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    Serena Williams Fans Flock to the First Match of Her Final US Open

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    A star-studded crowd inside Arthur Ashe Stadium was joined by throngs of fans outside during Williams’s first-round U.S. Open match.The public address system went quiet, and a pause ensued as people strained toward the player tunnel to get their first peek of the champion everyone had been waiting for.Serena Williams, dressed in a sparkling jacket with a cape flowing from her waist, walked out to ear-shattering applause as her daughter, Olympia, joined thousands of fans pointing cameras at her mom in the middle of Arthur Ashe Stadium.An announcer introduced her as “the greatest of all time,” and a record-setting U.S. Open crowd of 29,402 roared in agreement.Williams, despite the shattering noise, maintained her focus as she walked purposefully to her seat and began preparing for the spectacle ahead — the first match in what is expected to be Williams’s last U.S. Open, her last major tournament.“The crowd was crazy,” Williams said in an on-court ceremony to honor her afterward. “It really helped pull me through.”The night had the same kind of electric feel to it as so many other highly anticipated and buzzworthy tennis events before it, from Billie Jean King’s bedazzling grudge match with Bobby Riggs to Pete Sampras’s U.S. Open final against Andre Agassi. But even those may not have been quite as deafening.“I think when I walked out, the reception was really overwhelming,” Williams said. “It was loud, and I could feel it in my chest. It was a really good feeling. It’s a feeling I’ll never forget … Yeah, that meant a lot to me.”A host of celebrities — including a former president of the United States, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of the world and many former tennis greats, like King and Martina Navratilova — watched along with thousands of tennis fans inside the stadium and out, all hoping Williams would win Monday’s match and continue playing.Bill Clinton sat next to Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Mike Tyson sat alongside Navratilova. Gladys Knight was there, Queen Latifah read a poem in homage of Williams, Spike Lee helped conduct the pregame coin toss, and Oprah Winfrey narrated a video played after the match for Williams.Williams certainly did her part, too, overcoming some early nerves to defeat Danka Kovinic of Montenegro, 6-3, 6-3, under the lights to reach the second round — meaning it all happens again on Wednesday against No. 2 Anett Kontaveit of Estonia.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOn Monday, Williams looked far better than she had in previous matches this summer and seemed energized by the moment, and the crowd. Kovinic, ranked No. 80, said it was so loud, not only could she not hear the ball coming off Williams’s racket, she couldn’t hear it coming off her own strings at times.“On the outside courts we don’t have this experience,” she said. But Kovinic, who smiled amiably during the unusually long prematch introductions, handled her part with aplomb.Even as fans focused on Williams, many were also captivated by Olympia, her 4-year-old daughter, who wore a similar black outfit with sparkles. Olympia had beads in her hair, evoking when her mother wore beads as a player.“She asks to wear beads a lot,” Williams said. “It actually wasn’t my idea, but I was so happy when she had them on. It’s perfect on her.”After the match, a ceremony was held to honor Williams, an unusual departure for the first-round match. Williams had announced earlier this month that she intends to retire from tennis to concentrate on her family, her spiritual life and other ventures. But as King said during the ceremony, “You are just beginning.” It could have referred to both Williams’s future outside of tennis and her journey in this tournament, which has already been defined with her imprint.“I’m just not even thinking about that,” she said. “I’m just thinking about this moment. I think it’s good for me just to live in the moment now.”While inside the stadium the two players hammered balls from the baseline in front of a nervous but expectant crowd, the grounds outside the arena walls were crowded with an overflow audience of people unable to find tickets to get in.Instead, they watched on the big video screen overlooking the fountains in the main plaza, and cheered along with roughly 25,000 on the inside, as long as they could see the images from where they stood.“The screen needs to be bigger,” said Zandra Bucheli, an architect from San Francisco. Her brother, Jorge Hernandez, from Long Beach, N.Y. — and an architect, as well — said that despite not getting inside the stadium, his family members were still enjoying the scene in the plaza.“It’s just over the wall,” he said. “And the atmosphere out here is good. You get a feel for it.”The Gray family, from Bowie, Md., drove four hours to watch Monday’s matches and planned to drive back home after it was all over.