Swiatek, Iga (2001- )

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      Iga Swiatek Downs Ons Jabeur to Win US Open Women’s Singles Title

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      Swiatek, the world No. 1, beat Jabeur in straight sets to capture her first U.S. Open singles title. It is her third Grand Slam title and first on a surface other than clay.The 2022 U.S. Open will always be remembered — outside of Poland, at least — for its farewell to Serena Williams, long the queen of tennis and the greatest women’s player ever.Beware, though, after Poland’s Iga Swiatek won the women’s singles title Saturday, beating Ons Jabeur of Tunisia Saturday afternoon at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the sport may have a new ruler on its hands.Swiatek, the world No. 1, lived up to her billing and beat Jabeur, 6-2, 7-6(5), to capture her first U.S. Open singles title. It was the third Grand Slam title of Swiatek’s brief career and her first on a surface other than clay.When Jabeur’s last forehand sailed long, Swiatek collapsed on her back after a 1 hour, 51 minute duel that got dangerously close as the afternoon wore on. After a first set that was over in 30 minutes, Swiatek and Jabeur took 81 minutes to finish the second as Jabeur battled back from a service break down twice to get the set into a tiebreaker before Swiatek ultimately prevailed.Swiatek, 21, won the French Open in 2020 and 2022, becoming the first Polish woman to win a Grand Slam singles title. And now she is the first Polish woman to win three and the U.S. Open, where she was the first Polish woman to make the singles final.How young is this new tennis queen? She is Gen-Z to the core. After the extended congratulatory hug with Jabeur, and a little bit of celebrating, she took a seat in her chair, pulled her phone from her bag and texted away as she awaited the trophy ceremony For Swiatek, the victory was the latest success in a season full of them. She won 37 consecutive matches and six consecutive titles from late winter to early summer. Those victories included the so-called Sunshine Double — winning both the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., and the Miami Open in March and April.Those wins, on hard courts similar to those at the U.S. Open, announced Swiatek as a force on courts other than clay, on which she was already dominant. She has won so many 6-0 sets this year — a “bagel” in tennis parlance — that the saying “Iga’s bakery” was coined.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesSwiatek’s surge to the top came at an opportune time. In March, Ashleigh Barty of Australia, a three-time Grand Slam singles champion and the world No. 1, abruptly retired at 25 years old, saying she had accomplished all she wanted in the sport and was ready for a new challenge.In her departure, Barty, then the reigning Wimbledon and Australian Open champion, left a significant void in women’s tennis, which has largely been a free-for-all in recent years.No woman has won more than two Grand Slam titles in a calendar year since Williams won three in 2015. Since late 2020, Swiatek has done all she can to bring some order to women’s tennis, winning three of the past 10 Grand Slam titles.Beyond her dominance on the court, Swiatek has assumed a leadership role off it. She has spoken out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than any player who is not from Ukraine and has helped raise more than $2 million for relief efforts through her participation in tennis exhibitions, one of which she organized herself.“We’re trying to do our best to be good people,” she said during the trophy ceremony, as red-and-white Polish flags swung throughout the stands.On a lighter note, she was also among the players this summer who led an outcry over the balls that women use at the U.S. Open, which are different from those that men play with.From the start, all the signs pointed to this being Swiatek’s afternoon. During the warm-up, the sound system blasted AC/DC, one of her favorite bands. (Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin also have a major presence on her playlist.)Once the balls started flying, Swiatek gave little reason for anyone to believe that this match would go any differently from so many finals before. Coming in, Swiatek had played in 10 career finals. She has not lost one since her first, way back in 2019. Even more remarkably, she has not lost a set in any of those wins.“Iga never loses finals, so it is going to be very tough,” Jabeur said Thursday night, as Swiatek staged her second comeback in this tournament from a set down in her semifinal battle against Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, a player she was especially determined not to lose to for a variety of reasons.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesAgainst Jabeur on Saturday, Swiatek ambushed from the start. She won 12 of the first 14 points, sprinting to a 3-0 lead. Jabeur climbed back, getting back on serve as Swiatek momentarily lost control of her overpowering forehand. But then Swiatek went right back to business, with a style that has become more clinical than fancy.With Jabeur putting up so little resistance, she didn’t need to do much more than hit deep into the court. Eventually, Jabeur either made an error or landed a shot somewhere around the service line, allowing Swiatek to move in and blast away. The first set was over in 30 minutes.The queens of women’s tennis historically have done this sort of thing.Jabeur, the first Arab woman to reach a Grand Slam final in the Open Era and to reach the highest level of the sport, has arguably the most creative arsenal in the women’s game. When she is on, she can mix jumping backhand drop shots with a dangerous forehand and a deceptively hard serve that she can land in the corners with nasty movement.She reached the Wimbledon final earlier this summer and held a one-set lead before tightening and getting overpowered by Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan. Ahead of Saturday, she spoke of the lessons she had learned from that match and how she now knew ways to keep her emotions in check.But with Swiatek in top form, there was little that Jabeur, who has become an inspiration for Arab women, could do to stop the locomotive.“We’re going to get that title sometime soon,” she said after losing her second Grand Slam final of the year. “Hopefully this is the beginning of so many things.”The second set followed a similar pattern to the first at the beginning, with Swiatek surging to a 3-0 lead, Jabeur getting back on serve, and then Swiatek, seizing control right back in the sixth game to get within two games of the championshipFrom there, the only question was whether Swiatek’s occasionally shaky psyche might get the better of her or whether a crowd that swung to Jabeur’s side, begging her to extend the afternoon and make their high-price tickets worthwhile, might be able to rattle her.A few random knuckleheads started whistling in the middle of Swiatek’s service motion. A baby cried. Jabeur abandoned the cute stuff. No more variety for variety’s sake. She tried to match Swiatek’s power from the baseline. It worked as she evened the set at four games each.Ons Jabeur was overpowered early in the match but found her game in the second set.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesSwiatek is so different, though, from the fragile player who won her first Grand Slam title as a teenager. She has evolved from a player who cried in the bathroom during toilet breaks in the middle of matches into a problem solver.That player might never have had a prayer of prevailing in New York, where all the noise and commotion — passing trains and planes, fans who feel they have the right to long raucous matches and to help determine the outcome — make winning here such a different task from anywhere else.“It’s New York, so loud, so crazy,” she would say later of both her past two weeks and this match.Just keeping the ball in play was no longer working. Jabeur was sending her back and forth across the baseline and held chances to break Swiatek’s serve in the next game and serve for the second set. And just then, Swiatek figured out how to calm her nerves and dial back the mistakes. It wasn’t pretty, but it solved the problem, or at least stopped too many more from happening.Jabeur would stretch Swiatek, getting as close as anyone has in a Grand Slam final to winning a set. But in the tiebreaker, strokes that had become smooth and steady started sailing. On their final point, Swiatek’s first serve was not even close, and she lobbed in her second ball. The forehand Swiatek hit off Jabeur’s return floated into the middle of the court, but Jabeur couldn’t take advantage of it, and the championship was hers. There should be many, many more. More

