Once again, I chose to find the power in the struggle of these good people. Once again, I chose to be lifted by their perseverance, their resilience. Once again, their will became mine and I was strengthened.
U R a queen. U have been waiting for this moment. This moment has been waiting for U. For billions of years, this energy has been building up in U for this moment, this tournament. It all happens now!!! Release and go. U don’t have to hit every ball hard. Just relax & focus. U don’t have to be perfect. Just be strong, and brave. She’s the one who should be scared. She’s the one who isn’t ready. “Lose control.” (Beyoncé—again!!!)
—MATCH BOOK ENTRY
TWELVE
Up from Down Under
I played a couple tournaments before leaving on that first trip to Africa in November 2006, just to take my measure. I’d been away from the game for so long it felt a little like I was relaunching myself—Serena Williams, version 2.0. This version had a few glitches after all that time on the shelf, to go along with a few extra pounds.
As you might imagine, I ate a lot during that period in Los Angeles when I wasn’t playing. There was a place called Stan’s Donuts in Westwood, not far from where I lived; it’s considered one of the best donut shops in the world, and it just about did me in. And, to make matters worse, I wasn’t doing any fitness training (unless you happen to count shopping on Rodeo Drive as an aerobic activity), so those excess calories had nowhere to go but my hips and thighs.
I was in terrible shape, but I figured I could play myself back into form. Of course, it was naïve to think I could do so without any criticism or scrutiny from the tennis community, but I couldn’t see any other approach if I meant to start playing again in any kind of timely fashion. If I waited until I was completely ready to resume my career in an all-out way, I might never get it going. I talked to my parents about this, and they agreed that the longer I was away from the game the harder it would be to return. Venus, too. The thing to do was jump right back in and figure out what I needed to work on from there.
My first tournament after the long layoff was in Cincinnati—in July, a full six months after my third-round loss at the 2006 Australian Open. I don’t know what it was about that Cincinnati tournament, but it just popped out at me when I was looking over the calendar. It’s like it was calling me to come play, and I guess I must have been ready to get back to it because I listened. Right around that time, a day or two before I signed myself up for the tournament, I ran into this adorable little black girl on the street in my neighborhood, who was just superexcited to see me. She hurried over to me and said, “You’re Serena Williams!”
I must confess, she caught me a little off guard. I had my sunglasses on, and probably a hat, and I wasn’t exactly looking my best. (Come to think of it, I might have been coming out of Stan’s Donuts, so she caught me red-handed, too!) So I gathered myself and said, “That’s me.”
Well, this girl popped a smile so wide I could see her full set of teeth. She was so cute! She said, “I just love you so much, Serena. When I grow up I want to be just like you!”
It had been awhile since I’d gotten this kind of star treatment, but coming from this adorable little girl, with that bright, wide smile, it was just the push I needed to get back to my game. She told me how Venus and I were her role models, how she had a big sister and how they called themselves “Venus” and “Serena” when they played tennis. She said, “You’re just so awesome.”
I said, “You really think so?” Just then, I wasn’t feeling so awesome, so it was good to hear.
We talked for a bit, along these same you’re so awesome lines, but then this little girl completely surprised me. She said, “I know you haven’t been playing a lot lately, but I hope you start playing again soon. If you’re sick, I hope you feel better. I hope you come back because you’re still a great player. I just know you’ll come back and be better than ever.”
Well, that just took my breath away. I thought, If a little kid—I’m guessing she was ten or twelve—can look me in the eye and tell me I haven’t played my best tennis yet, there must be something to it. So I gave her a hug, thanked her for her kind words, and raced home to look at some tapes of my past matches. I do that sometimes, when I’m not feeling sure of myself or confident of my next move. It’s an amazing motivator and a powerful pick-me-up to pop in a video of one of your Grand Slam tournament victories and put yourself back in that championship frame of mind. Right away, it reminded me how much I used to enjoy playing, how much I used to enjoy winning. I looked at all this other footage, too, of these other girls winning their Grand Slam tournaments, and I started to think, I can beat those girls. In my sleep, I can beat those girls. That’s what I always think when I see someone other than me or Venus holding that trophy—only here I hadn’t looked at tennis in a while so it was a revelation, and it was all on the back of this uplifting encounter with this African-American girl.
