Serena Williams’s Grand Slam singles career will live on for at least another match.
On one of her favorite stages, Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam singles champion, beat Danka Kovinic of Montenegro, 6-3, 6-3, in front of a celebrity-packed capacity crowd on an electric opening night at the U.S. Open.
This win came just a few weeks after she announced that she planned to step away from tennis after the U.S. Open to focus on having another child and on her business interests.
It now means the end of one of the most successful and influential careers in sports history won’t arrive until the second round of the U.S. Open or even later. Williams will face a tougher test against No. 2 seed Anett Kontaveit of Estonia, whom she has never faced. But Kontaveit has struggled of late, especially after a bout with Covid earlier in the year.
“When I step out on the court I just want to do the best that I can do on that particular day,” Williams said when it was done.
Throughout the match, there were glimpses of the power and athleticism that had made Williams a boundary-breaking force that changed both her sport and women’s athleticism.
And on a heavy, late-summer New York evening, on the court where she captured her first Grand Slam singles title in 1999, it was enough to topple Kovinic, the sort of player Williams has rolled over in maybe an hour in so many early-round matches in so many other Grand Slams. Williams was shaky and rusty at the start, double-faulting and netting easy ground strokes, but she got better as the night wore on and ultimately dictated how the match was played and how it finished.
It may have just been one more first-round match that, if she had lost it, would have surprised few. No one had expected much from Williams coming into this tournament. Monday night’s match seemed to be as much of a gift for the boldfaced names and everyone else at Arthur Ashe Stadium as it was a chance for Williams to blast some final serves and winners, no matter what the numbers on the scoreboard said when it was over.
Queen Latifah was there, and so was President Bill Clinton, Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, and Katie Couric, and Matt Damon and Naomi Osaka, who just the other day had called Williams the biggest force in the sport, and that included the superstar male group of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.
Williams also plans to play in the doubles competition with her sister Venus, herself a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion, but Monday was always going to be Serena Williams’s valedictory, or the start of it, a night that, win-or-lose, would be a celebration. Williams made sure to show up for the party, and so did her daughter, Olympia, 4, who wore a matching outfit with her hair in beads reminiscent of a young Serena, and nearly stole the show.
Williams has endured a 27-year roller coaster filled with long stretches of near invincibility as well as injury-plagued years that made it seem like this night might have occurred long ago.
She has collected armfuls of championship trophies — and came so close to several more in the final phase of her career — and also endured the headline-grabbing controversies that followed her run-ins with tennis officials on the court where she played Monday night.
For Williams, who turns 41 in four weeks and is arguably the greatest player of all time, a loss to Kovinic, the 80th-ranked player in the world, was not the way she wanted to wave goodbye to her singles career.
She has been a shadow of her former self this summer, during the singles matches that are serving as her coda after nearly a year away from the game she has loved and dedicated her life to. The impromptu farewell began in earnest at Wimbledon, made stops in Toronto and Ohio and now continues in New York at the U.S. Open for at least one more singles match, and a doubles match.
It was Tony Godsick, the longtime agent for Federer, another champion struggling to figure out what his goodbye should look like, who said earlier this summer that going out gracefully doesn’t require lifting a championship trophy.
It means going out on one’s own terms, not with an injury, like the torn hamstring that sent Williams off the court in tears at Wimbledon in 2021, but with a final chance to compete and soak in the roars from the crowd.
“The crowd was crazy,” she said.
She will hear the fans at least twice more this week.
Their roar began echoing through the stadium as Williams walked onto the court just before 7:30 p.m. following a two-minute tribute video. She wore a black bedazzled jacket and headband and a wrap that flowed from her waist to her ankles.
They roared again as she walked to the center of the court to join the film director Spike Lee for the coin toss, and they lifted her after two early double faults, as she saved break points in the first game, and then as she broke Kovinic in the second with one of those patented forehand putaways from the front of the court. Williams pumped her fist and let the noise fall over Kovinic.
Kovinic settled in though, and two games later the match was tied. She wasn’t going anywhere, especially with Williams struggling to find a rhythm with her serve and netting easy forehands.
But Williams did what she has done for a very long time. She sensed an opening, a moment of weakness in her opponent, and she pounced.
It happened midway through the first set, with Kovinic serving to go up two games. Williams hit a wobbly backhand that looked like it was going long, but it caught the back of the baseline and the edge of the sideline, and Kovinic then double-faulted the game away.
All even once more, Williams started winning the points she needed to. A 115-mile-an-hour ace got her to set point. And then another cannon serve hit her target down the center of the court and Kovinic couldn’t get it back, letting the crowd send up a roar as Williams squatted and pumped her arms. Arthur Ashe Stadium was hers once more.
As the match wore on, it became the kind of contest that Williams relishes, with two players banging balls from the middle of the backcourt. Did Kovinic even realize as she sprayed forehands wide and deep and into the net that she’d fallen into a classic Williams trap, abandoning the angles and spins that have won her matches before?
If she did, Williams had no intention of letting her out.
A few long rallies early in the second set had a gassed Williams going to the towel to catch her breath. But the more balls Williams hit, the better she hit them. Each service game became a little better than the last one.
She started jumping into Kovinic’s second serves to her backhand, sending winners across the court. And in the fifth game of the second set, Kovinic sent one too many forehands long. Williams had broken her serve to go up 3-2 and moved within shouting distance of the finish line. Later, a rolling backhand winner down the line got her to within a game of the victory. She raised her left fist and the roars echoed once more.
Three points later, they stood for match point, a backhand into the net, and Williams was high-stepping and pirouetting like she did in the old days.
Now she will get Kontaveit, as shaky a No. 2 seed as there has ever been.
“It’s like Serena 2.0,” Williams said of the life that awaits her when this is all done. That will wait for now. This party rolls on.
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