The great ones, they bring change.
The on-field/on-court heroics? That’s the easy allure. That’s what sells tickets, renders jaws dropped, keeps us glued to our flat-screens. As the late poet (and long-suffering New York Mets fan) Joel Oppenheimer once wrote, watching someone “do something, anything better than you believed was possible, is a very beautiful thing.” But it’s the legacy of these once-in-a-generation athletes—their impact, not the buzzer-beaters or seemingly impossible five-set comebacks—that echo loudest after their playing days are done.
The rope-a-dope, “float-like-a-butterfly, sting-like-a-bee” fluidity of Muhammad Ali was pugilistic perfection. Armed with her trusty T-2000 and cat-eye spectacles, Billie Jean King began carving through opponents in the 1960s with a will to win never before seen on a tennis court. The late Bill Russell won so many NBA championships he ran out of fingers for the rings.
Still, it’s the change they brought about that has lingered longest. They’ll be remembered most for what they did with their platform, be it a push for social justice, an insistence on a level playing field, or their dignity, their poise amidst the backlash in the court of public opinion.
For the past 27 years, since her days in braces and beaded cornrows, Serena Jameka Williams has been wowing crowds (and inspiring future champions) across the globe. The athleticism, the explosiveness, the ferocity, the serve—oh, the serve—have been, as Mr. Oppenheimer would surely agree, very, very beautiful things to behold.
Those Open Era-best 23 Grand Slam trophies, 73 career singles titles, four Olympic gold medals, 319 weeks at No. 1, $94 million-plus in career prize money, etc.? She fought for it all as if it were her birthright, as if her opponent was trying to steal what was hers. At times, it could be messy. Nowhere was that more visible than right here in Flushing Meadows. There was her run-in with a lineswoman (and subsequent default) in her 2009 semifinal against Kim Clijsters; the infamous point penalty and code violation in her 2011 final against Sam Stosur; and, of course, her tumultuous 2018 matchup with newcomer Naomi Osaka, an emotional rollercoaster of a final that featured tears from both victor and vanquished.
“I am who I am,” said Williams in 2019. “I’ve always been the person that goes out there and roars and screams and complains and cries and fights.”
She caught plenty of flak on all three of the aforementioned occasions, but by then Williams had grown accustomed to the scrutiny. She had long been disrupting a once one-dimensional arena, challenging the status quo and redefining what it means to be a powerful Black female athlete. And, in the end, that may be her true, underlying legacy: Forcing us to reconsider any notions of what we thought she should be.
“She’s changed the way women compete, as far as it’s OK to be ferocious and passionate and vocal out there, emotional out there on the court, and still be a woman,” said Hall of Famer Chris Evert.
“And she has so many platforms, from the body-shaming, to working moms, to women of color and just empowering women,” Evert continued. “I think that message off the court, to me and maybe to millions of people, is more profound and more powerful than even what she’s done on the court.”
“Sometimes being a woman, a Black woman, in the world, you kind of settle for less,” asserted Coco Gauff, who wasn’t yet born when Williams collected her first major title in 1999. “I feel like Serena taught me that. From watching her, she never settled for less. I can’t remember a moment in her career or life that she settled for less.”
Count Gauff, 18, among those whom Williams inspired to first pick up a racquet.
“Growing up, I never thought that I was different because the No. 1 player in the world was somebody who looked like me,” she said.
It should come as no surprise that Williams, now 40 and a world away from those cracked Compton courts upon which she first fell in love with the sport alongside her big sister and built-in role model Venus, is averse to ‘The R Word,’ preferring instead a career ‘evolution.’ It’s in her nature to keep fighting on, Father Time just another opponent across the net. Those change-makers, that’s how they think.
“They don’t seem normal, those players, so you kind of expect them to be able to go on forever,” said Andy Murray, someone who’s wrestled with the concept himself, retiring one minute, unretiring the next.
Aside from the poignant Arthur Ashe Stadium embrace (“WE ❤️ SERENA”) on Opening Night at the US Open, where she’s captured an Open Era, co-record six tournament titles, there wasn’t much in the way of goodbye grandeur for Williams—no drawn-out farewell tour, gifts of rocking chairs or keys to the city. She didn’t want that. Instead, our last snapshots of the player who in her prime seemed superhuman, the most dominant force in the annals of the women’s game, reveal that she was indeed human after all.
Last year on the lawns of the All England Club, for so many years all but her second home, she was left writhing in pain in the opening round, unable to play on. It would be 364 days until she took the court again, this time as a Wimbledon wild card, though the outcome was the same—another disappointing first-round exit against the kind of player (155th-ranked Frenchwoman Harmony Tan) she once brushed aside without so much as breaking a sweat. More early, un-Serena-like losses would follow this summer in Toronto, Cincinnati and, ultimately, here on Friday night at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, site of her first Grand Slam title all the way back in 1999. It was the 1,014th match of her storied career, and also her last.
A. Tomljanovic (AUS) def. S. Williams (USA), 7-5, 6-7(4), 6-1.
A busy wife, mom and businesswoman, she showed flashes of her vintage self, but was now a step slower, the match no longer hers straight out of the locker room. Williams had, as John Updike once wrote of another world-beater, then-retiring baseball legend Ted Williams, “met the little death that awaits all athletes.”
So much has been made of Williams’ pursuit of Aussie Margaret Court and her all-time benchmark 24 major singles titles, a record that has held up for nearly half a century. As it stands, it appears she won’t get there. But if it’s GOAT status that Williams was chasing, she got there long ago, perhaps even before she eclipsed Evert and Martina Navratilova’s 18, or Steffi Graf’s 22.
Here are two sisters who came out of the inner-city, after all, who skipped high-pressure junior tournaments and high-fee academies, who kept it in the family and still climbed all the way to the top. When Venus burst onto the scene at the 1997 US Open, slugging her way into the final against Martina Hingis, Richard Williams promised to anyone who would listen that it was his youngest, Serena, who would go the furthest in the sport, that both his girls would simultaneously occupy Nos. 1 and 2 in the world.
It remains the greatest against-all-odds prediction in sports history.
Though Harlemite Althea Gibson had hurdled the color line long before them, the Williamses’ rise still came with its own complicated set of circumstances. They had to fight for their due, be it equal prize money or the kind of endorsement dollars that seemed to come far easier to others with less polished resumes. That Serena, once “just a kid with a racquet and a dream,” now pulls in $45 million away from the court speaks volumes as to just how far we’ve come. She’s simply refused to settle for less.
As she embarks on her new life, as a doting mom to daughter Olympia, an enterprising entrepreneur with a bent toward backing women-run businesses, wherever she may evolve, we’re sure to look back on that first-of-its-kind, Venus vs. Serena primetime US Open final of ‘01; to Williams in her Puma days, clad in that all-black, skin-tight catsuit; to the so-called ‘Serena Slam’ of ‘02-‘03, when she held all four major titles at once; to her 20-2 imbalance against purported rival Maria Sharapova; to her epic tussles with Justine Henin, to her near-calendar-year-Slam run of ’15; and on and on.
Those kinds of highlight-reel flashbacks, however, can get fuzzy over time. It’s the change Serena Williams brought, the singular impact she made, that will never fade.
