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      Serena Williams Loses to Emma Raducanu in Cincinnati

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      Emma Raducanu beat Williams in straight sets in the first round at the Western and Southern Open. Williams’s next tournament, and quite possibly her last, will be the U.S. Open.MASON, Ohio — The Serena Williams farewell tour continues to seem like a fine idea that has come too late in the game.Since Williams’s announcement in Vogue last week that she would soon retire from the sport that she once ruled, she has played two matches and lost both in straight sets.Her last hurrahs have so far been sotto voce: grand occasions without matching content. And as Emma Raducanu, last year’s surprise U.S. Open champion, made frightfully quick work of Williams with a victory, 6-4, 6-0, on Tuesday night, the sold-out center court at the Western and Southern Open was often as quiet as a practice court as the nearly 12,000 fans on hand rarely had the chance to cheer the icon they had come to honor.For those who remember Williams at her peak, it was painful to watch this first-round defeat as she piled up unforced errors and missed returns early and then, after a brief surge, faded badly down the stretch with more of the same.Irresistible on serve in her prime, she lost her opening service game at love and also lost her last three service games, unable to control her shots or her destiny, particularly when the quick and agile Raducanu got her on the run, exposing Williams’s now-limited movement.Williams’s second serve has been a problem in recent years, and it was an even bigger problem on Tuesday. She won just two of 16 points on her second delivery: a paltry 12.5 percent. And though Williams had long feasted on second serves like Raducanu’s, the 19-year-old British star won 75 percent of the points on her second serve as Williams struggled to find her timing and sometimes her footing.It was a measure of Williams’s disarray and disappointment that, after this 65-minute rout was complete, she politely shook hands with Raducanu and quickly exited the court with a wave to the crowd, declining an on-court interview with Kondo Simfukwe that would have allowed her to address the public directly in her final match at the tournament.Last week in Toronto, when Williams lost to Belinda Bencic in the second round of the National Bank Open, there was considerably more fanfare: Williams said a formal farewell to Canada, shed a few tears and accepted an armful of parting gifts, including Maple Leafs and Raptors jerseys with her name and the No. 22 on them.Williams won just two of 16 points on her second serve.Jeff Dean/Associated PressBut there would be no Bengals gear on Tuesday outside Cincinnati, even though the Western and Southern Open tournament staff were prepared to mark the moment with much more pomp and circumstance if Williams had been open to the idea.Instead, it was left to Raducanu, who had just faced Williams for the first and likely only time, to speak to the moment and perform one of the pirouettes that Williams long deployed in victory.“Well, I think we all need to just honor Serena and her amazing career,” Raducanu said. “I’m so grateful for the experience to be able to play her and for our careers to cross over. Everything she has achieved is so inspirational, and yeah, it was a true honor to share this court with her.”Raducanu was not yet born when Williams won her first Grand Slam singles title at age 17 at the 1999 U.S. Open but like so many of her generation, Raducanu grew up with Williams dominating the landscape.“When you guys were cheering for her, I was like — you know what? — all for it,” Raducanu said to the crowd.Raducanu’s breakthrough victory in New York last year was much more of a shock than Williams’s 1999 triumph. Raducanu was an unseeded qualifier and is the only qualifier to win a Grand Slam singles title. She has struggled to follow up on that bravura performance, failing to reach a final in any other tour event. But her poise, precision, flowing footwork and superbly sliced serves on Tuesday were a flashback to last September at Flushing Meadows, even if she felt much more shaky than she looked.“To be honest, I was nervous from the first point to the last point,” Raducanu said. “I know what a champion she is. She can come back from any situation. I just had to stay focused. I’m just so pleased I managed to keep my composure.”Williams congratulating Emma Raducanu, who wasn’t yet born when Williams won her first U.S. Open singles title in 1999.Matthew Stockman/Getty ImagesWilliams’s struggles in the twilight are certainly understandable. She will turn 41 next month and has been a professional since age 14. The years, even with a limited schedule and phenomenal talent, take their toll. Williams, who missed a year of action after a hamstring tear at Wimbledon in 2021, has played only four singles matches in the last 14 months, and she took to the court to face Raducanu with a long strip of tape running down the outside of her left thigh, likely to provide support for her left knee.This much-anticipated match between the greatest women’s player of this era and one of the game’s brightest young talents was originally scheduled for Monday night but was delayed a day at Williams’s request in order to give her, according to people informed of the situation but not authorized to speak about it, more time to recover from knee pain.It was a newsy day in women’s tennis on Tuesday: Naomi Osaka, once the world No. 1, continued to struggle in 2022, losing in the first round by 6-4, 7-5 to Zhang Shuai of China. Coco Gauff, the 18-year-old American who reached the French Open final earlier this year, rolled an ankle late in the first set of her opening-round match with Marie Bouzkova of the Czech Republic and retired trailing, 5-7, 0-1.But the main event was clearly Williams vs. Raducanu, and Williams took the court after warming up in front of a large and supportive crowd earlier in the day on Court 16, with fans peering down from nearby show courts for a chance to catch a glimpse of Williams in person, perhaps for the last time. Some of them already had watched Williams’s older sister Venus lose, 7-5, 6-1, on center court to No. 14 seed Karolina Pliskova in their first-round match.It was another poignant day for the Williams sisters and another short stay at a tournament where they used to settle in for longer. On Wednesday, the 10th-seeded Raducanu, not the unseeded Serena Williams, will face the former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka in the second round.Serena Williams will presumably return to the practice court and physical therapy to try to get sharper and healthier before playing in New York, even if it now seems a long shot that she will be able to find enough form to make a run at the U.S. Open, which begins on Aug. 29 and is likely to be the last of her hurrahs. More

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      Serena Williams Takes On Emma Raducanu On the Road to the U.S. Open