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      US Open Women’s Final: Iga Swiatek vs. Ons Jabeur

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      Swiatek will look to affirm her place as the top-ranked player, while Jabeur could become the first African woman to win the U.S. Open.Ons Jabeur of Tunisia also made it to the final at Wimbledon this year.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesIga Swiatek of Poland, the No.1-ranked woman, won 37 straight matches over the winter and spring.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesListening to the two women’s finalists in the U.S. Open, it can be easy to forget that tennis is a sport that involves strength, speed, athletic skill and some strategy.To Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 from Poland, and Ons Jabeur of Tunisia, now a two-time Grand Slam finalist, the game is almost entirely a mental test.Yes, there is an opponent on the other side of the net trying to hit the ball past you. But the real opponent is the one inside your head, the one trying to remind you of the recent run of bad form, or the balls that you’ve had trouble controlling, or the heartbreaking loss you suffered the last time you played in a Grand Slam final.A little more than an hour after Swiatek, 21, outdueled Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus in three sets on Thursday, she reflected on what had made the difference. Sabalenka had overpowered Swiatek in the first set, but Swiatek drew even, then climbed out of trouble in the third set to win the final four games.The key, she said, was not the string of winners she decorated the court with, or an extra burst of energy from a summer training block. It was being able to control her emotions and not panic.“The work we’ve put in with Daria for sure helped,” she said, referring to the sports psychologist Daria Abramowicz, who has helped her find the tools to calm her nerves. “I think that’s basically the most important thing on the highest level.”Jabeur, a 28-year-old veteran whose game has only recently reached the level where she can regularly compete for the most important championships, constantly has her sports psychologist, Melanie Maillard, with her as well.She has been wearing a T-shirt that says “Face Your Fears” around the grounds of the tournament.“Losing finals is one of them,” she said, after thrashing Caroline Garcia of France, a rival since they were juniors, in the semifinals. “Face all the stress. I think the most important thing is accept that I’m playing a big final and accept all the emotions that are going to come my way.Familiarizing herself with that fear may be a worthwhile exercise. Swiatek has made 10 finals during her first three years as a full-time professional. She has won nine of them.“Iga never loses finals,” Jabeur said. “So it’s going to be very tough.”It’s fair to say that neither player expected to do all that well in this tournament, given their form in late July and August.Swiatek won 37 consecutive matches and six straight tournaments through the late winter and spring of this year. But the grass at Wimbledon, a surface she is still figuring out, threw her for a loop, causing a level of discomfort that has taken her all summer to recover from. She lost early in three tournaments, including in her hometown competition in Warsaw.Then she came to North America and struggled to control the kinds of balls that the U.S. Open uses. Less than two months removed from one of the best winning streaks in the modern history of the sport, she found herself not trusting her game.“My level of trust should for sure be higher,” Swiatek said. Instead of panicking, or crying in the bathroom between sets as she said she used to do, she has tried to accept her uncertainty and move on.“Maybe I’m the kind of person who is never going to trust myself,” she said.For Jabeur, the challenge in Saturday’s final is twofold. She has to manage Swiatek’s powerful forehand and unmatched ability to cover the court and hit backhands from a split, and also try to push to the recesses of her mind the baggage and scar tissue from losing in the Wimbledon final after winning the first set.She is the most creative player at the top of the game, capable of all kinds of tricks and spins. Sometimes she can too be creative, forgetting that she can also simplify the game and rely on her own powerful forehand and serve. Jabeur has won all six semifinals she has made this year, but just two of the finals. She would like to make it three on Saturday, but has already adopted a mind-set that will prevent her from getting too low if it doesn’t go that way.“I’m going full in. I’m going for everything,” she said of her mental approach. “I feel very positive about this one. The most important thing is not to regret, because I’m going to give it all on this one. Even if this one is not going to happen, I’m very sure that another one will come.” More

