With Serena
An farewell to Serena Williams, from the perspective of a one-time casual viewer
When I read Serena’s Vogue article for the first time, I felt myself breaking down into tears. I was baffled as to why I was feeling this way–I’ve never really tweeted about Serena and I literally started watching tennis during the tournament at which she incurred a year-long injury. Maybe she’s a big deal, but I felt like I was stealing valour by being so upset about the end of a career which I had only experienced in the most peripheral way.
I feel weird writing this article. There are people to whom Serena has meant far more, by a function of how long they have been watching tennis in conjunction with a deeper connection with Serena’s life story. I would hate as a white person to make the story of one of the most iconic Black women of all time about me. Her legacy is enormous and daunting–everyone has thoughts about it, and for good reason. I fear that no matter what I focus on, I won’t be doing her justice.
I’d resigned myself to giving up on writing a Serena send off article (of which there are already indubitably many thousands, from better points of view than mine). However, these moments of inexplicable emotion regarding Serena kept happening. I’d watch a send-off montage on ESPN and feel a swell of emotion in my chest that logically wouldn’t make sense considering how little I’ve watched of Serena’s actual career. I tried to have a discussion about her impact with my mom and my mind would bluescreen trying to imagine a counterfactual in which she’d never picked up a tennis racket. Something about the weight of Serena’s story and career won’t leave me alone, and I’ve found myself contemplating it since the release of her Vogue article.
It wasn’t until I was reading an unrelated short story that I finally understood the reason for my intense emotions around Serena. In “With the Beatles,” Haruki Murakami discusses the symbolic nature that pervasive pop culture moments might hold for us, even when we aren’t invested in that piece of cultural interest. For him, it’s the music of the Beatles, a band he wasn’t a fan of and yet absorbed by simple osmosis. He talks about passing a girl holding a Beatles LP becoming “etched into [his] mind” as a “symbol of adolescence.” Murakami then traces these scraps of memory associated with the cultural force of the Beatles into a coherent story about our movement away from youth.
Serena is the same for me. She has managed to shape and define my life, becoming an unconscious symbol of my own youth long before I even had an inkling I might enjoy watching tennis. That to me is the measure of her true impact. How many matches of hers must have been on by osmosis while I’d sit quietly in a sports bar during slams growing up? How many times have I simply absorbed her face, in the form of advertisements or newspaper headlines? Even in the depths of my hatred for all things related to physical activity, I was always aware of the impact and implications of what Serena did. I knew the name “Serena Williams” before I knew what a breakpoint was or what “thirty-love” meant.
The moment Serena won the gold in singles at the 2012 Olympics is etched into my mind irrevocably–that image of her rejoicing after match point could be reconstructed from my memory into a perfectly coherent recording. I remember the heat of that summer, languishing on my living room floor while gazing at the tv. The moment she won, I was filled with a kind of ecstasy I’d never felt before in the context of sports. The moment was unique and perfect and an artefact of a time before life had gotten complicated with more adult concerns.
I want to talk about what Serena’s legacy means for people who are completely oblivious to sport. For people like the 11-year-old version of myself who’d never cared about this sort of thing before Serena. For people to whom Roland Garros might as well be the moon, and bagels are a breakfast food. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether certain players are “good for the sport,” but the question almost seems comical when faced with all that Serena has done and accomplished. In many circles, “Serena Williams” is a metonym for tennis. It’s impossible to imagine what the women’s game would have looked like or been marketed as without her.
The first time I consciously remember thinking about Serena Williams, I was around nine years old. My parents had realised that raising a child with the twin hobbies of “reading” and “pedantically lecturing every family member about said reading” was probably a recipe for playground exclusion. As a last ditch effort to ingratiate me into society, I was enrolled into a children’s sporting program. As an icebreaker at this particular program, we were asked to go around in a circle and state an athlete that we looked up to.
I had a little moment of fear because I’d never really watched sports for fun, and I had no real idea what was happening. This was the moment I was about to be found out as an imposter. Perhaps my peers could forgive the three times I’d managed to trip on my own shoelaces, but the prospect of being excluded because I didn’t get it with sports was petrifying. My panic rose as it came closer and closer to my turn, my mind scrambling for someone, anyone that didn’t seem totally fake coming off my lips.
I was saved by the girl sitting next to me. She quietly stated “Serena Williams” and I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, someone who would be believable for me to like. All I knew about Serena was that she was a tennis player and she was American and she’d been a girl just like I was. But, notably, she was the only woman that had come up in the discussion at all. So began the con, when I blurted out that my favourite athlete was also Serena.
