger brother was cheering in the stands. She said it was hard for her to picture Gauff, who reached the French Open final earlier this year, which she lost to Iga Swiatek, as an 18-year-old because she remembers her as the “14, 15-year-old” who was beginning to play professionally. And because it makes her feel old, she added.Like Zhang, Gauff’s first thought about her fourth-round opponent didn’t have much to do with tennis. Zhang is one of the most liked people on tour, Gauff said. She remembers how Zhang congratulated her when Gauff became the No. 1 doubles player, despite her overtaking Zhang, whose career-high doubles ranking is No. 2.“She’s such a tough competitor on the court, but also, as soon as it’s over, she has so much respect for everyone,” Gauff said. “So, I’m just happy that tennis has someone like her in the sport.” More

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      Serena Williams Match Brings Russell Wilson, Ciara and Others to US Open

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      Serena Williams continues to attract celebrities and politicians to her U.S. Open matches. In attendance Friday:the N.F.L. quarterback Russell Wilson and his wife, the singer Ciara; the rapper Pusha T; the actress Heidi Gardner; and the former Yankees pitcher C.C. Sabathia. Williams is facing Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia.Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, was spotted for the fourth time this week in Williams’s player box. (Wintour was also present for Williams’s doubles match with her sister Venus Williams on Thursday evening; the sisters lost in straight sets.) Serena Williams has described Wintour as a longtime friend, and it was in Vogue that Williams announced she would be “evolving away from tennis.”Wintour wasn’t the only big name who has felt a magnetic pull to Arthur Ashe Stadium all week. Both the designer Vera Wang and the filmmaker Spike Lee were back in the stands on Friday night, too.Other celebrities who have come out to show their support this week include Tiger Woods; the singers Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight and Seal; the actors Anthony Anderson, Zendaya, La La Anthony and Rebel Wilson; the models Bella and Gigi Hadid; the Jeopardy winner Amy Schneider; the former N.B.A. players Jason Collins and Steve Nash; and the comedian Chelsea Handler.Williams has refrained from being overtly political during her career, most recently deciding against commenting on the overturn of Roe V. Wade, but a number of politicians have been spotted at her matches, including former President Bill Clinton, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams. More

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      Serena Williams Prepared a Little Differently for This U.S. Open