“I’m extremely excited,” said Anita Gray, whose two sons, Cody, 12, and Coy, 14, play competitive tennis and train at the Tennis Center in College Park, Md., where the 26th-ranked Frances Tiafoe first honed his game. The boys’ father, Rory V. Gray, has been coming to the U.S. Open since 1993 and said he would watch Williams and her sister Venus working out on the back courts at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center with their father, Richard Williams. They were both schoolgirls at the time, and virtually no one else was there watching with him.It was a far different scene on Monday when Serena Williams practiced before the night match. Hundreds of fans waited patiently for her to appear at about 6:15 p.m. for a half-hour warm up. As soon as she emerged into view, the fans began to scream and cheer while a dozen cameras followed Williams to the door of the courts.Fans outside of Arthur Ashe Stadium as Serena Williams’s match was about to begin.Peter Foley/EPA, via ShutterstockWhen her practice session ended, the fans applauded again, and Williams lifted her racket to acknowledge their cheers as she walked off with Rennae Stubbs, her coach. Not long after, she was making her grand entrance into Ashe Stadium.“I don’t know if she can win it all,” said Shayla Veasley, a certified athletic trainer from Harlem. “But I’m hoping for at least a run to the semis. We just want to see more of her.”Menuarn Burns, 74, a retiree from Shreveport, La., said she felt lucky to have tickets for the match, which she had been anticipating for days. She admires and respects Williams, but she said she would not be sad when the great champion is finally gone from the tennis tour.“Everyone has to grow old,” she said. “She’s earned a chance to move on to something else.” More

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      Madonna? Harry Potter? Churchill? Tom Brady May Be Beyond Compare

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Super Bowl 2021Conference ChampionshipsBrady is BackIs Tampa the New Titletown?The N.F.L. and Black CoachesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMadonna? Harry Potter? Churchill? Tom Brady May Be Beyond CompareTom Brady rose from obscurity to become a standard-bearing quarterback hero, jousting with many characters along the way. We asked experts in various fields if they could cite similar sagas through history.Scholars compared Tom Brady to a variety of figures, real and fictional: (clockwise from top left) Winston Churchill, Harry Potter, Pope Benedict and Bill Clinton.Credit…Stanley ChowFeb. 3, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe arc of Tom Brady’s career — his rise to Super Bowl mainstay as quarterback of the New England Patriots and now with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — reads as if it were a folk tale.An unwanted N.F.L. orphan out of college is consigned to a woebegone, frosty football hamlet. Something akin to a miracle — a near-death experience by a co-worker — vaults him from obscurity into his dominion’s brightest spotlight, where he slays a two-touchdown favorite to win the Super Bowl. Next, this one-time nobody wins two more Super Bowls.He has it all: fame, fortune, a goddess for a wife. But he is also controlled by a Svengali-like mentor (the Hoodie), who draws him into a secretive clan known for outlaw tactics. As its ringleader, Brady is demonized outside his kingdom, the fiefdom of Dunkin’, and is briefly banished by the princely overlord, Roger the Goodell of Park Avenue.Brady plots his revenge, leading a patriot army to three more championships, achieving deity-like status signified by mythic comparisons of him to a mountaintop goat. Alas, in time even Brady’s powers diminish and he appears ready to be dethroned. Then, in yet another twist, Brady spurns his crafty swami to launch a new crusade in a foreign land where Ponce de León once sought the fountain of youth. Imbuing a bunch of football wannabe-greats with Brady wizardry, he claims another kingdom, from which he plots utter sovereignty.Quite a story, right?Folk tales gain their popularity for being universally applicable. So we wondered, are there other fields in which a Tom Brady-like figure exists? Whose storied life has been comparable? In the worlds of literature, politics and business, who is their Tom Brady? In the Bible? Theater? Greek mythology? TV or music? Does Tom Brady have any analog?In a chat room created to discuss which fictional character might be an apt comparison to Brady, the first response typed was “Harry Potter.”Credit…Stanley ChowLike everything else related to Brady, opinions clashed. Imagine Alexander the Great in a sword fight with Madonna.For example, in a chat room created to discuss which fictional character, or historical figure, might be an apt comparison to Brady, the first response typed was “Harry Potter.”The second reply: “Voldemort,” the literary saga’s villain.OK.On second thought, a roll call of experts from myriad fields was consulted — with entertaining results.The filmmaker and author Gotham Chopra, who made Brady the subject of a 2018 documentary film and of a nine-part documentary series set to air later this year, suggested that Brady was two conflicting biblical figures, David and Goliath.“He’s the ultimate underdog who came out of nowhere,” Chopra said. “But with all the success, over time he turned into Goliath, which is sort of interesting.”Hunter R. Rawlings III, a classics scholar and the former president of the University of Iowa and Cornell University, said there was no perfect fit in history for every part of Brady’s life narrative, even in mythology, but he found a link to Alexander the Great.