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    ‘Break Point’ Just Might Be the Best Way to Watch Tennis

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    The docuseries feels more like a prestige psychodrama — which gets the highs and lows of the pro circuit right.In the sixth episode of the Netflix docuseries “Break Point,” Ajla Tomljanovic, a journeywoman tennis player who has spent much of the last decade in the Top 100 of the world rankings, is shown splayed across an exercise mat in a drab training room after reaching the 2022 Wimbledon quarterfinals. Her father, Ratko, stretches out her hamstrings. She receives a congratulatory phone call from her sister and another from her idol-turned-mentor, the 18-time major champion Chris Evert, before Ratko announces that it’s time for the dreaded ice bath. “By the way,” Tomljanovic says at one point, “do we have a room?” Shortly after his daughter sealed her spot in the final eight of the world’s pre-eminent tennis tournament, Ratko was seen on booking.com, extending their stay in London.This is not the stuff of your typical sports documentary, but it is the life of a professional tennis player. Circumnavigating the globe for much of the year with only a small circle of coaches, physiotherapists and perhaps a parent, they shoulder alone the bureaucratic irritations that, in other elite sports, might be outsourced to agents and managers. If at some tournaments they surprise even themselves by outlasting their hotel accommodations, most events will only harden them to the standard torments of the circuit, which reminds them weekly of their place in the pecking order. As Taylor Fritz, now the top-ranked American men’s player, remarks in one “Break Point” episode, “It’s tough to be happy in tennis, because every single week everyone loses but one person.” This is a sobering audit, coming from a player who wins considerably more than his approximately 2,000 peers on the tour.“Break Point,” executive-produced by Paul Martin and the Oscar-winning filmmaker James Gay-Rees, arrived this year as a gift to tennis fans, for whom splashy, well-produced and readily accessible documentaries about the sport have been hard to come by. Tennis, today, finds itself in the crepuscular light of an era when at least five different players — the Williams sisters, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic — have surely deserved mini-series of their own. But the sport has never enjoyed its own “All or Nothing,” the all-access Amazon program that follows a different professional sports team each season, or the event-television status accorded to “The Last Dance,” the Netflix docuseries about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, with its luxury suite of talking heads: Nas, Isiah Thomas, “former Chicago resident” Barack Obama. Perhaps this is because the narrative tropes of the genre tend toward triumphs and Gatorade showers, while the procedural and psychological realities of professional tennis lie elsewhere. The 10 episodes of “Break Point” render tennis unromantically: This is the rare sports doc whose primary subject is loss.In Andre Agassi’s memorably frank memoir, “Open,” he describes the tennis calendar with subtle poetry, detailing “how we start the year on the other side of the world, at the Australian Open, and then just chase the sun.” This itinerary more or less dictates the structure of “Break Point,” which opens at the year’s first Grand Slam and closes at the year-end championships in November. At each tournament, the players it spotlights post impressive results — and then, typically, they lose, thwarted sometimes by the sport’s stubborn luminaries but more often by bouts of nerves or exhaustion. They find comfort where they can, juggling a soccer ball or lying back with a self-made R.&B. track in a hotel room. But many tears are shed, after which they redouble their commitments to work harder, be smarter, get hungrier. “You have to be cold to build a champion mind-set,” says the Greek player Stefanos Tsitsipas.‘It’s tough to be happy in tennis.’Those who watched Wimbledon this month might find, in all this, an instructive companion piece to live tennis. “Break Point” is frustratingly short on actual game play, shaving matches down to their rudiments in a way that understates the freakish tactical discipline required of players; viewers will not, for example, come away with any greater understanding of point construction than they will from having watched Djokovic pull his opponents out wide with progressively heavier forehands, only to wrong-foot them with a backhand up the line. They will, however, come to understand how intensely demoralizing it must be to stand across the net from him. In an episode following last year’s Wimbledon, we watch the talented but irascible Nick Kyrgios, as close as tennis has to its own Dennis Rodman, play Djokovic in the final. He gets off to a hot start and then, like so many before him, begins to wilt. “He’s calmer; you can’t rush him,” he says of Djokovic, in a voice-over the series aptly sets against footage of an exasperated Kyrgios admonishing the umpire, the crowd, even friends and family in his own box. These are athletes we’re accustomed to seeing at their steeliest or their most combustible; the matches in “Break Point” may be fresh in the memory of most tennis fans, but the series benefits greatly from its subjects’ clearer-headed reflections.For all its pretensions to realism, “Break Point” is a shrewd, and perhaps doomed, attempt to fill the sport’s impending power vacuum. Kyrgios and Tsitsipas are among a handful of strivers it positions as the sport’s new stars, along with others like Casper Ruud, Ons Jabeur and Aryna Sabalenka. All, naturally, subjected themselves to Netflix’s cameras. This kind of access is increasingly crucial to sports documentaries, a fact that often results in work that’s unduly deferential to its subjects, as with “The Last Dance” and Michael Jordan.Tennis, though, runs counter to this mandate. It is perhaps the sport most conducive to solipsism. Singles players perform alone. On-court coaching is generally prohibited, so there are no rousing speeches to inspire unlikely comebacks. The game’s essential psychodrama takes place within the mind — often in the 25 seconds allotted between points, or in the split seconds during which one must decide whether to go cross-court or down the line, to flatten the ball or welter it with spin. I can remember, as a junior-tennis also-ran, my coaches saying that once my eyes wandered to my opponent across the net, they knew I would lose. This might explain why tennis players so often resort to their index of obsessive tics, like hiking up their socks or adjusting their racket strings just so.By the season’s end, we meet Tomljanovic again at the U.S. Open, where she earned the awkward distinction of sending Serena Williams into retirement. At the time, ESPN’s broadcast of the match yielded nearly five million viewers, making it the most-watched tennis telecast in the network’s history. This was Serena’s swan song, but “Break Point” depicts it from the perspective of our reluctant victor. Between the second and third sets, Tomljanovic shields her face with a sweat towel, as if to quiet the sound of 24,000 spectators rooting against her. In tennis, it seems, even winning can feel like a drag.After the match, we find Tomljanovic cooling down on a stationary bike. Ratko, who has emerged as the show’s sole source of comedic relief, comes up from behind, embracing his daughter with a joke about her beating the greatest player of all time. “But why do I feel so conflicted?” she asks. There is no Gatorade bath, no confetti. To win the tournament, she still has four more matches to go.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Netflix; Tim Clayton/Corbis, via Getty ImagesJake Nevins is a writer in Brooklyn and the digital editor at Interview Magazine. He has written about books, sports and pop culture for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Nation. More

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

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

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      Serena Williams Willed Her Way to a Glorious Goodbye

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

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

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

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