Now that the actual mother of storylines has hurled itself atop the New York heap for the upcoming U.S. Open — Serena Williams’s imminent farewell to tennis, announced Tuesday in Vogue magazine, making this probably her last U.S. Open — it can justify firing up the video and venturing 23 U.S. Opens back.
What a send off 👏👏👏@serenawilliams | #CincyTennis pic.twitter.com/jxHYIk5J06
— wta (@WTA) August 17, 2022
Perspective charges in from the late last century, from the 1999 U.S. Open women’s final, from Williams’s upset title at 17 in a raging ruckus against then-No. 1 Martina Hingis, from Williams’s teenage ampleness of hair beads, from Williams’s reaction when Hingis’s last backhand fluttered long.
Pics from Serena Williams' first practice session earlier today 💪🏾🎾 #USOpen
📸: US Open IG pic.twitter.com/hv9BLzRKKN
— Luis. (@serenapower_) August 23, 2022
She brought her left hand toward her heart in some state not all that far from bewilderment, and she beamed from there to Melbourne and Paris and Wimbledon and back, and she yelled, “Oh, my God!” and she wondered: “Should I scream? Should I yell? Should I cry?” — and, yeah, that’s the same person, the same lifetime, as the almost-41-year-old who won 22 more major titles and will amplify this U.S. Open with a ciao.
What’s in there proved to be oh-my-God. What’s in there was a Grand Central Station of a mind, a concrete avenue of a gut, and some inner skyscraper of a will. To call what’s in there “ferocious” is to sort of slight what’s in there. So even as “something’s got to give” and she would like to have another child and she’s excited about her investment business, it’s easy to imagine one more reemergence somewhere up ahead.
That might be erroneous, but that, too, stems from long since knowing what’s in there.
