Williams, Serena

Of course Serena Williams is confident. She deserves to be. And her opponents know that her improving game and overwhelming crowd support make beating her in this U.S. Open all the more difficult.Serena Williams is almost 41. She did not play competitive tennis for nearly a year, and it showed — truly it showed — at Wimbledon, in Toronto and in Mason, Ohio, at the three tournaments where she made painfully brief appearances earlier this summer before arriving in New York for her farewell U.S. Open.She looked slow to react and slow on the run. She looked rusty, mistiming returns off second serves that she would once have punished.But that is all irrelevant now. Williams is relaunched, as she made clear by defeating Anett Kontaveit, the No. 2 player in the world, on Wednesday night.Williams is into the third round of what is very likely her final tournament: convincingly replaying her greatest hits — big-point aces, swing-volley winners, full-cut groundstrokes on the move — and quickly giving first-time opponents like Danka Kovinic and Kontaveit a true taste of what it is like to face the real Serena.With her 7-6 (4), 2-6, 6-2 victory over Kontaveit complete, Williams was asked on court by ESPN analyst Mary Joe Fernandez, “Are you surprising yourself with your level at the moment?”Williams looked at her for a little while and chuckled.It was the most telling answer of the evening, and no actual words were required even if Williams did tack on a few when the chuckling was done: “I’m just Serena you know,” she said.“She’s not coming here to be surprised by winning, otherwise she wouldn’t be here,” said her coach Eric Hechtman.This is not bravado. This is hard-earned confidence. The kind that comes with being raised by parents who made it clear that greatness lay ahead if the right choices and sacrifices were made. The kind that comes from measuring yourself against an uber-talented big sister named Venus from the moment you could pick up a racket on a court full of cracks in Compton, Calif. The kind that comes from winning 23 Grand Slam singles titles across nearly two decades against rivals from multiple tennis generations and despite all manner of setbacks, both professional and personal.Williams has good reason to believe that she can rise above, even in the twilight, because she has done it so often.Serena Williams’s Farewell to TennisThe U.S. Open could be the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Decades of Greatness: Over 27 years, Serena Williams dominated generation after generation of opponents and changed the way women’s tennis is played, winning 23 Grand Slam singles titles and cementing her reputation as the queen of comebacks.Is She the GOAT?: Proclaiming Williams the greatest women’s tennis player of all time is not a straightforward debate, our columnist writes.An Enduring Influence: From former and current players’ memories of a young Williams to the new fans she drew to tennis, Williams has left a lasting impression.Her Fashion: Since she turned professional in 1995, Williams has used her clothes as a statement of self and a weapon of change.“I would never, ever count Serena Williams out, and if you do, that would be your biggest mistake,” said Kathy Rinaldi, the captain of the United States King Cup team, who was watching on Wednesday.If you do count her out, as Williams has explained before, you are only going to help her.“Because she’s going to use that to prove you wrong,” Rinaldi said. “But she’s really enjoying this one. You can clearly see. It’s got to be really tough for her opponents: to face her and face the crowd.”It has been quite a team effort so far: Williams rolling back the years and five tiers of stands packed to the roof in sold-out Arthur Ashe Stadium with fans wholly committed, perhaps for the first time, to showing Williams nothing but love in a venue where she has generated ambivalence in the past with her outbursts and, at other times, with her dominance as she racked up six U.S. Open singles titles and made long runs at No. 1.But with Williams preparing, in her words, to “evolve away from tennis,” the U.S. Open crowd seems to have considered her body of work, enduring excellence and manifest love of the game and the battle and decided to go all in.“There’s no rush here,” Williams said with a grin, alluding to her impending evolution. “I’m loving this crowd. Oh, my goodness, it’s really fantastic. There’s still a little left in me. We’ll see.”Watching her lose 6-4, 6-0 last month to Emma Raducanu in the first round of the Western and Southern Open with tape on her left leg, it did seem reasonable to believe she might not be able to pull her game together in time.