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      Ons Jabeur Will Play Iga Swiatek for the U.S. Open Women’s Singles Title

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      Top-ranked Swiatek will play for her third Grand Slam title. Jabeur, who lost this year’s Wimbledon final, will get another chance to win her first major title.There will be a new U.S. Open women’s singles champion this year, and Ons Jabeur and Iga Swiatek remained in contention in very different ways on Thursday night in Arthur Ashe Stadium.Jabeur needed just 66 minutes to dispatch Caroline Garcia, a quick-striking Frenchwoman who likes to imitate an airplane after her victories but was grounded by the weight of this occasion. Swiatek needed more than two hours to scrap and come back against Aryna Sabalenka, the Belarusian star who is a force of nature and one of the exceedingly rare ball-strikers powerful enough to dictate terms to the explosive Swiatek.But Swiatek, still the world No. 1 by a cavernous margin, found a way to navigate in heavy weather, rallying from losing the first set and from falling behind by 4-2 in the third to prevail by 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 and reach her first major final on a surface that is not red and slippery.She has won two French Opens on clay, the first out of close to nowhere in October 2020 and the other as the heavy favorite this June. But Swiatek, who has won six tournaments during this breakthrough season, can take her campaign and career to a new level if she can win her first hardcourt major on Saturday night.She said she was proud that she had learned to adjust on the run and at rest; sitting on changeovers with her eyes closed while trying to solve tennis riddles. It is a method she has long emphasized in her work with Daria Abramowicz, her performance psychologist.“Earlier I felt like my emotions kind of were taking over and I was panicking a little bit when I was losing,” Swiatek said. “For sure I grew up. I learned a lot, and the work we’ve put in with Daria for sure helped. Right now it’s just easier for me to actually logically think what I can change. And I feel like I have more skills to do that than one type of way to play. So I’m pretty happy that it changed because I think that’s basically the most important thing on the highest level.”Jabeur has also worked on her body and mind and has been rewarded with the best season of her career. Sitting at No. 2 in the yearlong points race behind Swiatek, Jabeur, whom her fellow Tunisians have nicknamed the Minister of Happiness, brought some more sunshine to her country and her season on Thursday.Garcia had the hottest hand in tennis with a 13-match winning streak. But Jabeur met the moment with power and precision; with variety and guile. She won the first set in 23 minutes as Garcia pressed and Jabeur slammed aces and chipped backhands that skidded low on the blue Arthur Ashe Stadium hardcourt.She closed out the match, 6-1, 6-3, d punctuating the rout with a shout and a tumble before rising quickly to embrace Garcia, a friend, at the net.Jabeur, who is good company as well as an increasingly great tennis player, has many friends on tour. And there is much to celebrate. After reaching her first Grand Slam singles final in July at Wimbledon, where she lost to Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan, Jabeur has followed that up with a run to the final in New York.But Swiatek, 21, deserves to be the favorite on Saturday, even though she and Jabeur have split their four previous matches and Jabeur has had a more straightforward run to her first U.S. Open final.“Two in a row feels amazing,” Jabeur said in her on-court interview. “After Wimbledon, there was a lot of pressure on me, and I’m really relieved that I can back up my results.”Jabeur, seeded fifth after being ranked as high as No. 2 earlier this year, is not only a symbol for Tunisia. She is a symbol for a region and a continent as the first Arab and African woman to reach a U.S. Open singles final.“I take it as a great privilege and as good pressure for me,” she said in a recent interview. “I love that I have that kind of support, and I always try to be positive in my life and see even bad things in a positive way. I don’t just play for myself. I play also for my country.”But the goal, as Jabeur’s poised and relentless performance made clear Thursday, is a first major title. She has made her serve a bigger weapon and though Garcia leads the tour in aces this season, Jabeur had the edge on Thursday, finishing with eight aces to Garcia’s two. Though her first-serve percentage was below 50 percent, she won 83 percent of the points when she put her first serve in play while Garcia, who played far below the level she had shown in recent weeks, struggled to win points quickly with her serve. Garcia finished with 23 unforced errors and just 12 winners despite her aggressive tactics. Jabeur had 21 winners and 15 unforced errors.“She knows now where she’s going, and she knows now what she wants,” said Melanie Maillard, a French performance psychologist who has worked with Jabeur since 2016. “She’s given herself the means. She’s dedicated and so determined.”Jabeur was poised and relentless, closing out the match in 66 minutes.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesIt has been a long haul for Jabeur, 28, to believe that someone from a modest background and a nation that had never produced a top-10 tennis player could hit the highest notes in a global sport. She spent long stretches training in France and away from home despite her close connections with her family and her roots.But Jabeur knew what she had been hearing since her youth about her talent: her innate feel for the ball; her capacity to create angles and change speeds and spins, even on the move.“I’ve always believed in mental coaching,” Jabeur said. “I had a mental coach since the age of maybe 12 or 13, long before Melanie, but we’ve been working together with Melanie for a long time, and I’m very lucky I found the right person who could push me through and know me much better. It’s all about the connection between both of us. We did a great job, and we’ve come a long way. But I’ve always been someone who believed in the importance of mental health.”As at Wimbledon, Maillard was in Jabeur’s player box on Thursday night alongside Jabeur’s coach, Issam Jellali, and Jabeur’s husband, Karim Kamoun, who is also her fitness trainer.”Though Thursday’s duel in Ashe Stadium represented new ground for Jabeur and Garcia — neither had been in a U.S. Open semifinal — it also was a flashback. They were junior rivals who played in the U.S. Open girls event in 2010 in the quarterfinals and also played three more times in junior Grand Slam events.Jabeur won all those matches and has now beaten Garcia three times on the pro tour, all in major tournaments. Garcia said that though Jabeur’s spin and variety clearly posed her problems, she was not thinking back during Thursday’s defeat:simply struggling in the present to find solutions and let her game flow freely.“It helped and not at the same time,” Jabeur said of her long-running head-to-head edge. “Because I know she was playing amazing tennis, and that puts a lot of pressure on you.”The pressure should be bigger still against Swiatek, who is gathering strength after failing to win a title since the French Open. Against Sabalenka, Swiatek’s quality of defense and returns ultimately made the small difference, and though Sabalenka has shored up her faltering serve in New York, she was still unable to put first serves in play when she needed them most in her closing service games.The loss hit her hard. Sabalenka arrived at her post-match news conference wearing mirrored sunglasses and kept them on for the entirety of her interview as she spoke in tones much more subdued than her high-intensity, high-volume approach to thumping tennis balls.This was a big opportunity indeed: a wide-open major tournament. But only two players still have a chance to win it, and it seems fitting that they have been, on balance, the two best players of the season.“She has different game style than most of the players,” Swiatek said of Jabeur. “She has a great touch. All these things mixed up, she’s just a tough opponent. She fully deserves to be in the final. I think it’s going to be a great battle.” More