She picked me up, this little girl, and she’d never know it but she set me right back down onto the career path I’d all but abandoned, because I signed up for that Cincinnati tournament the very next afternoon. Like I said, it had been nearly six months since I stepped away from the game, following that early exit in Melbourne. That’s a long time to be away from an activity, even one you used to be really, really good at. I’d dropped to a rank of 139—the lowest I’d been since I was on my way up in 1997. You know, on the way down, it was a whole other perspective. Back when I was starting out, it felt like I was going places. Now, after all that time at the top, it felt like I was nowhere.
I didn’t play all that badly in Cincinnati. I actually surprised myself—I surprised a lot of people, I think. Nobody was really expecting me to do all that much, so I caught my opponents unprepared. I beat the #2 seed in the first round—Anastasia Myskina of Russia, 6–2, 6–2. To this day, I’m sure I beat her mostly on muscle memory. That, and my big serve, which never left me—thank You, God! I remember making a conscious effort to win points as efficiently as possible, because it was ridiculously hot, and I didn’t think I had the stamina to play too many long rallies. (As it was, I was huffing and puffing!) That meant going for a lot of winners, at a time in my career when I might have been more patient, but I didn’t think I had that luxury here, so I just pounded away at this girl. At some point, probably after I hit my first winner, I thought, Wow, this is so great to be playing again. And it was. The tournament organizers were so gracious, so welcoming. The fans were extremely supportive and generous. It was just such an encouraging return, in every possible way. After that first match, I pushed past two American players in the next two rounds—Bethanie Mattek and Amy Frazier, also in a straight-sets hurry. Vera Zvonareva finally knocked me out in the semifinals, in a 6–2, 6–3 trouncing that more accurately reflected the quality of my game and my level of fitness.
Thinking back on that tournament, I believe I won those first few matches on shock and awe; players were a little in shock to see me out there, and a little in awe of my past accomplishments, so I managed to sneak past them into the later rounds. It felt good to be playing again, though. Good and right and welcome. In some ways, I found, high-level tennis is like riding a bicycle. Once you climb back on, you’re good to go. Only in my case, with that overall lack of fitness and those few extra pounds, together with the fact that the players on the women’s tour kept getting better and better, it’s like I got back onto that bicycle on a steep uphill climb. I could move the pedals, but I couldn’t really get anything going just yet.
Next, I earned a wild-card berth in Los Angeles a couple weeks later, which I thought would be a good tune-up for the U.S. Open. And here again, that’s just what it was, for a stretch, until an up-and-coming Serbian player named Jelena Jankovic sent me packing, 6–4, 6–3. This was before Jelena had cracked the Top 20, but she really took it to me that day, that’s for sure. She didn’t really have much of a serve, but she could put her stamp on a game in every other aspect, and here she ran m
e around pretty good.
At the Open, I had to get past what the old me, Serena 1.0, might have seen as the indignity of having to qualify for the first time in my career. The new me tried to look at it as just another hurdle I’d have to take on the way to getting my game back. And that’s all it was, really—an obstacle. My rank was back in the double digits, at 91, but that was hardly worth celebrating; I was still a long way from where I wanted to be, so I had that obstacle, too.
My plan was to mess with other people’s tournaments. Wasn’t really any kind of strategy, but I didn’t have a lot of options. I knew the seeded players tended to look past their early-round opponents, thinking they’d draw low-ranked rookies and wouldn’t have to worry too much about surviving their first few matches. I knew this because that used to be how I approached my early-round opponents. I took them for granted. Here at the U.S. Open, I knew these top players wouldn’t be thrilled to face me in the first or second round, so I tried to play that to my advantage. And that worked well enough, taking me through the first three rounds with straight-sets victories over Lourdes Dominguez-Lino, Daniela Hantuchova, and a rising star named Ana Ivanovic, all in straight sets.
It was in Round 16, though, that I needed to ratchet up my game, and I’m afraid I fell woefully short. I was up against the top-ranked Amelie Mauresmo of France. We’d faced each other a bunch of times, going back to 1999, and she’d beaten me only once—in Rome, in 2003, at the end of my great run. Now, things were a little different. Amelie was the same dangerous player—big and strong and smart—and she’d been playing great tennis. Me, I was a wild card, in every sense of the term. No one knew what to expect from me, least of all myself. I’m sure Amelie wasn’t too terribly happy about running into me so early in the tournament, but at the same time I wasn’t too terribly happy about running into her, so in this one respect at least we were dead even.