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      Analytics, scouting first-time opponents, additional coaching input, new footwork drills and treating doubles like practice — so far it’s adding up to winning.Follow live as Serena Williams plays Ajla Tomljanovic at the U.S. Open.An underdog with the oddsmakers against the No. 2 seed, Anett Kontaveit, on Wednesday, Serena Williams will be back on familiar ground as the favorite against the unseeded Ajla Tomljanovic on Friday.The word is out, expedited by the roars in Arthur Ashe Stadium: Williams has worked her way with great speed back into form and into the third round of her final U.S. Open.It is remarkable but not necessarily astonishing, even a few weeks from her turning 41.“We can all ride a bike at an older age, and once the jitters are gone, you can even ride a bike without holding the handlebars,” said Sven Groeneveld, the leading coach who works with Bianca Andreescu and long coached Maria Sharapova.“It’s like walking for Serena,” Groeneveld said. “She has played tennis 90 percent of her life.”Williams has no shortage of positive memories to draw on from her younger years of pulling out of tailspins in a hurry.In 2007, she came into the Australian Open unseeded and ranked 81st, having played just five tournaments in the previous year and losing early in her lone warm-up event.But she soon locked in, defeating six seeded players, including the top-ranked Sharapova in the final.In 2012, Williams was beaten in the first round of the French Open by Virginie Razzano, a Frenchwoman ranked 111th. It was Williams’s earliest defeat to date in a major tournament, and it left her reeling and unusually open to change.She brought on a new coaching consultant, Patrick Mouratoglou, and though she played no tuneup events before arriving at Wimbledon, she quickly worked her way into devastating form. She won the title and then played what is widely considered the best tennis of her career to win the Olympic gold medal in singles and also in doubles with her sister Venus at the London Games on the same grass courts of the All England Club.That was, beyond doubt, a no-handlebars moment, but she is coming from even further back this time: playing no competitive tennis for nearly a year, arriving at the U.S. Open having won just one of four singles matches this season and ranked, strange but true, No. 605.“I just think because Serena is Serena and is a great athlete, that the more practice and the more practice matches she gets, she can play her way into an event,” said Kathy Rinaldi, the United States King Cup captain. “You’ve seen her do it in the past, and if you watched the match against Kontaveit, her movement to me got better and better by the third set, and I just think a great athlete can do that.”Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open was very likely the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Glorious Goodbye: Even as Serena Williams faced career point, she put on a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.The Magic Ends: Zoom into this composite photo to see details of Williams’s final moment on Ashe Stadium at this U.S. Open.Her Fans: We asked readers to share their memories of watching Williams play and the emotions that she stirred. There was no shortage of submissions.Sisterhood on the Court: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to each other’s.Some fitness coaches for other players were still shaking their heads on Thursday at their mind’s-eye images of Williams’s struggling to cover court at the National Bank Open in Toronto and the Western and Southern Open in Mason, Ohio: tournaments in which she lost last month in early rounds.“The change in a month is incredible,” said Maciej Ryszczuk, the fitness coach of the world No. 1, Iga Swiatek.But Williams said she felt her level in practice was often quite high as she returned to the tour, but that this was not carrying over into matches. The exception was the Western and Southern Open, where she was dealing with what several people had said was a flare-up of knee tendinitis: something that neither she nor her staff has confirmed.Williams during her first-round loss at the Western and Southern Open in August.Jeff Dean/Associated PressBut Eric Hechtman, Williams’s new coach, said the platform for the success so far in New York was in place.“The shotmaking was there, and the serve was there,” he said in an interview after her victory over Kontaveit. “She was actually moving well in practice, so in New York, we added in some more side-to-side running drills, and I think that’s helped.”So have the sellout crowds of nearly 24,000 in Ashe Stadium that are entirely in Williams’s corner.“That stadium is so big, and once you pack it in like that with a bunch of fired-up people, it’s a game changer,” Hechtman said. “It takes a little bit of time to get some rhythm, but it’s starting to come together. It was a great win against Kontaveit, but it’s still just the second round. None of us are getting carried away.”A loss against Tomljanovic would actually bring Williams full circle. She also lost in the third round in her first U.S. Open singles appearance in 1998 and has never failed to go farther in her 19 appearances since then: winning six titles.But the expectations are different this year. Given her recent level of play, the third round feels like an achievement. But the challenge as Williams goes deeper in the tournament will be to manage the load that comes with stacking up singles matches and doubles matches. She played doubles with her sister Venus at a tournament for the first time in more than four years, losing in the first round Thursday to Lucie Hradecka and Linda Noskova of the Czech Republic, 7-6 (5), 6-4.Unlike regular tour events, the Grand Slam tournaments allow a day of rest for women’s singles players between each round of singles, with occasional exceptions. Unlike the men, who play best-of-five-set matches, the women play best-of-three-set matches.But playing doubles on what would normally be a recovery day could still create a greater risk for the 40-year-old Williams. The last time she and Venus played doubles in a major — at the 2018 French Open — Williams withdrew from singles before the fourth round with a pectoral injury aggravated during a doubles match.Venus and Serena Williams last played doubles together at the 2018 French Open.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMouratoglou, who had counseled against playing both events because Williams was returning from a long layoff, was displeased, and Williams had not played singles and doubles with her sister at a major again until now.But in what is most likely Williams’s final tournament, this sounds like a heart-over-head decision.“I feel like it’s been very important for her to be a part of this,” Williams had said of Venus. “She’s my rock. I’m super excited to play with her and just do that again. It’s been a long time.”Hechtman, who also coaches Venus Williams, said he fully supported the decision. “I think it’s great she’s playing doubles,” he said of Serena. “It’s not just the doubles, it’s the fact you get the reps on serves and return and play points and play with the crowd again.”Hechtman had not pushed for Serena to play doubles in her warm-up events.“This is a different situation,” he said. “It’s her last tournament. It’s a Grand Slam and you have the day off in between singles matches, and normally you practice on that day, so instead you are playing doubles. I talked to her a little bit about it in Cincy, and it was like, ‘You know what? This totally makes sense.’”What also made sense to Hechtman was the decision to play tournaments in singles heading into the U.S. Open, which Williams did not do before Wimbledon, where she lost in the first round to Harmony Tan, an unseeded Frenchwoman.“I personally thought we were very ready for Wimbledon,” he said. “The only thing we didn’t have was those matches. Even if she was a little banged-up in Cincy, I think those tournaments were crucial to getting to the level she’s hit here. You can’t say definitively they made the difference, but I would say they were very important.”Scouting and preparation have also been important in New York. She had not faced Danka Kovinic, her first-round opponent, or Kontaveit and has not played Tomljanovic either. Hechtman said he and Williams had been getting input on opponents from the United States Tennis Association’s analytics team, working closely with Rinaldi and David Ramos, a director for performance analytics.“It helps us see clearly how Serena’s strengths match up against opponents’ weaknesses, and we go from there,” Hechtman said.Hechtman said he also welcomed the arrival of Rennae Stubbs, an ESPN analyst, coach and former No. 1 doubles player, who has been providing counsel in New York.“They’ve been friends for a long time, and the more positive people — this is a very emotional state — the better it is,” he said. “I’m all for it. Look, I’m here to win so anything that’s going to help us get over that mountaintop.” More