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      U.S. Open Semifinals: The 4 Women Left

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      Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesCaroline Garcia, 28, of France, beat Gauff on Tuesday, adding to an exceptional summer that has included victories in Cincinnati, Warsaw and Bad Homburg, Germany. She also reached Wimbledon’s round of 16, but this will be her first Grand Slam semifinal. More

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      The Great U.S. Open Ball Debate of 2022

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      The Open is the only Grand Slam tournament where women use different balls than men, and the Wilson ‘regular-duty’ ball has gotten into some players’ heads.Tennis players are the Goldilocks characters of sports.The balls are too big, or too small. The courts are too fast, or too slow. It’s too cold, or too hot, or too sticky, or too sunny.“Some weeks you don’t play well, and you got to blame it on something,” joked David Witt, who coaches Jessica Pegula, the American who reached the quarterfinals on Monday with a win over Petra Kvitova.And so it has been at the U.S. Open this year as the women — well, some of them — have waged a rebellion over the Wilson balls they have used for years at the tournament. This is the only Grand Slam event where the women and the men use different balls.These yellow spheres are loved and loathed.Pegula, who has lost just one set in four matches, and that one in a tiebreaker, happens to love the balls. Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 from Poland, has called them “horrible.” That is so tennis. Rarely is there any consensus. Players often make contradictory complaints in the same tournament, or even the same day, about the same thing.You are officially forgiven if you have lived your life thinking all tennis balls are created equal but with different names and numbers stamped on them. But now, a quick tutorial in tennis ball technology.The men at the U.S. Open use what is known as an “extra-duty” ball, which means the felt on the outside of the ball is woven slightly more loosely than the “regular-duty” ball the women use.Iga Swiatek and her sports psychologist have talked about the challenges posed by the regular-duty balls.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesEverything else about the balls is the same — their core construction, their size and weight, how they rebound and how quickly they deform, according to Jason Collins, the senior product director for racket sports at Wilson Sporting Goods.However, the regular-duty balls “play faster,” Collins said through a spokeswoman for the company. Felt that is woven more tightly doesn’t fluff up as much and can wear away, so there is not as much friction when those balls make contact with the ground or the strings of a racket.The additional friction of a fluffy ball allows players to create maximum spin. Those who rely heavily on that spin can struggle to make a regular-duty ball travel the way they want it to, especially after a few games, when the ball begins to lose whatever fluff it had right out of the can and gets smaller.Players who hit a flatter ball, like Coco Gauff, or Pegula or Madison Keys, don’t have this problem as much. But some still do. Paula Badosa, who was seeded fourth and lost in the second round, hits as flat as anyone. She said she hated the balls.“You feel more like you’re playing Ping-Pong sometimes,” Badosa said after her first-round win. Two days later, she was out of the tournament.Another point of complication and confusion: Regular-duty balls are always used on clay courts and other surfaces that are moist because they don’t collect the moisture the way the looser felt of the extra-duty balls do. Extra-duty balls are the balls of choice for outdoor hardcourts, like those at the U.S. Open, except when they are not.And then there is one more complicating factor: Tennis is run by seven separate organizations, with tournaments all over the world, many of which have different companies that pay for the right to supply the balls. That means players can end up playing with a different ball from a different manufacturer from one week to the next. And every ball is just a little bit different, and behaves differently depending on heat and humidity and air pressure.According to the United States Tennis Association, which owns and organizes the U.S. Open, the women have played with a different ball than the men for as long as anyone can remember; the WTA Tour has always wanted it that way, and the tournament abides by the tour’s preference.Stacey Allaster, who is the U.S. Open director and was the chief executive of the WTA from 2009 to 2015, said the sports science experts on the women’s tour have long felt that the faster, more aerodynamic ball helps limit arm and shoulder injuries.Every year, Allaster said, the U.S.T.A. asks the WTA what balls it wants to use, and the answer has always been the same. “As far as we know, a majority likes it, so we could end up trading one problem for another.”Amy Binder, the chief spokeswoman for the WTA, confirmed that the players and the sports science teams have favored the faster regular-duty balls, but executives have heard from “a select number of our athletes that they would like to consider a change.”The WTA will continue to monitor and discuss the matter, Binder said, though she said the decision on the ball ultimately rested with the U.S.T.A.The ball controversy has had previous iterations. After Ashleigh Barty won the Australian Open in January, her coach, Craig Tyzzer, said she would never win the U.S. Open as long as the tournament used the Wilson regular-duty balls. (Barty retired in March at age 25, while ranked as the world No. 1.) The latest gripes started earlier this summer, when the players began playing with these balls in the lead-up to the U.S. Open.Tennis, though, is all about making adjustments and finding solutions as the conditions change throughout a match, and a tournament, and a season. The challenge can be as much mental as it is physical.A tennis umpire examined one of the tennis balls during a fourth-round match.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesPegula kept switching rackets in her match against Kvitova on Monday, experimenting with different string tensions in search of one that felt just right as the humidity and the condition of the balls changed. Looser strings hold the ball for longer (think of a trampoline) and provide more time to spin the ball.“Something feels off, you have to make a change,” Pegula said “It’s important not to let it frustrate you too much.”That has been the challenge for Swiatek, who travels with her sports psychologist, Daria Abramowicz. They have talked plenty about all the challenges created by these balls that Swiatek so despises.Abramowicz does not tell Swiatek not to think about the balls because then the first thing she will think about is the balls.“It’s like I would tell you right now not to think about a blue elephant for a minute, and literally the first thing popping into your mind is this blue elephant,” Abramowicz said. “You accept the thought, because it’s already there, and move on, refocus, find anchor in something else.”Pegula and Swiatek will meet Wednesday in the quarterfinals, a match that could become a test between Pegula’s flexibility and Swiatek’s ability to think about other things besides the balls. Or maybe the balls will have nothing to do with the outcome.What will happen with the balls next year is anyone’s guess, but Allaster said the WTA would need to decide what to do soon. Wilson has already been asking which balls the U.S.T.A. needs in 2023.Someone is not going to be happy. More