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      After a postponement because of physical problems, Williams is scheduled to play Emma Raducanu on Tuesday. Her prime target is the U.S. Open, and she will not want to take undue risks.MASON, Ohio — The Serena Williams farewell tour is set to continue Tuesday at the Western and Southern Open.But for how long?The matchup — Williams vs. Emma Raducanu of Britain in the opening round — seems particularly well suited to the grand occasion that is Williams’s extended goodbye from professional tennis.With 23 Grand Slam singles titles, she is unquestionably the greatest women’s tennis player of this era and one of the greatest athletes of any era. Raducanu, a cosmopolitan 19-year-old, shocked the world (and herself) by winning last year’s U.S. Open as a qualifier, and has the smarts and strokes to be one of the leaders of the game if she can adjust to her new status and resume smacking forehand winners and winning matches by the bunch.The two champions at opposite ends of their careers have never played each other, and Raducanu is one of several young stars on the WTA Tour who have been hoping for a chance to face Williams before she walks away from the sport she long dominated. She wrote in Vogue, published last week, that the U.S. Open, which begins on Aug. 29 in New York, would be her last.But the question is whether Williams’s body (she turns 41 on Sept. 26) can make it to her self-imposed finish line. Her match with Raducanu was originally scheduled, with great fanfare, for Monday night, with the tournament releasing a statement and informing fans on site for the qualifying rounds that Williams would be playing in that opening-night slot outside Cincinnati.But after tickets, presumably quite a number of them, were purchased with Williams in mind, the match was bumped late on Monday to Tuesday with a vague explanation from the tournament. “On account of a number of factors related to scheduling, the Serena Williams-Emma Raducanu match will now be held on Tuesday,” the tournament said in announcing the Monday schedule.People who had been informed about the situation but who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, said the postponement was because of physical problems with Williams, who has had chronic knee tendinitis during her career and missed a year of competition after tearing her right hamstring at Wimbledon in 2021.There was no confirmation of injury concerns from Williams or from tournament officials. Williams practiced on Sunday and Monday, and the match remains on the Tuesday night schedule. But Williams, if she wins, would have to play on consecutive days for as long as she remains in the tournament. With the U.S. Open in her sights, she will clearly not want to take undue risks that could jeopardize her moment in Queens.Serena Williams and her coach, Eric Hechtman, during a practice.Dylan Buell/Getty ImagesThe U.S. Open is her prime target as Eric Hechtman, her new coach, made clear in an interview last week in Toronto, where Williams lost in the second round of the National Bank Open in straight sets to Belinda Bencic of Switzerland.It was the third singles match of Williams’s latest and surely last comeback, following an opening-round defeat to Harmony Tan, an unseeded Frenchwoman, at Wimbledon in June and a first-round victory in Toronto over Nuria Parrizas-Diaz of Spain.“We had Wimbledon, and now we have Toronto and Cincinnati to build up for New York,” Hechtman said after the loss to Bencic. “I’d say Serena’s played better in each match, and obviously there are things she could do better out there, but I thought her opponent played really well tonight. What we’re going to do is take the positives and improve tomorrow. She’s a champion, and we’re going to keep getting better every day, not just every match, but every day and hopefully we can make some improvements by Cincinnati.”Hechtman, a 38-year-old club professional who played at the University of Miami, has coached Venus Williams, Serena’ s older sister, since 2019 and began coaching Serena Williams earlier this year after she split with her longtime coach, Patrick Mouratoglou.For years, Venus and Serena shared the same coaches, their father Richard and mother Oracene Price, and in the sisters’ developmental years, the Florida-based coach Rick Macci.Working with Hechtman brings them, in a sense, full circle even if he generally trains with them separately to give them individualized instruction.“I feel blessed and thankful that I’m in this situation,” he said. “It just fell into place, and I just hope I do them justice and help them as much as I can to go forward.”Venus Williams, 42, who has yet to announce any timetable for her own retirement, received a wild card into the Western and Southern Open and has a daunting first-round match on the main stadium court against Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic, a former world No. 1, on Tuesday.“Venus will do it how she wants to it when she wants to do it,” Hechtman said of her leaving the game. “She could play for five more years. Who knows?”But her younger sister has made her intentions much clearer.“Emotions are high,” Hechtman said. “Every athlete faces this time at some point, and I think it’s good Serena did it the way she did it. I thought her first-person essay was unbelievable, and it shows a lot about how she is but also how intelligent she is. We’ve got a couple of tournaments left and hopefully we can use that as one of her major weapons: not just her tennis but her brain power and how she uses it on court.”Tennis fans watched Williams, far left, during a practice session on Monday.Aaron Doster/Associated PressThe power gap that long separated Serena Williams from the chase pack has been closed. Her successors on tour thrive on torrid pace, from this year’s Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina to the rising Americans Coco Gauff and Amanda Anisimova. It is harder to overwhelm this generation, in part because Williams set a new standard.But Williams still has aura, particularly with those who grew up watching her from afar.“When I look at her, I suddenly kind of forget that I’m here as world No. 1,” said Iga Swiatek, the Polish 21-year-old who was not even born when Williams won her first major title at the 1999 U.S. Open. “I see Serena and it’s, ‘Wow, Serena!’ You know? And I feel like I’m a kid from kindergarten just looking at her. So it’s tough. I haven’t talked to her, but I’m just trying to say hi.”And though Williams is no longer as mobile at age 40, she can win points in a variety of manners, deploying drop shots successfully in Toronto and using her still-impressive first serve to secure quick points or set up next-shot winners.“I think she’s serving well,” Hechtman said. “The pace is there on the serve, as it always has been through her career. She’s been improving since Wimbledon, and I think she’s definitely striking the ball cleaner, and I’d say the movement has improved. So, on all those fronts, it’s good.”The intent is to have a better, fuller preparation heading into New York than she had heading into Wimbledon, where she had played only two doubles matches at a tournament in Eastbourne, England, with Ons Jabeur before facing Tan.“We’re playing more events coming in,” Hechtman said. “So I think that’s useful and what we need to be doing. It’s like warming up for a match, right? You don’t just start the match cold. You’ve got to get the rhythm, and she’s getting her rhythm with the more matches she plays.”Body willing, she will play at least one in Mason, Ohio. More

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      Can a Tennis Player Share His Heart, and Courts, With Pickleball?

