When Venus Williams stepped out of the tunnel at Arthur Ashe Stadium and into the sun on Tuesday afternoon, the stands were half empty. Carlos Alcaraz, the third seed in the men’s draw, had just won his first-round match. Alcaraz, a phenom expected to win multiple majors someday, was born in 2003, six years after Williams made her first final in New York. The night before, Venus’s sister Serena had played the first match of what will likely be the final U.S. Open, and the final tournament, of her career, in front of a raucous, record crowd. Billie Jean King emerged to sing Serena’s praises. Oprah narrated a montage of Serena’s achievements. Beyoncé made a Gatorade commercial to celebrate Serena’s career. Bill Clinton was spotted in the stands, chatting with Dr. Ruth.
When Venus won her first U.S. Open title, more than two decades ago, Clinton, then the President of the United States, called to congratulate her. He’d missed the match; he had been there for the men’s semifinal, but rain delayed the start of the women’s final, and he didn’t stick around. “So what happened?” Williams asked the President. “Where’d you go?” Even then, you had the sense that she didn’t actually care if the President was in attendance or not. (He said he’d had to get home for dinner.) But she knew her worth, and wasn’t afraid to say so.
She still knows it; one look at her on Tuesday could tell you that. She wore large gold hoop earrings, a navy visor, and a forest-green crop top and skirt with white piping as clean as a baseline. Her bare midriff was chiselled. Her face was a sculpted stone. She walked to the coin toss with her usual air of stillness and equanimity. Only a vigorous little shake of her racquet head gave a hint of the quick-twitch ferocity beneath the smooth exterior.
The lack of ceremony was unsurprising, even appropriate—the tournament could hardly throw a retirement party for a player who has, for decades, brushed off talk of retirement. The winner of seven Grand Slam singles titles, Williams is one of the greatest players of all time, and one of the most influential. She has played out the past few years of her career proudly, but quietly, and often on the outer courts. It’s not that she doesn’t mind—she does mind—but her attitude has always been that she doesn’t need a spotlight to deserve one.
Williams won the coin toss, shook her long legs a little loose, and walked to the baseline to warm up. She is forty-two now. After a year away from the tour, on account of injury, she is ranked No. 1,504 in the world. On the other side of the net was Alison Van Uytvanck, a red-headed Belgian ranked No. 43. Van Uytvanck is an unusual player who deploys a bevy of slices. She was favored, but not invulnerable: coming into the match, she had lost all but one of her previous nine first-round appearances at the U.S. Open, and had lost her last three matches in a row. Williams, though, had played just four matches in total since last summer’s Wimbledon, and had not won any of them. Lately, she has been coached by the pro at her local tennis club, in Miami.
Her long time away from the court was apparent from the start. Her serve, once the most powerful, precise weapon on the tour, capable of speeds no woman had consistently hit before—“a hundred and twenty” every time, as her old rival Lindsay Davenport said, during the broadcast of the match—was failing, more often than not, to hit its spots. Her hard, flat ground strokes, particularly on the backhand side, were mistimed, hitting the middle of the net or sailing long. She lost the brisk first set 6–1.
There is a discomfort, even at times a kind of secondhand embarrassment, involved in watching a beloved champion who is far from her best—think of Willie Mays tripping in the outfield, losing a fly ball in the sun. Williams once called sport “triumph and disaster witnessed in real time.” She added, “You can’t fake it.” What you can fake is immortality, but only for so long.
Still, embarrassed? Not Venus. At the start of the second set, her serve started to click. Her open-stance backhand began to solidify, her legs a stable base. She struck forehands down the line and on the run. Her long legs swallowed the ground. She took the second set to a tiebreak before losing it and, with it, the match. “In the end, it’s just rust,” she said afterward. “There is nothing you can do about that except for, you know, not be rusty at some point.” A reporter asked her what drove her, after all this time. “Three letters,” she answered. “W-I-N. That’s it. Very simple.”
She had already been asked, inevitably, whether she had any plans to retire—or, as Serena had put it for herself, in an essay for Vogue, to “evolve” away from the sport. “I’m just focussed on the doubles,” Williams replied.