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      The Void Serena Williams Left in Tennis Doesn’t Need to Be Filled

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      Tennis has long thrived on singular stars, no one bigger than Serena Williams. But perhaps women’s tennis doesn’t need one big name to be interesting.Serena Williams is gone from the game; at least, we think so. Given the sharp, competitive way she played at the U.S. Open last week, maybe, just maybe, she’ll end up coming back for an encore.Let’s take her at her word, despite the malaise that settled on the grounds at Flushing Meadows in the days following her defeat to Ajla Tomljanovic of Australia. Their three-hour match Friday night featured some of the most thrilling tennis played at this tournament in years.Now what? That was the question fans were asking over the Labor Day weekend, many of whom had bought their tickets just before the tournament began, gambling that Williams would keep playing and that they could watch her last great run. With her gone, not even the players who are left in the tournament have a firm grasp of who will take her place in women’s tennis.“I don’t know,” said Jessica Pegula last week, echoing a typical locker room sentiment. Pegula, an American barely known outside of tennis even though she is currently ranked No. 8, made note of the remarkable explosion of talent on the women’s tour, which features its deepest-ever bench, but lamented that nobody has been up for filling the Serena void.“It’s open for someone to step up,” she said. “That’s why you look at someone like Serena, dominant over several eras, and it’s pretty crazy.”Of course, tennis, like most sports, thrives on big names. On the women’s side, in the modern era of professionalization, the racket passed from Billie Jean King to Chris Evert to Martina Navratilova to Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. Then it was Venus Williams’s turn, and finally, Serena, who not only pushed the game in popularity and reach, she helped changed the way the game was played.“It’s hard to picture tennis without her,” Pegula added, dolefully.Steffi Graf with the U.S. Open trophy in 1988 the year she won the Grand Slam.Peter Morgan/Associated PressDoes women’s tennis need such a dominating figure to be interesting?Maybe it’s a matter of perspective. Rivalries and dynasties are great things. Many fans seem content to follow a small handful players or, in other sports, teams. The few players who win big and win consistently — like Williams and Novak Djokovic — are the ones whose stories take up most of the oxygen.But is there another more satisfying way of looking at sports?Is the N.B.A. at its best when the Golden State Warriors are in the finals, year after year, and winning the league title, in four out of eight seasons?Did we only care about the N.F.L. when the New England Patriots were bullying everyone in sight?Simone Biles had her well-documented struggles at the Tokyo Olympics, but how cool was it to watch Sunisa Lee emerge from relative obscurity and win gold in the all-around event?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.In men’s tennis, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Djokovic are pure genius. Bless the Big Three. But after reigning over the game for nearly two decades, each one of this trio feels past his due date.Despite Monday’s stunning loss to Frances Tiafoe, Nadal may play for at least another year. Djokovic looks like he has no plans to slow down until he is 70. Federer says he will give it one last hurrah when he can return from yet another knee injury.All to the good, unless, like me, you want some spice and variety and you like not knowing with near 100 percent certainty who is going to dominate every big tournament.Over the last several days, I spent time in Manhattan, randomly asking strangers what they knew about Iga Swiatek, the top women’s seed at the U.S. Open. The standard response was a quizzical, dumbfounded look. “Who?”Swiatek, a 21-year-old from Poland, won her second French Open in June. She also won 37 straight matches this year, the longest such streak in the 21st century.She has a compelling, all-court game. She is intelligent, contemplative, and engaging.But let’s face it, outside of tennis fans, in America, arguably the most critical market in tennis because of its size and spending power, Swiatek isn’t well known. She does not seem poised to fill the void left by Serena Williams. But that’s fine. No player will. The game, with its drama, athleticism and skill, should be able to attract fans.Iga Swiatek is the top seed at the U.S. Open. Will she be the next player to dominate tennis?Mike Segar/ReutersIt’s been interesting to watch the matches at Flushing this week, not only on the big courts but on the outskirts of this glammed-up tennis mecca — which, unlike, say, lush and intimate Wimbledon, has the look and feel of public tennis courts on steroids, with a looming football stadium stuck in the middle.Serena’s influence is everywhere. Remember how she spoke of “evolving” away from tennis? What a perfect word, because that is what she has done for tennis. She’s been the prime force in its evolution.You can see her fingerprints in every women’s match. The powerful, percussive groundstrokes hit from every corner. The biting serves. The aggressive, swinging volleys. The strength and speed. Virtually every player looks like they could be competing in the Olympic Heptathlon.Women’s tennis has never contained this much depth. Yes, you can watch the young and talented Coco Gauff, 18, ranked 12th, now into her first U.S. Open quarterfinals on Tuesday, and make the obvious comparison to a young Serena Williams because of their race — and because Gauff has steadily pointed to Serena and Venus for laying down the path for her tennis journey.It helps that Gauff also has the same sort of ambitious grit. As she came from behind in each set of her Sunday match against China’s Zhang Shuai, Gauff channeled Serena’s moxie, giving a Dikembe Mutombo finger wag, pumping her fists, flying from corner to corner to hit groundstrokes that echoed with a boom across Arthur Ashe Stadium.But throughout this tournament the grounds have been filled with competitors like the 86th ranked player in the world, Ukraine’s Dayana Yastremska — who, like so many other, credits Serena Williams for sparking her love for tennis as a girl. The shots that fly off Yastremska’s racket, no surprise, look like they’re ripping out of a cannon.Serena isn’t truly gone from the sport. She left a lot behind and remains part of tennis in a profound way. Her influence is all over the grounds.But that the void she left can’t be filled and doesn’t need to be. More

