With the current suspension of the ATP and WTA Tours, USOpen.org is reliving some of the biggest tennis matches in the tournament's history in photos. In our latest featured match, we look back at the 2011 US Open women's final between Sam Stosur and Serena Williams. Watch the full match on the US Open YouTube channel.
In one of the biggest upsets in Grand Slam history, No. 9 seed Sam Stosur shocked 13-time major winner and three-time US Open champion Serena Williams in straight sets to capture the first Slam title of her career at the 2011 US Open.
On the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, the Australian underdog played the match of her life, taking control with powerful strokes from the baseline and a heavy kick serve to stun the overwhelming American favorite, 6-2, 6-3.
With the win, Stosur became the first Australian woman to win a Grand Slam championship since Evonne Goolagong Cawley won Wimbledon in 1980, and the first Australian woman since Margaret Court to win at the US Open since 1973.
Here's a look back, in photos, at this surprising final.
Stosur was playing in only her second Grand Slam final, with her first coming the previous year at the 2010 French Open. Prior to the 2011 tournament, the Aussie held a 2-9 record in tournament finals, winning titles in Osaka, Japan, in 2009 and Charleston, S.C., in 2010. Her previous best singles performance at the Open was a quarterfinal result in 2010, but she did have past doubles success in New York, taking home the women's doubles trophy in 2005, with Lisa Raymond.
The then-29-year-old Williams, seeded No. 28, was playing in only her sixth tournament of the year at the 2011 Open. Since Wimbledon in 2010, she had two foot operations and was hospitalized for a pulmonary embolism, missing nearly a year of action, before returning at 2011 Wimbledon, where, ranked 175th in the world, she reached the fourth round.
Stosur's path to the final included a three-hour, 16-minute, third-round win over Nadia Petrova, which at the time was the longest US Open women's singles match since tiebreaks were introduced in 1970, and a fourth-round victory over Maria Kirilenko, which featured the longest tiebreak in a women's singles match (17-15) in US Open history. She next ousted No. 2 seed Vera Zvonareva, 6-3, 6-3, in the quarterfinals and posted a three-set, semifinal victory over Angelique Kerber, before taking on Williams for the title.
Serena did not drop a set in her first six matches of the tournament, and beat four seeded players—No. 4 Victoria Azarenka, No. 16 Ana Ivanovic, No. 17 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki—en route to the final.
Serena put only 35 percent of her first serves in play during the opening set and lost 12 straight points to give Stosur a one-set-to-love lead in the match. It was the first set Williams had lost in the tournament.
After Stosur took the 31-minute opening set, Williams began to lose her composure, but Stosur remained unshaken. On her third championship point, the Brisbane native crushed a cross-court forehand to capture her first major singles title in one hour, 13 minutes.
At age 27, Stosur, who celebrated the win with her team in her players' box, became the oldest US Open champion since a 30-year-old Martina Navratilova won the title in 1987. She finished the match with 12 unforced errors, compared to 25 for Williams.
The five games Williams won in the match equaled her lowest total in 240 career Grand Slam matches. "She played really, really well," she said of Stosur. "It's good to see I tried my hardest, but she kept hitting winners."
"I'm still kind of speechless. I can't actually believe I won this tournament," said Stosur, who joined Margaret Court, Wendy Turnbull, Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Kerry Melville Reid as the only five Australian women to play in a US Open singles final in the Open era. "I guess to go out there and play the way I did is obviously just an unbelievable feeling, and you always hope and you want to be able to do that, but to actually do it, is unbelievable."
