On the Line

by Serena Williams

  It took a frustrating (make that maddening!) loss to Jennifer Capriati in the quarterfinals of the 2004 U.S. Open to relight the fire in my game. What’s interesting to me here is that once I realized the outcome of this match was out of my hands, it was like a switch flipped. I was pushed to accept the fact that I could never be completely in control—of my life, my game, whatever. All I could do was put myself in position to succeed and then hope for the best.

  The match itself has become kind of famous in tennis circles. For one thing, I had a great outfit that year, so people remember it because of these killer shiny-black warm-up boots I wore over my sneakers, the short denim skirt, the studded black sport tank that gave the outfit an in-your-face, hip-hop feel. It was a real signature look for me—and it made an impression, I’ll say that. Mostly, though, the match is still talked about for the ton of missed calls that seemed to tilt the outcome in Capriati’s favor. This, too, made an impression—a far more lasting one than my head-turning outfit. In fact, people in tennis look to this match as the catalyst for the player challenge system that was adopted soon after—and all I can think in response to this is: It was about time.

  Look, I never like to blame the officiating for deciding a match, because the incorrect calls tend to even out, but here on this night, before a packed house at Arthur Ashe Stadium, on the healing end of a personal and professional turmoil, there was a plague of incorrect calls—almost all of them against me. Even a call that shouldn’t have been a call went against me. It was just so ridiculous.

  In the very first set, there was a terrible call in the third game that might have signaled what was to come. I didn’t give it much thought because I was up a break and ahead 40–15. I hit an apparent baseline winner that was called long. I questioned the call, but not too forcefully. The ball was clearly in, but the umpire failed to overrule the line judge and the call was allowed to stand. I was more annoyed than rattled, especially when Jennifer won the next point to bring the game to deuce, but I managed to hold serve and push the score to 3–0 in the first, so I set the missed call aside.

  It was nothing, I told myself—a hiccup. It would be awhile before I knew these hiccups were contagious.

  I ended up dominating that first set, 6–2, but Jennifer fought back in the second. For some reason there were an unusual number of close calls throughout. At one point, when I was down a break in the second set, I hit a passing shot that caught the back of the baseline, but the crowd let out such a groan of disapproval that Jennifer approached the umpire to argue. She didn’t say anything at first, but now she thought it was out. She didn’t get anywhere with her complaint, but when you’re on the other side of the net and your opponent approaches the chair to protest a call and take some of the air out of your energy, it’s never a good thing. Even if the call is upheld and the point stands in your favor, it can be unnerving, and that’s just what happened here. It got me thinking of that missed call in the first set, the one that turned out not to matter. It set it up in my head—and, for all I know, in Jennifer Capriati’s head, too—that this was a match we couldn’t trust to the officials.

  Indeed, here and there for the balance of the match, a close call seemed to go against one of us, and if you look at the replay you can see the frustration on our faces. You can hear it in the groans of the crowd when they thought a call was missed. We were both playing so well, trying to use as much of the court as possible, so the lines came into play a lot more than usual, and that’s a tough way to play when you’re not sure you can trust the lines. It cheats you of some of your canvas. The real test, though, came after Jennifer forced a third set. She had a break point in my first service game of the third set, but I battled back to deuce. Then, with the score knotted, I hit a gorgeous passing shot that was completely inside the line—by about six inches! I mean, I was so happy with that shot! The ball was so clearly in, the line judge didn’t even bother to make the call, but the umpire scored the point for Jennifer. I learned later that she didn’t actually overrule the call, because there was no call; she simply put it in the Capriati column and instructed us to move on.

  The same kind of thing had happened to Venus in Wimbledon earlier that summer, when an umpire mistakenly awarded a point to Venus’s opponent during a tie-breaker. Venus ended up losing the match, largely because of that one scoring error, and I wasn’t about to let that happen here, so I marched over to the umpire’s chair. I said, “That ball was so in. What’s going on here?”