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      What You Missed at the U.S. Open While You Were Glued to Serena Williams

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      In case you missed it: The defending women’s singles champion, Emma Raducanu, is out, and a few players not named Serena retired, too.The Serena Williams show has come to an end, quite likely for good in competitive tennis. Even if Williams continues to say “you never know” and her current coach Eric Hechtman and long-ago coach Rick Macci have their doubts.“As of now, I guess we could say it’s over, but in her own words, the door is not slammed shut and locked, right?” Hechtman said on Saturday. “I’d say there’s a crack open.”“Just my hunch, but I think she and Venus are still gonna play doubles,” said Macci, whose Florida tennis academy was the sisters’ longtime base in their youth. “They have two of the best serves in the world and two of the best returns in the world, and in doubles you only have to cover half the court. When the Williams sisters play together, it’s the greatest show on earth. Anything’s possible.”The Williamses are indeed full of surprises and enjoy springing them. But what is 100 percent clear is that they are both out of this U.S. Open and that Serena’s prime-time farewell epic will no longer be the mega-story that blocks out all the light in the press room (or at least the American press room).“It’s completely her tournament, in my opinion,” said Daniil Medvedev of Russia, the No. 1 seed and defending U.S. Open men’s singles champion.But there has been a great big Grand Slam tournament going on for a week in New York. Let’s catch up on what you might have missed:Last year’s fairy tales are not this year’s fairy talesIn 2021, two multicultural teenagers made just about anything seem possible in tennis (and beyond). Leylah Fernandez, an unseeded 19-year-old Canadian with roots in the Philippines and Ecuador, knocked off favorite after favorite to reach the women’s singles final. Emma Raducanu, an 18-year-old Briton born in Canada with roots in China and Romania, defeated Fernandez in that final, becoming the first qualifier in the long history of the game to win a Grand Slam singles title.But midnight struck early this year, and the carriage turned into a pumpkin in the first round for Raducanu, who lost to the veteran Frenchwoman Alizé Cornet, and in the second round for Fernandez, who fell to Liudmila Samsonova of Russia.There was no dishonor in either defeat. Cornet is playing the best tennis of her career at 32 and upset No. 1 Iga Swiatek at Wimbledon. Samsonova, 23, won two hardcourt titles leading into the U.S. Open.But the early exits certainly do underscore how wild and crazy the Open was last year. Truly.Sam Querrey was one of a handful of players who said they would retire after the U.S. Open.Vera Nieuwenhuis/Associated PressSome players are retiring and locking the doorWhile Serena Williams was dragging her sneakers and talking about “evolving away from tennis,” some of her lesser-known peers had no trouble being more direct, including two longtime American pros, Christina McHale and Sam Querrey.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.McHale, a thoughtful 30-year-old from New Jersey, announced her retirement discreetly after losing in the first round of the qualifying tournament. She turned pro at 17 and soon reached the third round of all four majors, peaking at No. 24 in the world in 2012.“I am so grateful to have had the chance to live out my childhood dream all of these years,” she said on her Instagram account.Querrey, a 34-year-old Californian with a laid-back manner and a power game best suited to fast courts, won 10 tour singles titles and peaked at No. 11 in the singles rankings in 2018, the year after he rode his big serve to the semifinals at Wimbledon. The All England Club was also where Querrey recorded his biggest victory: upsetting No. 1 Novak Djokovic, who then held all four major singles titles, in the third round in 2016.Germany’s Andrea Petkovic, also 34, had some big victories of her own and broke into the top 10 in 2011 after reaching the quarterfinals of the Australian Open and the U.S. Open. She came back from a major knee injury early in her career and became a hard-running baseliner. She has been a fine player but probably an even better wordsmith: writing articles and giving interviews full of wisdom and wit in German and English, as she did again at the U.S. Open after her first-round loss to Belinda Bencic of Switzerland.