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      Our columnist grew up playing competitive tennis on Seattle courts that are now caught in the middle of a turf war with pickleball. He took up a paddle to see what all the fuss was about.Allow me to begin with an admission. I haven’t exactly been a fan of pickleball, the sport that is sweeping America like thorny tumbleweeds blowing across the windswept plains.I’ve always been jarred by the sound of it: Thwack!Though pickleball, a hybrid paddle sport, is increasingly sharing space with tennis at many courts and clubs around the country, it has nothing like the feel of tennis or the booming sound of that fuzzy ball on the strings, struck just right.Instead, graphite pickleball paddles careen against yellow plastic balls, emitting a high-pitched bleat.Thwack!For a lifelong tennis player like me, that high-pitched wail is an insult to the ears, the auditory equivalent of a root canal.Then, there’s the aesthetic. The look and feel of pickleball. In contrast with the elegance of tennis, this sport appeared to me to be a simple something parents would dream up to keep the kids busy on a lazy summer day. Turns out that’s pretty much how the game began back on Bainbridge Island, Wash., in the 1960s.Pickleball? Why not read a book, walk the dog, take a nap or just go ahead and play Ping-Pong?I had intentionally and assiduously avoided it until last week.Then pickleball sucked me in.Pickleball players of varying skills and ages pack the courts at Green Lake Park in Seattle.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesI went down to one of the game’s new meccas in my hometown, Seattle, a sliver of courts in the verdant park that wraps around the aptly named Green Lake. To describe it with better accuracy, these are three tennis courts that have been more or less commandeered by pickleball.It’s a turf war that’s become common nationwide in recent years as the pandemic drove demand for both sports. Pickleballers are clamoring for respect, more resources and courts, creating a sensitive balancing act for parks and recreation departments around the country.I naturally landed on one side of the battle. Way back when — read, during the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Clinton — I was one of the better players in the Pacific Northwest and often the best for my age division in Seattle. From ages 14 to 30, I won the city championships a half dozen times, sometimes playing matches or warming up on the three Green Lake courts.On my pilgrimage to the transformed (pickled?) venue, I quickly found a shepherd. “So, do you want to give it a try?” asked Peter Seitel, a former owner and manager of a computer-engineering firm who is now known as the mayor of these courts. He’s an organizer, champion of pickleball and one of the locals trying to get the city to pay more heed to the sport.I played my first games with Seitel, 68, as he taught me the rules and strategies. And I was hardly the only newbie greeted with open arms that day. Everywhere I looked, experienced players were guiding rookies with welcoming patience. The scene felt open and democratic compared with my experience with tennis, in which you often must prove you’ve got game before you can really be accepted.There were intense games and relaxed ones. A 60-year-old woman held her own against a muscular 20-something. A fourth grader was just learning the ropes, moving from court to court to face off against people he’d never met. The racial and age diversity of the people playing pickleball felt refreshingly cool for a part of the city with a mostly white population and teeming with youthful tech workers.Anita Gulrajani, a Green Lake pickleball regular, serving the ball.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesIf you can play Ping-Pong and run eight feet in any direction, you’ll be rallying within a single day.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesPickleball’s cozy community partly owes to the low barrier to entry. The time between learning the game and having fun with it is almost negligible. If you can play Ping-Pong and run eight feet in any direction, you’ll be rallying within a single day. Seitel and I played a few games, and I immediately held my own. It was competitive but not so rigorous that I couldn’t wear my straw, wide-brimmed hat while playing. Don that hat during a tennis match and it would have fallen off during every other serve and sprint across the court.Still, there were nuances. The scoring and positioning for instance. I’m used to hitting 120-mile-per-hour tennis aces, but the pickleball serve is a floppy underhand shot that barely leads to an advantage. During rallies, that pesky little plastic ball seems to have a mind of its own. One of the game’s biggest weapons is a soft knuckler that barely clears the net and is known as the dink. Not exactly my style.Nicole Bideganeta urged me on. If Seitel is the mayor of the Green Lake courts, Bideganeta is the chief of staff. She can also talk a lot of smack to opponents and back it up so, of course, I wanted her as my partner.Bideganeta, 28, might have regretted saying yes.In our second game, I got tired of dinking around. “I’m gonna poach, just like in tennis, and take this thing over!” I told myself.This was not the smartest move. Or the safest.When a floater came, I dashed for it, coiled, swung — and my racket collided with Bideganeta’s elbow, right on the funny bone. “Ouch!” She winced in pain. I felt embarrassed, like a bull in one of those ever-shrinking tennis-racket stores.Kurt Streeter, left, chatted with Nicole Bideganeta as she iced her elbow. With its small court and swinging paddles, pickleball can be a little dangerous.Lindsey Wasson for The New York TimesThe score was tied, but we had to end that game. I got my partner some ice and a mango popsicle to soothe her pain.Lesson learned. With its small court and swinging paddles, pickleball can be a little dangerous.No sweat, Bideganeta assured me. “We’re going to get back out there. You’re not done yet!”And sure enough, we returned, only this time with more focus. I didn’t want to let her down — dink, dink, curveball, smash to the feet. I was getting into it now.Thwack! — that paddle-against-plastic sound I had thought was so obnoxious? Well, in the heat of the moment, I didn’t even notice it. What I did notice was that I couldn’t stop smiling as I played. And I saw way more smiles and joy all around me than when I’m playing tennis, where intensity and furrowed brows dominate.We won that game, 11-0, which I learned is known as “a pickle” and isn’t easy at any level. “You’re just getting started,” my new partner said. Several other stalwarts surrounded us, urging me on.I’m not giving up tennis. No way. A good match is like a flowing waltz — and a much more demanding workout. But I’m ready to make some room for pickleball in my life.Just don’t tell my tennis friends.Luca Campese, 9, put down a paddle to reserve a spot in line for the next available court.Lindsey Wasson for The New York Times More