  I probably should have asked the umpire to check with the line judge, to confirm that the ball was in, but I didn’t think of that at the time. Plus, it didn’t even occur to me that the umpire had simply misread the score; I just assumed she was overruling and calling the ball out, so I merely complained, as forcefully and respectfully as I could—to no good result. The point went to Jennifer, giving her a second opportunity to break. However, I won the next point, bringing us back to deuce, and as I collected myself before my next serve I took time to think, If it wasn’t for that missed call, Serena, this game would be yours.

  The “lost” point messed with my head. It shouldn’t have, but it did—and sure enough Jennifer ended up breaking me to go up 1–0 to start the third set.

  I thought, Isn’t that how it goes, when a call goes against you? It’s never on a nothing, throwaway point; it’s always meaningful, and it always comes back to bite you or set a negative tone for the rest of the match. I’d allowed that to happen here, so now I wasn’t only frustrated with the umpire and the line judge; I was frustrated with myself as well. But that wasn’t the end of it. Jennifer gave me back that break in the very next game—on a double fault, no less. It felt like a gift, but then I gave it right back, allowing Jennifer to take the lead with another break of her own. That made three straight service breaks to start the third set, which I guess meant we were each playing tight, like we were afraid to lose—never a good approach if you mean to make a statement win.

  I was so rattled by this latest missed call that I actually said something to the umpire during the changeover. I said, “I can’t believe you would sabotage me like that.” It wasn’t like me to mouth off to an official—but at the same time it wasn’t like me to blindly accept an abuse of authority, either. That’s how I saw it. Every official misses a call from time to time; but you’re only supposed to miss the close ones, right? The rules of the game are the rules of the game; the boundaries of the court are the boundaries of the court; and we’re meant to play by the rules, within the boundaries. Otherwise, what’s the point?

  Jennifer held serve in the next game to go up 3–1 in the deciding set, so I answered with four straight points to push it to 3–2. The next game was a real showcase, with one great point after another. It actually felt to me like I was controlling the pace of play. I was running Jennifer from sideline to sideline, but I couldn’t put her away. She was tenacious, unyielding. Whatever I did, she had an answer. I earned a break point in the middle of a seesaw deuce battle, but Jennifer fought me off, until she finally held to go up 4–2.

  Then I held serve, too, to climb back to 4–3.

  Jennifer’s next service game was another hard-fought duel. She had me on my heels. I continued to control the pace, but she kept winning points. I got off to a strong start, taking the first point on an approach to the net, and the second on a great return of serve, wide to Jennifer’s backhand side. But then Jennifer clawed her way back into the game and won the next four points to hold serve yet again and push the score to 5–3.

  Now I was really up against it, and this was where that switch seemed to flip for me—only not in the most positive way at first. It was more like a moment of despair than a moment of personal discovery. I was playing great tennis, and yet somehow I’d allowed a few incorrect calls to nearly chase me from the tournament. Nothing against Jennifer, who was also playing great tennis and showing a whole lot of grit and determination, but it felt to me like this was my match to win, and like it was being taken away fr
om me in an arbitrary way.

  I managed to hold with a convincing service game to keep things close. That still gave Jennifer, up 5–4, a chance to serve for the match, but she double-faulted on the very first point of her service game, and for a beat I thought she might unravel. In fact, I nearly helped with the unraveling, hitting a backhanded passing shot that caught a big chunk of baseline, but not enough to keep the line judge from calling it out. Here again, the replay confirmed that the ball was in, but I just couldn’t get a call.

  There would be two more calls against me in this final game—the first an apparent double fault at 30–30 on a second serve that was clearly long; the second an apparent winner at deuce that was somehow called wide to give the advantage to Jennifer. The replays later confirmed that each of these calls, too, should have gone my way, but both went to Jennifer during the run of play, and she finally put me away on her second match point to end the contest.

  Three calls in the same game! A game I needed! A game I would have won, if the first two calls had gone the right way! A game that would have put the match back on my racquet, where I felt it belonged. But it was not to be.