“I think I brought everything to the game that I had to give,” she said. “Obviously it’s not in the amount as Serena, but in my own little world, I feel like brought everything to it, and my narrative was done.”She may play one final European tournament to give her European friends and family a chance to help her say farewell, but she looked like an ex-player already this week with a beer in hand at the beach.“First day of retirement,” she wrote on Instagram. “Enjoying my six-pack while it lasts.”And maybe there are some advantages to retiring in America after all, despite Europe’s bigger social safety net.“Every American that I encountered and told them I’m retiring, their first reaction was, ‘Congratulations,’” Petkovic said. “Every European I told this, they were, ‘Oh my God, what are you going to do now?’ I have to say the last few days I’ve embraced the American way of looking at it a little bit more.”Iga Swiatek remains the favorite to win the women’s singles title.Peter Foley/EPA, via ShutterstockThere will be a new champion and she just might speak FrenchThere will be no seventh U.S. Open singles title for Serena Williams, but someone is winning their first. None of the women who reached the fourth round have taken the singles title at Flushing Meadows.If Iga Swiatek continues to rumble, she deserves to be the favorite. Swiatek is No. 1 in the rankings by a huge margin after a 37-match winning streak earlier this year that included three hardcourt titles. The new champ could be American: Jessica Pegula, the new top-ranked American, and the big-hitting Danielle Collins, who reached the Australian Open final in January, are both contenders.So is Coco Gauff, the 18-year-old American who is seeded 12th and reached the quarterfinals in style after defeating Zhang Shuai of China, 7-5, 7-5, and covering the court like few women have covered it before. But the player rising the fastest is actually Gauff’s next opponent: the 17th-seeded Caroline Garcia, a French veteran who has been steam-rolling the opposition.Garcia, 28, once a top-five player, has been back on the rise since June and became the first qualifier to win a WTA 1000 event when she took the Western and Southern Open title last month in Ohio. She is playing with near-relentless aggression, standing well inside the baseline to return, frequently pushing forward to the net and ripping her groundstrokes, above all her potent forehand. It is all clicking, and she is on a 12-match winning streak after defeating Alison Riske-Amritraj of the United States, 6-4, 6-1.“I’m afraid to get too close to you,” said Blair Henley, the on-court interviewer. “Because you are red hot.”Garcia’s signature airplane-inspired celebration — arms spread wide — seems quite appropriate. She is in full flight, but Gauff has beaten her in their two previous matches and will have the nearly 24,000 fans in Arthur Ashe Stadium behind her on Tuesday in what will be the first U.S. Open quarterfinal for both players.Should be a good one. Could be a great one.Victoria Azarenka of Belarus will face Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic on Monday in the round of 16.Cj Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockWimbledon was a different worldIn the last major tournament, Wimbledon barred Russians and Belarusians from participating because of the invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. Open did not follow that lead to the dismay of some Ukrainian players.One week into this major, no Ukrainians are left in singles, but Russians and Belarusians comprised a quarter of the remaining singles players in the fourth round.Ilya Ivashka of Belarus and Medvedev, Andrey Rublev and Karen Khachanov, all of Russia, reached the men’s round of 16.Victoria Azarenka and Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus and Samsonova and Veronika Kudermetova of Russia reached the women’s round of 16. One other big difference from Wimbledon: Novak Djokovic, the men’s singles champion at the All England Club, is absent from New York because he was not allowed to enter the United States due to his remaining unvaccinated against Covid-19. More

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      On the First Day of US Open, All Eyes Are on Serena Williams