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      Serena Williams Begins the Not-Too-Long Goodbye

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      Williams, who expects to retire after the U.S. Open, played what was likely her last match in Canada on Wednesday. It ended with a loss, and tears.As a champion who says she hates goodbyes, Serena Williams could have made her exit from tennis in other ways.In a news release or Instagram post; by post-match interview or by simply walking away and staying away without formalizing her farewell.Instead, by making it plain this week that the end is very near, Williams has given herself and her vast public some runway to do the job just right, an extended — but not too extended — opportunity to do justice to Williams’s long and phenomenal career.“Savor every match,” said Tracy Austin, the former No. 1 turned television analyst.The first chance came in Toronto on a warm Wednesday night in a packed stadium against a tough and experienced opponent, Belinda Bencic, whose flowing, counterpunching game unsurprisingly proved too much for the 40-year-old Williams.Bencic closed out the victory, 6-2, 6-4, in the second round of the National Bank Open, but it was, as Bencic rightly pointed out, not really about the result on Wednesday. It was about the occasion.Though on-court interviews are usually the realm of the winner, Bencic quickly and elegantly stepped aside after her victory and ceded the stage and the microphone to Williams.“It was a lot of emotions,” Williams said as the tears started to come. “Obviously I love playing here, and I’ve always loved playing here. I wish I could have played better, but Belinda played so well today. But just, yeah, it’s been a pretty interesting 24 hours.”It has been above all, a fascinating 27 years since Williams first played in Canada. She launched her pro career in 1995 at the Bell Challenge, a now-defunct tournament in Quebec City, making that debut at age 14 in part to avoid becoming subject to age restrictions that the women’s tour was soon to impose.She lost in the first round of qualifying to the American Annie Miller, then ranked 149th in the world, but that was hardly foreshadowing. Williams has gone on to become the greatest women’s player of the 21st century and join the very short list of the most successful players of all time alongside Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Margaret Court.Tickets for the second-round match sold out in the hours following Serena Williams’s retirement announcement in Vogue.Vaughn Ridley/Getty ImagesWilliams has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, one short of Court’s record, and has won 50 other tour singles titles, including three at the Canadian Open in 2001, 2011 and 2013.There would be no fourth title in Canada, but that was no impediment to her generating plenty of excitement and emotion as she played her last professional match there.Williams announced her impending retirement — she intends to play through the U.S. Open — in a poignant first-person essay in Vogue that was published on Tuesday. That was the day after she won her first singles match in more than a year in the opening round in Toronto, defeating Nuria Parrizas-Diaz of Spain.The buzz built quickly ahead of Williams’s second-round duel with Bencic.Karl Hale, the tournament director at the National Bank Open since 2006, said that after the retirement news broke, the tournament sold more tickets for the Williams-Bencic showdown than it had for any of its men’s matches, notable for a tournament that began in 1881, making it almost as old as Canada itself. (Canada was founded in 1867, and the women’s tournament started in 1892.)“In the players’ lounge, you heard the chatter. It’s the first time I’ve seen so many players watch a practice,” Hale said of Williams’s practice on Tuesday. “She practiced at 9 a.m., and everybody was out there watching her.”On Wednesday night, the stadium north of downtown packed in 12,500 fans, and the tournament would set up an outdoor viewing area — for the first time — for another 5,000. Williams’s husband, Alexis Ohanian, and their daughter, Olympia, 4, watched from the stands.Alexis Ohanian, Williams’s husband, and their daughter, Olympia.Vaughn Ridley/Getty ImagesAhead of Williams’s taking the court — which she did with a bowed head and a serious expression — a video with greetings from the retired champion Billie Jean King and some rising stars on the tour, Coco Gauff, Leylah Fernandez and Bianca Andreescu, played for the crowd. Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian who was one of the very greatest players in hockey history, had a closing message for his counterpart.“Serena Williams, Willie O’Ree in hockey, Jackie Robinson in baseball,” Gretzky said. “They changed everything. They changed the culture of sports, and what Serena did for boys and girls throughout the world is spectacular. Serena, congratulations on a wonderful career.”The crowd wanted Williams to win, and throughout the match it often felt as if everyone was trying to will her to victory. The hoopla — and often-disruptive shouts from the stands — could easily have rattled a lesser, more inexperienced player, but Bencic, a 25-year-old Swiss star, handled the moment with aplomb. She is at her best on hardcourts with her finely tuned game and exquisite timing, on display again as she redirected Williams’s still-formidable power with half volleys from the baseline and forecourt. Bencic won the Olympic gold medal in singles last year in Tokyo, and back in 2015 she upset Williams in Toronto in the semifinals on her way to winning the women’s singles title at age 18.Williams had won their three previous matches. Although both women have had to contend with injuries in recent years, much has changed since Williams defeated Bencic in three sets in the Hopman Cup team event in 2019.While Bencic has re-established herself as a consistent threat and is ranked No. 12, Williams, ranked 407th, has played comparatively little and missed a year of action before returning for Wimbledon in July, where she lost in the first round to Harmony Tan, an unseeded Frenchwoman.Wednesday’s match was only Williams’s third singles match in the last 14 months. She is, understandably, still finding her range and is no longer able to move to the corners or find the lines on the run as she did in her prime. But when in position, she still has the power and ball-striking skills to do considerable damage, and she occasionally clicked into higher gears against Bencic without summoning the consistency to genuinely threaten her opponent.The floor, if not the match, was soon hers, however.“It’s just been so memorable,” Williams said, her voice cracking, as she addressed the sellout crowd. “Like I said in my article, I’m terrible at goodbyes, but goodbye — .”She waited a beat and then added, “Toronto.”Other emotional adieus await: at the Western & Southern Open next week in the Cincinnati suburbs and then, body and spirit willing, at the U.S. Open in New York that begins Aug. 29.“These are all building blocks for New York,” said her new coach, Eric Hechtman. “And put it this way, she’s not just showing up as a farewell tour. Today, we could see stretches of level of play that are championship level, and I truly believe that she has got that gear in her, and I know she believes it, too.”Shawna Richer More