“She was a little banged up in Cincy,” Hechtman said. “She’s much better now and of course the crowd helps a lot, absolutely. At the end of the day, you play that many years and that many tournaments and win that many titles, you need the big stage to get you up for it.”There have been more standing ovations than at a national political convention, myriad shouts of support and, less sportingly but probably unavoidably, plenty of cheers for the opposition’s errors, including their missed serves.The latest sellout crowd on Wednesday night even booed a machine: disagreeing with the electronic line-calling system when one of Kontaveit’s winners was shown to have landed on the extreme outside edge of the sideline.In the second set, Kontaveit won one of the points of the tournament — a spectacular scrambling effort punctuated with a backhand winner — and was greeted with a golf clap.It will not get easier for her rivals. Ajla Tomljanovic, the tall and unseeded Australian who will face Williams in the third round on Friday night, was playing on Court 7 on Wednesday as Williams and Kontaveit dueled in the main stadium.“I was hearing the crowd and it like scared me, even though I was playing on a different court,” Tomljanovic said. “So I’m going to have to get my earplugs.”Tomljanovic said before even seeing the draw she had a vision that she would face Williams in New York and was only hoping that it was not going to be in the first round.So it has turned out, and Tomljanovic, like nearly all of Williams’s opponents in this latest comeback, has never played her before. Like Kontaveit, she wants the experience to make her career feel complete but is not sure how she will handle the moment (Kontaveit ended up in tears at her news conference).“I do this trick where I feel like the crowd is cheering for me as well,” she said. “I heard Novak Djokovic say that once about doing that in his matches. It’s a good one. It’s all about tricking your mind really, because you can’t control what the crowd does.”The British chair umpire, Alison Hughes, tried her best on Wednesday night and ended up saying “please” a great deal more than she succeeded in truly quieting the din.It is a moment that spurs thoughts of U.S. Opens past, particularly of Jimmy Connors’ rip-roaring run to the semifinals in 1991 as he was celebrating upset victories and his 39th birthday.“I just feel like I have had a big red X on my back since I won the U.S. Open in ’99,” Williams said. “It’s been there my entire career, because I won my first Grand Slam early in my career. But here it’s different. I feel like I’ve already won, figuratively, mentally.”A record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title still seems an unreasonable notion to many of us outsiders. She is 40, after all, and also playing doubles with Venus starting Thursday night, which could put extra strain on her injury-prone frame.Her ex-coach Patrick Mouratoglou counseled against doubles during majors and was proved correct in 2018 when in her first major after coming back from childbirth she played both events in the French Open and had to exit the singles draw with an injury.She and Venus have not played doubles at a major again until now, but it is understandable that they want this full-circle moment, and Hechtman said the plan is simply to eliminate a full practice session on the days Serena plays doubles.But her singles draw certainly gets one thinking about the possibility of a deeper run. There are no Grand Slam singles champions left in Serena’s quarter of the draw and only one left in her half: the unseeded Canadian Bianca Andreescu, who beat Williams in the 2019 U.S. Open final.But going all the way surely does not seem preposterous to Team Serena, and when Hechtman was asked very late on Wednesday night about the Connors precedent, he mulled it over and said he was leaning toward a different U.S. Open swan song: Pete Sampras, who won the 2002 men’s title in what turned out to be his final tournament.Dream on New York, and as the Williams family would surely endorse, dream big. More

Anett Kontaveit walked out of the players’ tunnel first, with barely a notice from the audience in Arthur Ashe Stadium, which was half full at the time. She made a small waving gesture, to no one in particular, and then went to her chair to prepare for her role as the villain in the biggest tennis spectacle of her life: the Serena Williams U.S. Open.As Williams made her own appearance underneath thunderous applause just moments later, Kontaveit never looked up or glanced over. She just continued to put on her wrist bands, drink water and select her first racket.She got up, walked onto the court first, knowing that for the vast majority of people in the building, she was there only to be the foil for the queen of tennis, there to lose.