There is no Serena without Venus, as everyone, Serena and Venus included, will tell you. Venus pulled tennis, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century. Venus, with her speed and big serve, with her beads and bravado and incandescent smile. Everyone knows, by now, how Venus protected Serena, how she took the brunt of the racism and resistance, how she shielded her little sister, how she followed the rules so that Serena could land like a stick of dynamite, how she publicly, and successfully, pressed Wimbledon to offer men and women equal pay.
I can remember only one time when Venus lost her cool during a match. It was at the Australian Open, in 1999, when a strand of her beads broke and scattered, clattering, across the court, and she was docked a point. “I am not causing a disturbance here!” she said, more insistent than angry. “No one is disturbed!” (“But tennis was disturbed,” Elizabeth Weil wrote a few years ago, in an excellent profile of Williams.) In 2004, she lost a match at Wimbledon to Karolina Šprem 7–6 (7–5), 7–6 (8–6), after the umpire called out the wrong score in the second-set tiebreak, giving Šprem an extra point. “I’d like to think that one point doesn’t make a difference,” Venus said, gracious as ever, having lost that tiebreak by two points. The generations of tennis stars that have come since—particularly Black women such as Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka, Sloane Stephens, and Madison Keys—had Serena to follow. Serena had Venus. Venus had her faith, in God—she is a practicing Jehovah’s Witness—in her parents’ vision, in herself. “I’m tall. I’m Black. Everything’s different about me. Just face the facts,” Venus said in 1997, at age seventeen. She made the mold.
It is tempting, then, to imagine how we might see Venus without Serena. After all, in addition to the seven Grand Slams that Venus won, she lost seven finals to her younger sister. When Serena left the tour, in 2017, to have a child, Venus reached the finals at Wimbledon and the semifinals at the U.S. Open, and returned to the top five. She was thirty-seven years old.
Last year, Williams published an op-ed in the Times in which she described how her mother, Oracene, at the start of Venus’s career, counselled her to take care of her “whole self,” not only her body but her mind. “What my mom was telling me that day in Oakland was that none of those elements of winning would work unless I also tended to my mental health. I needed to have a balanced life and not identify myself solely as a tennis player,” Williams wrote. “Even though I was beginning to have success as a young pro, I had to remain committed to my education, stay connected to my religion and enjoy the experience of improvement—not be so driven that I would miss it all.” This way of thinking helps explain why the Williams sisters took so many prolonged breaks from the tour, for which they were criticized. They went to fashion school, started businesses. (Venus has a streetwear line, EleVen, whose clothes she wears on court; she also has an interior-design business, which serves mostly corporate clients.) Perhaps it also explains why Venus has been able to prolong her career despite a diagnosis, in 2011, of Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that can leave her sapped of energy, and that can flare suddenly; she takes care of herself holistically.
Watching Williams, earlier this week, with her lapidary grace and impenetrable expressions, I thought it might explain something else, too. To a degree that I have rarely witnessed in another person, and perhaps never in a prominent athlete, Williams seems to have reserved her self, protected it. There is, behind the calm façade, an inner life that shows in flashes of coolness and bursts of passionate, athletic intensity. She has never, in any sense, sold herself out. “I think I was born to play this game. I really do,” she said, a few years ago. “I’ve been blessed enough to do something that I love, and I think this was my calling because I grew so big, and so tall, that I can cover the court and hit it hard.”
What would Williams be without Serena? It’s an interesting question to ponder, briefly, but ultimately beside the point. She would be herself, and her self is a sister. On Tuesday, after her loss, she was asked about her hopes and expectations for the doubles tournament. (She and Serena have fourteen Grand Slam doubles titles together, and are a perfect 14–0 in finals.) “More than anything, I just want to hold my side of the court up and be a good sister,” she said. On Thursday night, in prime time, she and Serena took the court together, almost certainly for the last time. They lost a tight, entertaining first set to a Czech team—there were volleys to the body, and returns flung into the alleys—and battled back in the second before succumbing, 7–6 (5), 6–4. They gathered their things and walked off the court, to a standing ovation, together. Venus has always defined her terms, and there is more than one way to win. ♦