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      Serena Williams Loses in First Match Since Saying She Will Retire

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      Williams’s second-round match on Wednesday at the National Bank Open was her last in Canada, and everyone wanted in on it, even Wayne Gretzky.TORONTO — Karl Hale has been the tournament director at the National Bank Open since 2006 and had never seen anything like the 24 hours after Serena Williams said she was winding down her professional tennis career.“We heard it yesterday morning, and immediately ticket sales picked up,” Hale said. “In the players’ lounge, you heard the chatter. It’s the first time I’ve seen so many players watch a practice. She practiced at 9 a.m., and everybody was out there watching her.”Williams, who played a second-round match against Belinda Bencic of Switzerland on Wednesday night, stepped onto the court with everyone aware she could be competing for the last time in front of Canadian tennis fans at this tournament.“But I hope not,” said Hale, who has known Serena and her sister Venus for more than 20 years since they began coming to Toronto.But it was, as the 12th-ranked Bencic won in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4.

      National Bank Open — Women’s Second RoundFinal12 Belinda Bencic66 Serena Williams24 .spt-live-blog-width { max-width: 600px; margin: auto; } .spt-grid-item { font-family: nyt-franklin,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; padding: 5px 0; width: 100%; border: none; } table.spt-scoreboard { font-family: nyt-franklin,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: 300; font-size: 15px; border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; } tr.spt-scoreboard { border-top: 1px solid #ddd; } tr.spt-scoreboard:last-of-type { border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; } td.spt-scoreboard { padding: 13px 0 12px; text-align: left; /* vertical-align: top; */ } .spt-black { color: #121212; } .spt-athleteName { word-wrap: break-word; word-break: break-word; hyphens: auto; margin: 0 !important; } .spt-score { padding: 13px 0 12px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; text-align: center; width: 30px; } .win { font-weight: 700; } .spt-score sup { position: absolute; top: 7px; text-indent: 2px; font-size: 12.5px; } .spt-winner-mark { width: 1em; margin-left: 5px; height: 1em; display: none; } .spt-winner-mark.win { display: block; } .spt-container { display: flex; align-items: center; } .spt-medal-wrapper { display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; } .serve { display: inline-block; border-radius: 10px; width: 10px; height: 10px; background-color: #ffe532; margin-left: 5px; } .spt-seed { font-size: 12.5px; color: #666; font-weight: 300; width: 21px; text-align: right; display: inline-block; } .spt-flag { transform: scale(.9); margin-top: 1px; margin-bottom: -1px; } .spt-meta { margin-bottom: 5px; } div.spt-title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-weight: 700; } div.spt-status { font-weight: 400; } @media (min-width: 600px) { .spt-grid-item { /*text-align: center;*/ } .spt-score { width: 50px; } .spt-meta { text-align: center; margin-bottom: 10px; } } The stadium north of downtown packed in 12,500 fans, and the tournament set up an outdoor viewing area — for the first time — for another 5,000.Ahead of Serena Williams’s taking the court — which she did with a bowed head and a serious expression — a video with greetings from the retired champion Billie Jean King and some rising stars on the tour, Coco Gauff, Leylah Fernandez and Bianca Andreescu, played for the crowd. Wayne Gretzky, the greatest player in hockey history, had a message for the greatest player in women’s tennis.“Serena Williams, Willie O’Ree in hockey, Jackie Robinson in baseball,” Gretzky said. “They changed everything. They changed the culture of sports and what Serena did for boys and girls throughout the world is spectacular. Serena, congratulations on a wonderful career.”Williams’s farewell tour is underway, kicked off by an as-told-to Vogue cover story for the September issue that was published online Tuesday. Williams wrote that she planned to retire from tennis at some point after at least playing in the U.S. Open, which begins Aug. 29 in New York.“I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me,” including working with her venture-capital firm and growing her family, she said.