“He never lost a battle, though fighting against Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Afghans, Indians, and countless others,” Rawlings wrote in an email.Rawlings also noted, for those who believe that Bill Belichick is pivotal to the Brady story, that Alexander’s childhood tutor was none other than Aristotle. Alexander was also occasionally despised.“Alex and Brady, it strikes me that there is never enough winning for such people,” Rawlings said, adding: “Those two are definitely G.O.A.T.’s, but somehow seem to spawn as many detractors as admirers.”David Maraniss, author of best-selling biographies of presidents and prominent athletic personalities, said he found elements of Brady in Winston Churchill.Credit…Stanley ChowDavid Bianculli, a television critic and professor of film and TV at Rowan University, cited the 1978 movie “Heaven Can Wait,” a fantasy-comedy that starred Warren Beatty as a resolute N.F.L. quarterback who overcomes numerous obstacles. Beatty’s character dies and comes back to life twice, which is undoubtedly the ultimate fourth-quarter rally.The resourceful, adaptable community of world leaders seemed a ripe sub-society to mine on the subject of Brady analogies. David Maraniss, author of best-selling biographies of presidents and prominent athletic personalities, said he found elements of Bill Clinton and Winston Churchill in Brady.“I mean in terms of latching onto a Machiavellian sort of master of the dark arts to help you,” Maraniss said, pointing out that Clinton had used the adviser Dick Morris “as his political manipulator to get where he wanted to go.”“There’s a little bit of Churchill there, too,” Maraniss added, “for coming back at an old age and being at his best again.”The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author who frequently writes and comments on religious and spiritual topics, said the parts of Brady’s narrative with the most striking historical similarities were his career comebacks or revivals.“I do not, however, think he’s exactly Lazarus,” Martin said.Martin believes the most obvious comparison in the Bible is King David, who Martin noted led a “very complicated life and was clearly seen as someone who had fallen but still was a revered leader of the people.” King David conspired to kill Bathsheba’s husband, the soldier Uriah, by having him placed up front in battle and then abandoned to the enemy.“He basically has him assassinated, and people are obviously upset with that,” Martin said. “He is a person who’s not perfect but nonetheless beloved in his area. And his people knew his flaws better than anyone.”Martin, whose book “Learning to Pray” was published this week, also suggested Pope Francis as a possible parallel to Brady, because he did not ascend to the papacy until he was 76.“Pope Francis is not married to a supermodel,” Martin said. “So that’s where the comparison slips a bit.”The Rev. James Martin said Pope Francis, who ascended to the papacy at 76, was a possible parallel to Brady.Credit…Stanley ChowAfter warming up with David and Goliath comparisons, Chopra mentioned Muhammad Ali and LeBron James as cultural figures similar to Brady, and Madonna because she had persevered.“Madonna the artist today versus the Madonna when she was 19,” Chopra said. “Radically different and yet equally accomplished.”Chopra, who has remained friendly with Brady, also told a funny story of a recent walk with Brady on the Great Wall of China. Two women passed by, and one excitedly recognized the quarterback. The other woman did not understand why he was famous until her friend said: “He’s Gisele’s husband.”“So, he’s super grounded,” Chopra said, laughing.Literary fiction seemed to be an especially fertile place to find characters who resemble Brady.Heather Klemann, a lecturer at Yale University whose specialty is 18th century British novels, pointed out Sir Charles Grandison, a central figure in a famed mid-18th century novel that bore his name. Grandison faces trials and tribulations but does so without moral flaws or malicious intent.Perhaps proving that not much has changed in 270 years, Klemann recalled literary criticism of Grandison along these lines: “Annoyance that this guy is perfect, you know?”Finally, James Shapiro, a renowned Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, said he could find no one like Brady among the thousand or so characters in Shakespeare’s plays, though there is a reference to a “base football player” in “King Lear.”Shapiro instead saw a distinct parallel in the centuries-old play “Doctor Faustus,” about a man who makes a deal with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for 24 years of having his heart’s wishes met. By Shapiro’s calculation, such a deal for Brady would date back to his days riding the bench at the University of Michigan.“Which kind of makes sense since that’s when things turned around for him, almost miraculously,” Shapiro wrote in an email. “It makes you wonder, no?”Such a deal could expire not too long after this weekend’s Super Bowl.“But,” Shapiro conceded, “that’s a Giants fan speaking.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More