  Certainly, this was a tough loss, but it came at such a curious crossroads for me that I didn’t quite know what to make of it. At first I kind of threw up my hands and thought, I can make my shots and do everything right and still come up short. I thought, All I can do is all I can do. But then I thought about it some more and started to see the power in these realizations. No, I couldn’t control the umpires or the line judges any more than I could control my opponent. The only person I could control on the court was me.

  To be honest and supercritical of myself, I don’t think I did such a great job keeping my emotions in check that night. I kept flashing the umpire these cutting looks, as if those alone might set things right. But the thing to do when you’re on the receiving end of adversity is to rise above it. Or at least to try. When you buy into the adversity and shout that things are going against you, then things have a way of going all the way against you. But when you set it aside and move on, you give yourself a fighting chance. As I reconsidered this Capriati match in my rearview mirror, I came to look on it as an opportunity for growth. I started to see all these points of connection between the match itself and what was going on in my personal life—struggling with the loss of my sister, battling back from an injury, trying to rediscover my will and focus.

  As such, this frustrating (and yes, maddening!) match presented me with a real turning-point moment. It would take awhile, though, for me to gain the perspective I’d need to let it turn me in the right direction.

  I got it together to win my very next tournament, in Beijing, and I somehow reached the finals in the season-ending Tour Championships, which were held that year in Los Angeles, before falling to Maria Sharapova in three sets. I even started the 2005 season with a bang, winning my second Australian Open—this time, battling back from 2–6 to beat the top-ranked Lindsay Davenport 2–6, 6–3, 6–0.

  But after that I lapsed into serious downhill mode. My knee was fine, as this recent minirun had demonstrated, but looking back I think my head wasn’t in the game. By all outward appearances, things should have been looking up on the court, but it didn’t seem that way to me. The lesson of that Capriati match had yet to take hold—and more than that, I couldn’t quite rededicate myself to my game. I tried to play through whatever funk I was in, but the more I played the more I resented playing. I’d never felt this way, but suddenly it was harder and harder to get out and hit each day between tournaments. It was like every competitive bone in my body was broken—only I didn’t have the self-awareness or strength of character to see that anything was wrong.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was slipping into a depression. I don’t think it was what a psychologist would have called a clinical depression, but it was an aching sadness, an allover weariness, a sudden disinterest in the world around me—in tennis, above all. Call it what you will, although at first I didn’t think to call it anything. I tried to either ignore it or power past it. I just kept playing and playing. And struggling and struggling. Underneath, I had my share of aches and pains. An ankle sprain. A shoulder pull. My results from that period tell the tale: after Melbourne, I made it past the quarterfinals only once the rest of the year—and even then, in Dubai, my shoulder forced me to retire before Jelena Jankovic could beat me in the quarters herself. Heck, in the final five events I played in 2005 (Rome, Wimbledon, Toronto, the U.S. Open, and Beijing), I didn’t even make it to the quarterfinal round, so I was clearly hurting.

  I wasn’t honest with myself about how I was feeling, what I was thinking. In truth, I’d never been honest with myself about stuff like this—and that right there was the root of my troubles. People would ask me what was wrong and I’d shrug them off. I’d say everything was fine, but of course everything wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Usually, I could talk to my mom about something like this, or my sisters, but I wouldn’t let myself. Daddy, too, had always been a great sounding board, but I shut him out as well. I started seeing a therapist in Los Angeles during this period—weekly, at first, then a couple times a week—and I didn’t even tell my mom about it; that’s how closed off I was about whatever was going on with me. I wouldn’t even leave my apartment, except to go to therapy.

  In my therapy sessions, the more I talked, the more I started to realize that my gloomy funk had to do with making other people happy. It came up because of Tunde. It came up because of me not playing following my knee surgery. It came up because of me wanting to validate the faith the good people at Nike had just placed in me with a big new sponsorship deal I’d signed when I was rehabbing my knee. It came up because of all those weeks at number one, and the pressures I felt to get back there. It was all these things, mashed up together, but the main ingredient was me trying to please everyone else. That was the theme, just as it had been a theme reaching all the way to childhood. It was a lifetime of me on the tennis court, working hard to make other people happy—so it was inevitable that I would come to resent tennis at some point.

