There was a point late in Serena Williams’s match with Roberta Vinci in Friday’s US Open semi-finals when it became evident the world No 1 was in danger.
Actual danger, rather than the imaginary fire, often of her own making, that she’d made her plaything during a season that had seen her win 18 of 19 matches when extended to three sets. Back to the wall, she had just pounded a soul-crushing 126mph ace down the middle on deuce at 3-3 for a game point – her fastest of the match – in an emphatic response meant to demoralize an opponent playing the tennis of her life.
This was a moment we’d experienced many times over the years, but especially in these past nine months, as Williams has appropriated brinksmanship as a signature art form during her run to a calendar-year grand slam. We’d seen this movie before.
But on the next point – the turning point – Vinci pounced on second serve out wide and engaged Williams in a white-knuckle 18-stroke rally. She turned back one missile after another with an unpredictable blend of pace and spin, steering angled shots expertly with a gorgeous one-handed backhand, until the 21-times grand slam champion began to founder. When she finally drove Williams far enough out of position to caress a volley into the open court for a winner, the crowd screamed and whistled. Vinci gesticulated passionately for more and the biggest tennis stadium in the world gladly accommodated.
Yet amid this maelstrom there was Serena doubled over by the baseline, visibly gassed, struggling for breath as she tried desperately to maintain her steely game face. Spent.
So many times had Williams come back from the abyss in winning the previous four major tournaments, but now this: genuine peril. For the first time it was clear that Williams’s penultimate step to history might not follow the script that’s become numbingly familiar.
Williams then netted a backhand followed by an overcooked forehand that sailed past the baseline and was broken. Twenty minutes later it was finished. There would be no final-reel escape.
In the aftermath, always a reckless space from which to take measure of historical context, emotions ran high. To call it the biggest upset in tennis history, as many have – to invoke Buster Douglas v Mike Tyson, as one writer I deeply admire did on a deadline crunch – shortchanges Vinci, for one, but even more the profundity of Serena’s unforgettable season.
Tyson was 23 and at the height of his physical powers in Tokyo. Williams turns 34 in two weeks. She became the oldest player to hold the No 1 ranking more than two and a half years ago, and her semi-final finish at Flushing Meadows mathematically ensures she’ll be the oldest year-end No 1 ever. Every time she steps on a court, it’s her opponent’s Super Bowl – a career-making opportunity. That she won 33 straight matches at the grand slam level until Friday’s setback is a miracle, and we are fortunate to have been witnesses.
Styles make fights. Williams was felled not by an upstart who could have never beaten her at her best – not by a Sloane Stephens or Genie Bouchard or Belinda Bencic or one of countless rising ingenues she’s picked her teeth with through the years – but by a veteran doubles player whose stylish all-court game is tailor-made to counter her power and aggression.
The grand slam is a big deal because it’s hard – all but impossible – no more so than in a best-of-three-sets format where the margins for error are far less forgiving.
Friday’s result, while extraordinary, in no way defies logic – and does nothing to undercut Serena’s towering accomplishments this year. To hold all four grand slam titles simultaneously at an age when many other greats had long since been put out to pasture has lifted Serena into a class of her own. That it didn’t happen within a rather arbitrary timeframe of a calendar year is almost immaterial.
When it was over, Vinci, bless her heart, apologized to the American crowd during perhaps the most memorable on-court interview ever – a Roberto Benigni moment if ever tennis knew one. Yet she owed an apology to no one. Nor does Serena, whose improbable supremacy in the winter of her career will not soon be forgotten.