“I’m gonna relish these next few weeks,” Williams wrote on Instagram.The National Bank Open is the lone Canadian stop for the WTA and ATP tours each August, splitting the men’s and women’s events between Toronto and Montreal and alternating the cities each year. Suddenly, Williams’s match on Wednesday night in Toronto became the hottest ticket in sports.Hale said that after the retirement news broke, the tournament sold more tickets for the Williams-Bencic showdown than it had for any of its men’s matches, notable for a tournament that began in 1881, making it almost as old as Canada itself. (Canada was founded in 1867, and the women’s tournament started in 1892.)The round-of-32 match was a bigger draw than the entire 2017 women’s tournament, he said.Hale was buried in interview requests for Williams — the answer has been “no” — and requests for tickets from athletes, musicians and actors like Adam Sandler currently shooting movies in the city — the answer has been “yes,” to a point.“It’s going to be a really emotional night for her,” he said.The stadium hosted 12,500 fans, and 5,000 more gathered in an outdoor viewing area.Cole Burston/ReutersIt was. Williams, with wet eyes, thanked the crowd for its support over 22 years. “I was so happy to be here today,” she said.Fans, who gave Williams two standing ovations before the match began, and a lengthy one afterward, held signs that read: “Serena Williams for Prime Minister,” “Canada Loves Serena,” “Queen,” and simply, “Thank you Serena.”“Tonight was about her,” Bencic said in her on-court interview.Hale had a four-hour dinner at Harbour 60, a pricey Toronto steakhouse, with Serena and Venus Williams on Saturday night.“She didn’t tell me the Vogue piece was coming, but she spoke that retirement was imminent,” he said. “All of the signs were definitely pointing to a U.S. Open retirement. She’s really ready to move forward with the next chapter of her new life. She’s excited, she’s not sad, but she’s going to be very, very emotional tonight. I don’t think it’s hit her yet.”She is plainly having fun in Toronto. Over the weekend before the tournament began, she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, and their daughter, Olympia, went to Medieval Times, the theater show with crowns and swords. Then on Monday, she won in straight-sets over Nuria Parrizas-Diaz of Spain, her first singles victory in more than a year. “I forgot what it felt like,” she said.It was the first time Olympia had sat through a full match, and she low-fived her mother — a go-to move when you’re 4 — after her win. “I was super excited,” Williams said. “It was good for her to have that memory. She’s never had it because I’ve always kept her away.”One of the most enduring images of this tournament — until Wednesday night — came after Williams was forced to exit the women’s singles final early in 2019 because of back spasms. Her opponent, Andreescu, approached the sideline and asked the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion if she could give her a hug.Andreescu, who went on to beat Williams in the 2019 U.S. Open final, recalled her emotional postmatch bonding with Williams after her straight-sets win over Daria Kasatkina of Russia on Tuesday night.“In Toronto, we had a nice conversation going, and at the U.S. Open she said some very kind things to me in the locker room,” Andreescu said. She added that she felt “grateful to have gotten the chance to play her and connect with her in some way. Maybe I’ll get one more.”Williams and Bianca Andreescu after Andreescu won the women’s singles final at the 2019 U.S. Open.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAs Williams closes out her career, a scarcity mind-set is setting in. Only a handful of tickets for Wednesday’s match were listed with resellers, suggesting that Williams’s final Canadian match was not for sale at any price.Williams’s fellow players at the tournament were also afraid they will miss out. Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1, Gauff, Emma Raducanu and the Canadians Fernandez, Rebecca Marino and Carol Zhao have never played against Williams and wistfully said they hoped to share the court with her before it was too late.The spotlight and the crowd will continue to follow Williams from Canada to Ohio, and on to New York, where she won her first Grand Slam singles title in 1999 as a 17-year-old.Marino said that it was fitting that Williams would at least play once more at the U.S. Open and that it would make for a perfect goodbye to the sport. “That’s, I think, the place to do it,” she said. More