After learning about her over the course of this sports week, I inevitably associated Serena with an uncompromising brand of femininity. Women where I grew up were mostly expected to gain some impressive credential, before settling down into the comfortable role of homemaker. Femininity was about being the quiet good kid in class–it was boys who had energy. I remember making endless wishes at 11:11 or while blowing out my birthday candles, desperately hoping to suddenly transform into a quiet, good kid. I would bargain with the universe to make me quiet and shy, because I thought this was how I was supposed to be.
Serena is the antithesis of this. In a world where women (and especially Black women) are expected to settle for less, Serena’s uncompromising vision of what her best consists of and what achieving it might look like is monumental. Coco Gauff describes Serena’s power as residing in her ability to command better for herself–especially in tennis, a traditionally white space:
“She never puts herself down. I love that she always elevates herself."Sometimes being a woman, a black woman in the world, you kind of settle for less. 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.”
So, of course it’s not at all a shock that Serena is of great importance to me as a role model. That’s the thing about Serena–she’s not just another athlete. Even when I wilfully ignored anything related to the realm of sports, I knew about Serena. The Serena that won Wimbledon in 2010 is inevitably associated with who I was that year–gawky and awkward with a baby face that retained a certain naïveté about how the world worked. When I think about those matches, in a way I’m confronted with that version of myself.
This is the nature of these sorts of life symbols–they become frozen in our memory despite the ostensible progression of time around us. Murakami cautions that these sorts of symbols “don’t age, aren’t full of contradictions, and probably don’t disappoint anyone.” I think this is partially why I found the Vogue article so jarring–it was obvious proof that Serena experiences the same concerns we all do. She has her own life and desires beyond tennis. At some point the match must end, and we must pack up our things and go home. My adolescence has to end sometime, and Serena’s retirement is a jarring reminder of how fast life and memory can progress in that way.
My anti-sport position was so staunch that even my high school debate coach decided that I would have to get into a sport–if nothing else so I could understand her endless allusions to American Football. I would stay after school most days in the debate room, trying to cram as much information about the debt ceiling or the North Korean nuclear program as possible. However, I absolutely hated it when my coach would inevitably question me about sports, as a part of her concerted campaign to probably make me less unbearably pretentious.
I remember my coach asking me, “who won the French Open this weekend?” I gulped and my mind drew a blank. I fiddled with a pencil on the lectern I was standing at instead of answering my coach. Whoever it was, I figured, they were intensely irrelevant to my very deep and profound intellectual world which in no way could accommodate for the boring unintelligent world of sports {I hope it is exceedingly obvious here that my tone is sarcastic and that I’ve grown far past endorsing this view of sports. But this being the internet, you never know}. When my coach said “Serena Williams” I kind of shrugged. I wanted to be fed a question about something cool, like the Federal reserve’s balance sheets or the process of paint drying.
When my coach started reading an article about how she’d won while ill with the flu, something in my mind conceded. Admittedly, it was pretty badass to win a tournament like that, let alone as a woman as well known and admired as Serena. I was insanely competitive at debate, in a way that I was judged quite often for by the adults around me. The idea that there was a woman out there fighting through something like the flu, while pumping her fist on the court and being feminine and strong at the same time was powerful.
In her retirement piece with Vogue, Serena discusses her hope for her legacy.
But I’d like to think that thanks to opportunities afforded to me, women athletes feel that they can be themselves on the court. They can play with aggression and pump their fists. They can be strong yet beautiful. They can wear what they want and say what they want and kick butt and be proud of it all… Over the years, I hope that people come to think of me as symbolizing something bigger than tennis.”
When I read this, I immediately became that version of myself in the debate room on a quiet May day in 2015. I teared up, because Serena is absolutely correct. She had helped me feel more assured in my fierce competitive nature, even if it wasn’t in the overt way that longtime fans of the sport might feel her impact. Maybe I’m new to the sport, but I’m not new to Serena. Of course I would cry at the prospect of her retirement–she’s indelibly shaped my conception of what womanhood can even entail.
One of the most intense discussions I’ve had about Serena was at a house party when I was an undergraduate. I was perched on the arm of the most uncomfortable couch I have ever laid my eyes on, nursing what I think was supposed to be a rum and coke, casually listening to the people around me talk about association football. I’d been spacing out, the combination of second hand smoke and being out past my bedtime taking a toll on my cognitive abilities. This was until I heard a joke about how nobody watches women’s sports (the conclusion of this joke, of course, being a jab at the general concept of feminism) .