  I’ve read that in times of stress and duress we start to resent what we love the most, and I suspect that’s what happened here. It’s like tennis had become a job for me, instead of a passion, a joy, a sweet release. At a time in my life when I needed something to lift me up and out of the fog that found me after my sister’s passing, all I could do was keep playing tennis, which was all I could ever do. And now, for the first time, tennis couldn’t solve anything for me. When I wasn’t looking, it went from being the answer to the question. My whole life had been tennis, tennis, tennis, and here I desperately wanted something more.

  Something else.

  Something new.

  It all came to a head in Australia in January 2006. My dismal 2005 season was still fresh in my mind—and in everyone else’s, I feared. I’d thought I could put it past me and start fresh, but then I found myself in the middle of a third-round match against Daniela Hantuchova, a tall right-hander from Slovakia. She was wearing me out! And all I could think was that I so didn’t want to be there, at just that moment. On the court. In Melbourne. Fighting for points I didn’t really care about, in a match I didn’t really care about. So what did I do? I cried. Right there on the court. I don’t think anyone saw, because I was all sweaty to begin with, but tears were just streaming down my face. It started during one of the changeovers, but it continued when I went back out to play, and it was such a low, despairing, desperate moment for me. I don’t know how I managed to keep playing, but I kept playing, because that’s just what I did. I sucked it up and pressed on, but I was no competition for Daniela that day. She beat me in straight sets, and I still remember walking to the players’ locker room after the match feeling so completely lost and beaten and confused.

  I went back to Los Angeles as soon as I could, and I didn’t pick up a racquet for months. Officially, I put it out there that I was hurt, but I wasn’t hurting in a
ny kind of tangible way. Nothing was physically wrong with me. I was depressed. Deeply and utterly and completely depressed. I didn’t talk to anyone for weeks and weeks. I think I went about a month and a half without talking to my mom, which was so out of character for me because we usually spoke every day. It freaked her out, I’m sure. I didn’t talk to my sisters, and it freaked them out, too. At one point, they came out to Los Angeles to shake me from my doldrums, in a kind of intervention, and after that I started seeing my therapist on a daily basis, so I guess it had a positive effect. I wasn’t on any medication, although we talked about it in therapy, but I was leery of changing my moods or messing with my already fragile state of mind, so I resisted.

  Eventually, I came to the realization that I was the problem. It wasn’t Nike or the pressure to be number one or being an emblem of hope for my family, or any of that. It wasn’t losing Tunde. These were all contributing factors, but ultimately it was on me. It was all this negative energy I’d allowed to build up around me, that’s what was dragging me down. I couldn’t even make myself happy, so of course there was no way I could make anyone else happy.

  For the longest time, Venus and I used to marvel that all these girls on the tour would burn out from tennis, and we would just keep going. I’d never once felt any kind of pressure, or that I was anywhere close to burning out—that is, until Tunde died, and then all of a sudden I started to feel pressure. The pressure to get back to tennis. The pressure to heal. The pressure to fulfill the promise and responsibility Nike had placed in me. And on and on. All of a sudden, I looked up and felt like tennis didn’t matter anymore—because it wasn’t about tennis anymore. It was about playing, and going through the motions, and keeping all these people around me happy. I’d let the game get away from me.

  And then a weird and wonderful thing happened. That switch I talked about, when I was describing that Capriati match? It finally flipped in a positive direction. It flipped to where I chose tennis. This was a first for me—and a real breakthrough. All along, going back to when I was a kid, I’d never made an active or conscious choice where tennis was concerned. It was always like tennis chose me. Don’t get me wrong, I was honored to have been chosen, and I was blessed with a God-given gift, and I came to love the game—really and truly. But it had always been handed to me, and expected of me, and held out like a given. I came to it by default, and it took reaching for it here, when I was down and desperate and miserable, for me to fully embrace the game.