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      Serena Williams Will Retire Tennis Just as She Played — on Her Own Terms

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      Williams brought her own distinctive flair to tennis, challenging norms that governed fashion, power, decorum, race and gender. By being herself, Williams’s reach far exceeded the game.She is a symbol. A persona. An athlete who has gone far beyond the footsteps of her trailblazing sister and came to rule a cloistered, mostly white sport. She refuses to stop there.Announcing her plans to retire from tennis, Serena Williams said on Tuesday that she will focus her life far beyond sports, instead prioritizing being a mother, a fashion maker, a venture capitalist and much more. She will design her future as she sees fit.That’s oh-so-Serena.She has always done it her way, always operated on her own terms. It has made her special, uniquely skilled and beloved — and has sometimes drawn criticism. It has helped her become one of the greatest athletes to ever grace us — a Black woman who grew from the humblest of American beginnings into a star whose magnetic pull reaches far beyond the bounds of sport.Her announcement, in a Vogue magazine cover story released Tuesday, that she would be leaving tennis after playing the U.S. Open later this month, befitted the transcendent figure she has become.It is easy to forget that her championship journey, which came to include 23 Grand Slam singles titles, just shy of the record of 24 set by Margaret Court, began with a win at the U.S. Open in 1999. At 17 years old, Serena became the first Black player since Arthur Ashe in 1975 to win a Grand Slam singles title and the first Black woman to emerge victorious in a slam since Althea Gibson in 1958.Williams won her first of 23 Grand Slam titles by defeating Martina Hingis at the 1999 U.S. Open.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWilliams became the personification of athletic greatness and — for at least two decades — carried the aspirations of gender and racial equity.Along the way, she showed the world the incredible power of breaking boundaries and obliterating norms. The Vogue article, a first-person account, feels tellingly symbolic, even if it was long expected, given Williams’s struggles competing in recent years. She did not break the news on her Instagram account, on ESPN, or in a post-match news conference. No, Williams does what she wants, when she wants, in the way she wants.Of course she has Anna Wintour, Vogue’s tennis-loving editor, on speed dial. Of course she would announce that she is making a break from tennis through one of the world’s premier fashion magazines.Serena Williams has never let tennis define her.With the retirement news, our memories of her come in waves. Oh, how she loved to entertain and put on a show. Isn’t that what drew us in? She had a knack, a hunger, a desire that demanded to be seen. Watching her stride upon a Grand Slam center court for a first-round match or a pressurized final was entertainment at its best. She drew multitudes to the moment, bringing along those who would never otherwise watch a tennis match.Those new fans, and many tried-and-true tennis lovers who had watched the game for years, stood behind her when she struggled or found herself enveloped in disputes over the fierce way she sometimes punctured norms of on-court decorum.Who can forget the 2018 U.S. Open, when she heatedly clashed with the chair umpire who docked her first a point and then an entire game toward the end of a loss to Naomi Osaka? The full spectrum of her career in tennis — the dozens of heart-racing wins and the occasionally torturous upsets — weaves into the tapestry that is Serena Williams.Williams confronting chair umpire Carlos Ramos during her U.S. Open final loss to Naomi Osaka in 2018.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesRace can never be discounted when we speak of Serena, or of Venus Williams, the older sister who started it all. Their Blackness and their physical stature, cast against a tennis world where only a few shared a similar look, felt showstopping.Ashe and Gibson were fine players who were occasionally great. Yannick Noah, the mixed-race son of a Black Cameroonian father and white mother, won the French Open in 1983. A smattering of other Black players, male and female, made brief but important marks on tennis.Nobody strode atop the game or dominated it with the pounding consistency of the Williams sisters.Serena added a bold defiance to the undertaking, as predicted with certitude by their father, Richard Williams, who even when Venus was splashing first upon the tennis scene said it would be Serena who would become the best in tennis history.Can you imagine Jimmy Evert, Chris Evert’s father, coach, and a member of the tennis establishment, saying the same about his daughter as she burst upon the scene in the early 1970s?Nothing Serena Williams ever did was confined by tradition. She defied the status quo and played with a mix of consistent, poleaxing power and touch at the net, energized by a serve for the ages and a boxer’s steely will.Only the elite of the elite can change the way their sport is played. Think of Stephen Curry’s influence over modern basketball and its fixation with outside shooting. Or Tiger Woods’s revolutionary impact on golf. Add Williams to the mix.Williams defied the status quo and played with a mix of consistent, poleaxing power and touch at the net, energized by a serve for the ages and a boxer’s steely will.Calla Kessler/The New York TimesOthers played a power game before her — Jennifer Capriati, for example — just as there were other 3-point shooters before Curry. Williams took the game to new heights. She went into that 1999 U.S. Open final against Martina Hingis, who had catapulted to the top of the rankings by playing with finesse and exploiting every angle as prescribed by the old guard. After Williams’s power, speed and grit dispatched Hingis, 6-3, 7-6, tennis would never be the same.Think of not only Williams’s game but her style — how she stepped beyond the old norms of fashion and appearance codified in tennis since the Victorian era.Williams showed up as her full self, her hair braided or beaded or sometimes colored blond. On the court, she wore outfits of every color: blue, red, pink, black, tan, you name it. She donned studs, sequins and boots disguised as tennis shoes — or was it the other way around?She wore clothing that flowed and swung, or that proudly showed her stomach and strong shoulders. She made the full-body catsuit a thing at the U.S. Open of 2002 and the talk of Paris at the French Open of 2018.“I feel like a warrior in it, a warrior princess,” Williams told reporters at the French Open, as she referred to the movie “Black Panther.”“It’s kind of my way to be a superhero.”Sure, noting her fashion might seem superficial and superfluous. But not in this context. Black women’s bodies and fashion are often harshly criticized in ways that white women don’t usually experience. Moreover, tennis is one of those games bound by a tradition of exclusion and uniformity. Williams blew all of that up.Williams in her catsuit at the 2018 French Open.Matthew Stockman/Getty ImagesHere’s another way she leaped beyond old bounds. Recall that Williams won the 2017 Australian Open while she was two months pregnant. Then remember that she nearly died in labor. Then recall her comeback after giving birth to Alexis Olympia. She would make four more major championship finals.She lost all of them, true, and none were close matches. But Williams was past her best years, with a child at her side and the business world beckoning. And her comeback from pregnancy helped lead to an important rule change in women’s professional tennis — allowing players to enter tournaments based on their pre-pregnancy rankings for up to three years after giving birth.Now, Williams plans to end this phase of her life after her last match at the U.S. Open, whether it’s a first-round loss or yet another against-all-odds denouement: winning it all, at 40, after barely stepping on the tour over the past year.She won’t walk away with ease. She made that clear as she announced what she termed to be her “evolution,” which will include trying to have another child. Her attempts, she said, were at odds with continuing her tennis career, a fact she noted that male professional athletes do not have to contend with.This looks like the final stage of her career, but we should never be surprised by Williams. I wouldn’t be shocked if perhaps with a second child or more in tow, she pops up on the professional tour again, even for just one more bite of the sports limelight.If Serena Williams wants to, she’ll do it. This much we know. More

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      Charts Show Serena Williams’s Storied Career in Tennis

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      Serena Williams has signaled that the U.S. Open that begins later this month could be the end of her storied career. She won her first Grand Slam — the U.S. Open — in 1999, when she was 17 years old, beating the top-seeded Martina Hingis. She went on to become the sport’s most dominant force […] More

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      Serena Williams Says She Will Retire From Tennis Sometime After U.S. Open