I perked up immediately. The conversation felt suffocating, like everyone else around me was in on the joke, and I wasn’t. For several moments, I listened to the discussion around me until I quietly started talking about Serena Williams. Her legacy was so intense and profound that it was impossible to argue with my point. I mean how can you refute the reach that Serena has? Her existence is one of the firmest refutations of the idea that women’s sport isn’t to be taken seriously.
I cannot even fathom what the world might be like without Serena. Who would have dominated the WTA? What would the state of women’s sport look like writ large? She’s been a cultural mainstay as well, dominating public image in a way that very few Black women do in America. This is not even touching on the impact her legacy has had on tennis, directly inspiring players like Osaka and Gauff. This is not to mention all those indirectly inspired by the large bump in viewership she’s brought to the sport.
In this way, that version of Serena was present with my undergraduate self as well. A gentle reminder to keep my head in difficult situations, and a reminder of all the ways in which women can succeed. She was the antidote to what could have very well been one of the most invalidating situations I’ve experienced in recent memory. The attention she has brought to women’s sport is nearly unparalleled, and for that I will forever remember her.
It’s weird, when you’re aware a moment is going to be over before it’s finally done. In the case of Serena, I find myself over analysing everything she’s done. I want to take in all of the little details. It’s like I’m nostalgic for something that isn’t even over yet. That’s the thing about memory. It jumps and it skips until you find yourself on the precipice of something new and none of it is ever coming back.
In “With the Beatles,” Murakami is dealing with the way in which a symbol might freeze a certain version of ourselves in time. However, he is careful to distinguish reality from the symbolic realm of memory.
“But the reality we actually deal with is different from a symbol. And sometimes nothing can fill in the gap between the two—between symbol and reality. This story is fiction, of course, but my guess is that most people have experienced something similar.”
The Serena in my head is an ever present symbol of childhood, and by extension of my personal development as a woman. She is my point of contact into women’s sports, into femininity more generally. It’s extremely telling that even in math competitions or robotics tournaments, the adults around me would evoke her image in order to provide encouragement for my female competitive spirit. Of course Serena’s legacy is monumental when examining even just her competitive record, but the idea she could have this sort of impact on a shrimpy little unathletic kid in the middle of nowhere oblivious to the rules of tennis speaks even louder about the enormity of what she’s done.
Unfortunately, the real world is not the kind of place where you can put someone behind glass to preserve in a particular way for all eternity. In her Vogue article, Serena explicitly confronts the conflict between wanting a family and chasing more titles:
The way I see it, I should have had 30-plus grand slams. I had my chances after coming back from giving birth. I went from a C-section to a second pulmonary embolism to a grand slam final. I played while breastfeeding. I played through postpartum depression. But I didn’t get there. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. I didn’t show up the way I should have or could have. But I showed up 23 times, and that’s fine. Actually it’s extraordinary. But these days, if I have to choose between building my tennis résumé and building my family, I choose the latter.
This paragraph makes me tear up every time I read it. I think it’s the moment I realised that I’d been holding her up as a symbol in my head. She has battled through so much–most of these struggles I had been entirely oblivious to. There is something so poignant in someone who is so obviously perfectionistic finally acknowledging how extraordinary their record is.
“But I showed up 23 times, and that’s fine.” I can’t get that phrase out of my head. It’s not just that Serena showed up those 23 times. It’s her 73 career singles titles. It’s her four Olympic gold metals. It’s every single time she showed up on court and brought the best version of herself even when it was difficult, because her victories even since the very beginning have been symbolic of so much more. Maybe she showed up those 23 times, but her impact is simply so far beyond these titles that words elude me.
I think this is why I feel so weird about Serena evolving away from tennis. I kind of just took her existence on the tour for granted, because she’s one of those artefacts from my pre-tennis life. She’s an institution, she is in many ways inevitable. I think this is so difficult for me to write, because in many ways I’m simply not ready to let her go. I’m not ready to let go of this part of my life. She showed up those 23 times, and it was brilliant and euphoric, but at some point it had to end. It still hasn’t hit me though, that the end is here.
The context of Serena’s achievement is not extant in a vacuum. She isn’t a machine, wiling away to accomplish feats we may never again see in our lifetimes. Her achievements matter not because of the simple record of what she has accomplished, but because of the very human context in which they have been accomplished. Serena has and will continue to achieve amazing things, and I am so privileged that I happened to be alive at a time that allowed me to bear witness to just a fraction of her amazing feats. I might have to let go of Serena as a tennis player, but I cannot wait to see where she evolves to next. No matter what, I’m certain it will be extraordinary.
Lovely article. These pieces add to the diversity of stories and I can definitely resonate with a chunk of it.
Lovely article. These pieces add to the diversity of stories and I can definitely resonate with a chunk of it.