US Open 2022 – Serena Williams and the myth of passing the torch

NEW YORK — On the grounds at Wimbledon years ago, tennis was once described to me as “boxing without the punches.” The game may be more associated with the upper class and its country clubs, strawberries and cream and tea socials, but the analogy is nevertheless true: With the exception of boxing, there is no other sport as viscerally clear and unsentimental about victory and defeat. Two fighters. No help. No timeouts. No teammates. One winner.

Since Serena Williams‘ announcement in Vogue earlier this month that she will be retiring from tennis following the US Open — after 27 years, 23 singles majors, 14 in doubles, two more in mixed doubles, and, for good measure four Olympic gold medals — the air around her has been awash in nothing but sentiment. Nearly 30 years a professional, Williams represents the individual as dynasty, spanning six presidents, playing in parts of four decades. For her fans who were there from the start, her time, from braces to baby, has been theirs, time and age creating nostalgia and reflection for her and themselves. Her sponsors (remember Serena, the Puma years), the kits (the catsuits, 2002 Puma and the 2018 Nike) and the looks (the beads, the blonde) remind her followers not only of Serena’s rivalries (Hingis, Hingis, Hingis!) and victories (start 1-2 lifetime vs. Sharapova, finish 20-2), but where they were in their individual lives at the time, who they were as people and what they would become over the next quarter century. Like a living calendar, she has been their constant.

For the past three weeks since her announcement, Serena has been the story in tennis, and now the US Open is here. She will open the tournament’s Monday night session against 80th-ranked Danka Kovinic of Montenegro. Leading up to the moment has been ritual — the on-court ceremony in Toronto, the testimony from peers and competitors, the gracious and natural language surrounding her and her sport, the inevitable passing of the torch.

There are the watchers, and there are the doers. The watchers revel in the customs of this narrative: Williams, the great champion making her last stand at her home major, a tournament she has won six times. The Open was where she won her first major, 23 years ago, in 1999. The watchers look to the future, at the teen sensation Coco Gauff, perhaps, and see the lineage, as they did when Naomi Osaka beat Serena in the tense, uncomfortable 2018 US Open final. They see the elegiac poetry of time.

For the doer,…