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      The world first came to know Serena Williams as a 17-year-old with beaded braids, overwhelming power and precocious intelligence and poise when she stunned her sport by winning the first of her 23 Grand Slam singles titles at the 1999 U.S. Open.So began a journey that, with plenty of help from her sister Venus and her trailblazing parents, changed the game, transcended tennis and turned Williams into a beacon of fashion, entertainment and business, shifting the way people inside and outside of sports viewed female athletes.On Tuesday, Williams set the stage for the tennis part of that journey to conclude at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and the U.S. Open, where it began so many championships, battles, fist pumps and screams of “Come on!” ago.In a first-person article in the famed September issue of Vogue, published online on Tuesday, Williams said that she planned to retire from the sport after playing in the U.S. Open, which begins later this month, for the 21st time. And as she has for more than two decades, Williams made the announcement with her own unique twist, stating in the as-told-to cover story that she has “never liked the word retirement,” and preferred the word “evolution” to describe her next steps.“I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me,” including working with her venture capital firm and growing her family, she said.Williams was not explicit about when she might stop playing, but she hinted on Instagram that the U.S. Open could be her last tournament while leaving the door ever-so-slightly open to continue, or to come back, as players who retire often do. “The countdown has begun,” she said, adding, “I’m gonna relish these next few weeks.”Williams is playing this week at a U.S. Open tuneup tournament in Toronto and is scheduled to play in Cincinnati during the next week.Asked Monday after her straight-sets win over Nuria Parrizas-Diaz of Spain what motivated her now, Williams said “the light at the end of the tunnel.”“Lately that’s been it for me,” she added. “I can’t wait to get to that light.”Though some in tennis are skeptical that Williams will step away imminently, exiting the stage this year at the U.S. Open would be a fitting end to her storied career. Williams has won the singles title there six times, beginning in 1999, when she leapfrogged her older sister Venus to claim the family’s first Grand Slam championship 23 years ago, a number that matches her career Grand Slam tally. The tournament has also been the site of some of Williams’s lowest moments, including confrontations with umpires and tournament officials in the semifinals in 2009 and the finals in 2018.Williams has won each of the Grand Slam tournaments at least three times.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The NYT; Chang W. Lee/NYT; David Vincent/AP; Daniel Berehulak/Getty“It feels like the right exclamation point, the right ending,” said Pam Shriver, the former player and tennis commentator who was one of the great doubles champions of the 1980s. “It doesn’t matter her result.”Williams’s tennis future has been in doubt since she was forced to retire minutes into her first-round match at Wimbledon last year after she tore her hamstring.The injury sidelined her for nearly a year. In fact, Shriver and others thought it was likely that Williams might never officially retire but would instead continue the existence that she assumed for months following her teary Wimbledon exit.This spring though, Williams said she had the urge to play competitively again. In the Vogue story, she stated that Tiger Woods persuaded her to commit to training hard for two weeks and see what transpired. She did not immediately take his advice but eventually began hitting and signed up for the doubles competition at a grass court tournament ahead of Wimbledon .At Wimbledon, she played a spirited but inconsistent three-hour, first-round match, losing to Harmony Tan of France, 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (7). She showed flashes of the power and touch that had once made her nearly unbeatable, but lacked the fitness and match toughness that comes from being a regular on the WTA Tour.Williams wrote that she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, planned to have another child, though she lamented the choice between another child and her tennis career. She expressing envy that some male athletes, like the 45-year-old N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady, could continue to compete while their female spouses had children.“I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete,” she said. “I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out.”Williams won her last Grand Slam tournament title while she was pregnant during the Australian Open in 2017.Williams has won nearly $100 million in prize money, but her tennis career has hardly prevented her from pursuing her other interests. She has frequently helped design her tennis outfits. She was an executive producer of “King Richard,” the Oscar-winning film about her family that focused on how her father took two girls from Compton, Calif., to the pinnacle of sports. In recent years, she has become a venture capitalist, creating Serena Ventures, which invests in early stage ideas and companies, many in technology and run by women.Williams at the Vanity Fair party at the Oscars. “King Richard” was nominated for six Academy Awards.Hunter Abrams for The New York TimesOn the tennis court, for the moment, Williams remains second to Margaret Court of Australia in Grand Slam singles championships, a record she had many chances to tie and then surpass in 2018 and 2019 when she lost four Grand Slam finals without winning a set. However, because many of Court’s wins predate the modern era of professional tennis, that shortcoming is unlikely to tarnish Williams’s legacy as the greatest female tennis player, one of the greatest players, and one of the best athletes in any sport.“When Serena steps away from tennis, she will leave as the sport’s greatest player,” said Billie Jean King, the champion and pioneer of sports. “After a career that has inspired a new generation of players and fans, she will forever be known as a champion who won on the court and raised the global profile of the sport off it.”Beyond all the championships — Williams has won 73 singles titles, 23 in doubles, two in mixed doubles and has played on four Olympic teams, winning four gold medals — her impact on how the world perceives female athletes and inspiring the younger Black girls who now lead American women’s tennis may be her greatest legacies.With a unique mix of power, strength, speed, touch and the tennis intelligence that produced her dominance, Williams made irrelevant the distinction between great male and female tennis players as no woman had done. Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the great male tennis players of the 21st century — and the greatest the men’s game has ever produced — spoke of Williams as one of them.Last year at the U.S. Open, as the pressure mounted on Djokovic to win a rare calendar year Grand Slam, he said only Williams could understand what he was going through.Williams came to the U.S. Open in 2015 having won the year’s first three Grand Slam singles titles but lost to the unseeded Roberta Vinci of Italy in the semifinals. Winning the title that year would have given her a fifth consecutive Grand Slam singles championship, since she had already won four consecutive Grand Slam singles titles for the second time, a feat now known as the “Serena Slam.”Williams signing autographs after a workout at the U.S. Open in 2015.Earl Wilson/The New York TimesNone of this has surprised Rick Macci, the famed professional coach who three decades ago evaluated Serena and Venus Williams playing in a rundown park in Compton when Black girls, especially poor ones, rarely pursued tennis. At first Macci was not impressed, but when the girls started playing points everything changed.“There was a rage inside these two little kids once we kept score,” Macci said in an interview Tuesday. “They ran so fast they almost fell down. I took a huge chance because of what I thought I saw on the inside, and I haven’t seen it since.”Coco Gauff, the rising 18-year-old who is the latest Black American player to bear the burden of being labeled “the next Serena,” said Williams was “the reason why I play tennis,” after her win Tuesday in Toronto.“I saw somebody who looked like me dominating the game,” Gauff, ranked 11th in the world, “It made me believe that I could dominate, too.” More