Serena Williams will forever be imperiously detached from the mundanity of her calling. She is the queen of tennis, struggling to identify her first-round opponent here on Tuesday – the little-known and difficult to spell Belgian Alison Van Uytvanck – and declining the invitation to pronounce the surname of her replacement hitting partner, Jonathan Dasnières de Veigy, despite her excellent command of French.
But she is sure of one thing: winning a sixth Australian Open title to move within three of Steffi Graf’s record of 22 slams in the Open era is the sort of challenge that keeps her interested in her day job.
When asked about chasing history by adding another Australian title to her CV, she said in her final pre-tournament press conference: “I want it, I think, more than anyone else here.” That will come as news to Maria Sharapova, who will displace her at the top of the rankings if she wins the championship.
However, Williams will embark on her campaign without her long-time training partner, Sascha Bajin, who is absent injured and, apparently, “super bummed out” not to be part of her assault on the title. In the big Serb’s place, she said, is the man she chooses to refer to simply as, “Jonathan”.
As for Van Uytvanck, she is 20, ranked 106 in the world and should not, on form, detain Williams for long – although there have been enough aberrations in the past couple of years and recent dips to at least keep us guessing for a few games. As for Dasnières de Veigy, he is a French left-hander who reached 146 in the ATP rankings before retiring two years ago, and helped prepare Novak Djokovic for the French Open final against Rafael Nadal last year.
Williams and several leading women employ male hitting partners to test their power, and the American plainly has benefited from it, as her strength of shot, off the ground and from hand, is peerless on the WTA Tour.
Can she win here? If she has shrugged off the lethargy that has settled temporarily on her strong shoulders in the first month of the year, of course – although it is five years since she won her fifth Australian Open.
If Williams moves through tennis with a regal air, Britain’s sole representative in the women’s draw, Heather Watson, remains dazzled by competing in a major. It inspires her and excites her – and she definitely knows about Tsvetana Pironkova, the accomplished Bulgarian, whom she has beaten twice on grass and lost to twice on hardcourt.
So that will be no stroll in the sunshine when she steps out on Tuesday – in Serena’s quarter of the draw, as it happens. To get to the grand dame, Watson would have to beat Pironkova, then most likely the 11th seed Dominika Cibulkova, Alizé Cornet (19) and Williams’s best friend, Caroline Wozniacki, seeded eighth but who had to withdraw from the recent Sydney tournament because of a wrist injury – which has apparently healed.
Watson is not thinking with such linear certainty about all of that, though. She is doing what all athletes do: working on the next shot, and the one after that – except now she is developing the attacking mentality that gave her such a lift in 2014. She won her second WTA title in Hobart on Saturday – the first British woman to bag a brace on the Tour since Anne Hobbs 30 years ago. So her confidence is high.
“Yes, it’s been a very good start to the year,” Watson agreed in characteristic understatement. If she does admit to anything like naked ambition, it is through the desire to win titles rather than to move up the rankings. Titles, she says, deliver credibility and serve as irrefutable proof of a player’s worth. “Everybody looks back on their careers and when somebody mentions your name when you walk on to a court, ‘Heather Watson, she has won two career WTA singles titles … ’ You know, I want that number to go higher. I don’t want them saying, ‘oh, she’s ranked 20 in the world … and doesn’t have any titles to her name!’
“Everybody’s different, but that’s what’s very important to me, when I go into finals and semi-finals. The people who are runner-up or lose in the semis don’t get remembered. It’s the people who win it that do.”
So she shares that hunger for sporting immortality with Williams, at least. And, while Watson is a realist, she does not shrink from higher ambition. “Anybody can beat anybody now,” she said at the French Open last year after probably the best run of her career. Nothing has changed in her estimation.
“Definitely,” she said, “especially in the women’s game, where you see big players can get knocked out early in tournaments. You see it less in the men’s game. You usually see those who you’d expect to see later in winning. But, in the women’s, I find there’s a big group [where] there’s very little that separates the top girls. Obviously the great players just have that mental edge and confidence that some other lower-ranked players won’t have.”
She identifies that elite group as the top 10 – and her win in Hobart put her with 28 points off being so regarded, her highest career ranking.
On the face of it, Watson and Williams might be seen to be playing two different games. But the British player will not let herself think like that. And, while her chances of even going deep enough here to find out are obviously slim, dreaming of the prospect sustains her day to day – and shot by shot.