“It was her moment,” Kontaveit said. “I was trying to do my own thing. Of course, this is totally about her and I was very aware of that.”In the face of a tidal wave of support for Williams, Kontaveit played her role as the antihero as if fashioned from a script, playing well enough to raise the drama, but not well enough to win. Williams took the match, 7-6 (4), 2-6, 6-2, to advance to the third round, eliminating the worthy Estonian challenger and No. 2 seed from the U.S. Open.But Kontaveit did not go out without conjuring some of the best tennis from Williams in years. She made some brilliant shots and penetrating serves, but Williams was better on the biggest points, to the delight of 29,959 spectators, a record crowd for a U.S. Open night session. In team sports, athletes regularly encounter hostile environments of 30,000 fans or more. But standing alone in front of all that passion, energy and desire is something different, and Kontaveit informally awarded the audience an assist in the outcome.“It was really hard,” Kontaveit said of the crowd, adding, “I knew it was coming. I guess you can’t learn from anyone else’s mistakes. Feeling it, it was something I never experienced before.”The fans not only cheered when Williams won a point; they yelled encouragement to their heroine throughout the match, shouting, “We love you, Serena,” and “Come on, Serena,” including at critical moments on Kontaveit’s service toss, which is against audience decorum. Several times the chair umpire had to take the fans to task and ask for quiet as Kontaveit waited.Serena Williams had 11 aces to Kontaveit’s five.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times“They were not rooting against me,” Kontaveit said. “They just wanted Serena to win so bad. I don’t think it’s a personal attack against me or anything. It’s fair. She deserves this.” When the match was over and the players had shaken hands at the net, Kontaveit quickly gathered up her rackets and within moments was back in the locker room, sorting out her feelings after playing one of her best matches of the summer, only to lose to a crowd favorite.Kontaveit knew what was coming well beforehand. She understood she would be facing a substantial onslaught of support in favor of her opponent, and claimed it would relieve her of all expectations and pressure.The precedent had been set on Monday during Williams’s declarative first-round straight-sets win over Danka Kovinic of Montenegro. The crowd for that match was so loud, and in such a celebratory mood, that Kovinic said she could not hear the ball coming off the strings of the rackets, an important signifier of how the ball might move after it lands. Kovinic, ranked No. 80, spoke of actually being swept up in the moment herself, dazzled by the celebrities in attendance that night. For Kontaveit, it was more about the competition, and she was not as carefree afterward.Although she has earned the No. 2 ranking, she has had a difficult summer, losing three of her last four matches on hardcourts entering the U.S. Open. She said she contracted Covid-19 in April and had difficulty regaining her strength. Her one singles title this year came in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February, but she also made it to the finals in Doha, Qatar, later that month.Kontaveit reached the fourth round of the U.S. Open in her first try in 2015, but since then has not been immune to getting knocked out in the first or second round of a major. It has now happened 16 times in the 27 majors she has entered since that run. Her best result at a major is reaching the quarterfinal stage at the 2020 Australian Open, where she lost to Simona Halep.She does have some experience of going deep into the tournament at the U.S. Open. As a junior in 2012 she reached the final, losing to Samantha Crawford.This year, players have commented that the courts at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center are faster than normal, a factor that would tend to enhance the playing style of both Williams and Kontaveit, since each relies on power. Kontaveit indicated she was all for it.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesAfter an early exit from the Western and Southern Open outside Cincinnati, she arrived early in New York and practiced on the same courts. The difference was that then, there was virtually no one in the stadium watching. On Wednesday, the entire tennis world was tuned in.As Kontaveit said on Monday, “I’m not sure if I’ll ever experience something like this again.”The next player to experience it will be Ajla Tomljanovic, from Australia, who beat Evgeniya Rodina in three sets on Court 7 at roughly the same time that Williams and Kontaveit were playing. Even from over there, Tomljanovic could hear the noise pulsating from Ashe, the same din that she will be facing in person on Friday night.“I’m like, Court 7 isn’t that close,” Tomljanovic said. “I kept thinking, ‘Oh, my God, that’s annoying me and I’m not even playing against her.’” More