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      There are 63 other matches on opening day, but they have been relegated to the background as Williams prepares to play what could be her final singles match.Iga Swiatek is seeded No. 1 for the first time this year at the U.S. Open and is trying to secure her first Grand Slam title somewhere other than the red clay of Roland Garros.But on the eve of the U.S. Open, Swiatek had another priority: finally working up the courage to meet Serena Williams, a formidable champion whom Swiatek said made her feel like “a kid from kindergarten just looking at her.”On Sunday, Swiatek posted a photograph of her with Williams on her social media accounts: “This is the highlight of my day,” Swiatek wrote on Twitter. “Congratulations on your amazing journey and legendary career @serenawilliams. Huge respect for everything you have done for our sport.”It has been that sort of buildup to this year’s final Grand Slam tournament. There are an abundance of established and emerging players and story lines at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. But they are all relegated to the background for now as Williams, one of the greatest athletes of any generation, prepares to play what could be her final singles match on Monday night in the first round against the unseeded Danka Kovinic.Until this year, no Chinese man had qualified to play in the U.S. Open but two managed it this year — 25-year-old Zhang Zhizhen and 22-year-old Wu Yibing — and they are on Monday’s schedule after practicing together on Court 8 on Sunday with a small crowd of predominantly Mandarin-speaking fans applauding their efforts and besieging them for autographs and photographs when the training session ended.On Monday, Americans Elizabeth Mandlik and Brandon Holt, both children of U.S. Open singles champions, will make their own Grand Slam debuts. Mandlik, the daughter of Hana Mandlikova, will face Tamara Zidansek of Slovenia. Holt, the son of Tracy Austin, will face Taylor Fritz, the No. 10 seed and top-ranked American who is himself the son of former top 10 women’s player Kathy May.Also on Monday, Dominic Thiem, the 2020 U.S. Open men’s champion, will return to the tournament after missing last year’s Open with a serious wrist injury. He has a tough assignment against Pablo Carreño Busta, the smooth-moving Spaniard who has twice been a semifinalist at the U.S. Open and recently won the Masters 1000 tournament in Canada. But all those intriguing tennis stories will take a back seat to Williams vs. Kovinic, and even the other tennis players have been looking for opportunities to meet and catch up with Williams.“I watch her my whole life,” Swiatek, the 21-year-old Polish star, said of the 40-year-old Williams. “Basically she was everywhere, because she always won and was somewhere in the semifinals or the finals. I didn’t always feel like I’m this kind of player who can play similar tennis, because she always seemed so strong, really stronger than any of her opponents physically. But mentally for sure, she’s the one who’s going to show you how to use your position and how to kind of intimidate with being No. 1. I’m trying to do that. I don’t know if it’s going well or not.”Serena Williams’s Farewell to TennisThe U.S. Open could be the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Decades of Greatness: Over 27 years, Serena Williams dominated generation after generation of opponents and changed the way women’s tennis is played, winning 23 Grand Slam singles titles and cementing her reputation as the queen of comebacks.Is She the GOAT?: Proclaiming Williams the greatest women’s tennis player of all time is not a straightforward debate, our columnist writes.An Enduring Influence: From former and current players’ memories of a young Williams to the new fans she drew to tennis, Williams left a lasting impression.Her Fashion: Since she turned professional in 1995, Williams has used her clothes as a statement of self and a weapon of change.For Swiatek, Williams’s ability to juggle outside interests and motherhood with her tennis career have been a “great example.”“I think it’s great that we have somebody like that in our sport who cleared the path and showed us that you can do anything,” she said. “The sky’s the limit.”Naomi Osaka, a former No. 1 and two-time U.S. Open champion trying to recover her mojo after an unsuccessful stretch, spent more of her news conference on Friday answering questions about Williams than any other topic.“I think that her legacy is really wide to the point where you can’t even describe it in words,” Osaka said. “She changed the sport so much. She’s introduced people that have never heard of tennis into the sport. I think I’m a product of what she’s done. I wouldn’t be here without Serena, Venus, her whole family. I’m very thankful to her.”Grigor Dimitrov, the 17th seed in the men’s draw, catching up with Serena Williams during a practice session on Sunday.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesOsaka’s family did use the extraordinary success of the Williamses as a “blueprint,” according to Osaka’s father Leonard Francois.Naomi Osaka made her Grand Slam breakthrough by upsetting Serena Williams in the 2018 U.S. Open final in a match where Williams was penalized a game after a series of code violations by chair umpire Carlos Ramos. Osaka ended up in tears at the on-court awards ceremony amid boos from the stands, which were not directed at her but at the way the final had unfolded.She and Williams have long since moved on from that traumatic evening and developed a strong intergenerational connection.When Williams played (and lost) in the first round of the Western and Southern Open earlier this month to Emma Raducanu, Osaka was in the stands, eager not to miss the opportunity after Williams had announced that the end of her playing career was imminent.“I remember seeing an interview she did, I don’t know what it was, like an on-court thing, that if she retires, she’ll never tell anyone,” Osaka said. “I was really scared: Dang, when is the last time she’s going to play? Just to see her announce it and let people appreciate her legacy is really cool.”Monday night will not be the last chance to do so: Win or lose against Kovinic, Serena is entered in the women’s doubles with her older sister Venus Williams.But Monday night should be quite a moment, a sporting and cultural happening that comes on the 25th anniversary of Arthur Ashe Stadium, still the biggest permanent tennis venue in the world with its capacity of 23,771.While Venus, unseeded, reached the women’s singles final the year Ashe Stadium opened in 1997, Serena did not get to play a match in the main stadium. But she did make her Grand Slam and U.S. Open debut, losing in the first round of doubles with her sister to Kathy Rinaldi and Jill Hetherington.A quarter century later, Venus, 42, and Serena are the only women in this year’s draw who also played in the 1997 Open.It is a moment to celebrate, an era to commemorate, and though there is no shortage of matches on Monday worth watching closely, there can be no doubt about which match is generating the biggest buzz. More