She ended up beating me, but I made her sweat. I took the middle set 6–0, and that’s always a powerful calling card, when you can break a top player three times in a single set and beat her 6–0. When you’re coming back from nowhere at all, you take your accomplishments where you can find them, and here I took this one and held it close.
I figured I’d need it before long.
That first trip to Africa led directly to a career turnaround—another Godsend, I’ve come to believe. A lot of people bring back souvenirs when they travel: crafts, trinkets, art, clothes… Me, I brought back a renewed sense of purpose and a freshly charged personal battery. Unfortunately, I also brought back a few extra pounds—which, also unfortunately, I added to the few extra I’d started carrying during my long layoff.
The tennis press was only too happy to point this out when I turned up in Melbourne in January 2007 to prepare for the Australian Open. I went first to Hobart, Australia, to play in a tune-up tournament. The idea was to get another couple matches under my belt before the Open and to get my body clock adjusted to the sick time difference. I wasn’t alone in this, of course. A lot of players spend some extra time Down Under ahead of the Australian Open to acclimate and get settled, especially because the tournament sits at the front end of the tour season and there’s not a whole lot going on other than a couple of tune-up tournaments on the continent. It makes sense to settle in there and complete your off-season training regimen at some local facility so you can hit the ground running once the Open begins.
I was pumped and energized and ready to jump-start my career, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at me. I was seriously out of shape and nowhere in the rankings—now back down to 94, headed into Hobart. In my head, I was thinking I was back in the mix and on top of my game, but that’s not where the game was played. What counted was how I’d perform on the court. It’s not like I was a little kid, tearing it up on the little-kid circuit in Los Angeles. I had to go out and get it done.
I was in a new phase in my thinking when it came to tennis. Now that I’d rededicated myself to my game, the plan was to focus on Grand Slam tournaments. I would be all about the majors, I told myself. It used to be that every time I’d take the court, every tournament I’d play, I expected to win. Anything less than a championship was a disappointment, but that’s a sure mind-set for burnout, don’t you think? The better approach, I’d decided, the more seasoned approach, to put myself in position to do well when it counted and where it counted on the women’s tour, were the majors and a couple of the Tier I events.
Beginning in 2009, the WTA tour changed how these events are classified. Now the old Tier I events are known as Premier Mandatory tournaments, and the lesser events are known as Premier 5 (or Premier) tournaments, but it all amounts to the same thing. There are big, meaningful tournaments, and small, less meaningful tournaments, and my idea was to focus on the big ones. Everything else was a tune-up. That was how I set it up in my head, and here in Hobart was one of my first opportunities to put this new approach to the test. It was a Tier IV event, so a lot of the top players wouldn’t be in attendance, but the main objective was to get some more matches under my feet. The more I kept winning, the more matches I’d get to play.
Anyway, that was the plan, and it was working well enough. I won a couple of nothing-special matches to reach the quarterfinals, but then I ran into an Austrian named Sybille Bammer, who was ranked 56th at the time. What a frustrating match! I couldn’t get out of my own way. I won the first set, but Sybille battled back to win 3–6, 7–5, 6–3, and I thought, Man, this is bad, Serena. You can’t even get past the quarterfinals in a Tier IV tournament.
So much for my more seasoned mind-set, right?
I was so mad at myself for letting that match get away from me. I went out that night and started running, Rocky-style, just like in the movie. It’s almost like I could hear that theme song in my head. The next morning, I got up before the sun and went out for another Rocky run. My mom was staying with me in my hotel room, but I didn’t even tell her I was heading out. I just tiptoed from the room without waking her and hit the streets. I ran through all these different neighborhoods, up and down steps. I put myself through some serious paces. At one point, I found this huge park and started doing a series of sprints. I didn’t tell anybody where I was going or where I’d been. I did it for me. I was tired of losing.
Who knows, maybe this was my way of catching up to the rest of the field.
We went to Melbourne that afternoon, thinking at least I’d have another day or two to settle in before the tournament. Unfortunately, there was a pile of negative energy that found me almost as soon as I unpacked my bags. The biggest drag on my positive frame of mind was the negative press I’d started to notice as soon as I hit town. I try not to pay attention to what media types are saying about me, but there’s no avoiding it in Melbourne. The Australian Open is such a giant big deal when you’re Down Under, it’s tough to tune it out. I’d have to have been deaf and blind to miss all the criticism. The Australian press can be so mean, so petty. And so loud! The British press, too. The general consensus was that I was a big fat cow. That was what I kept hearing—in just those terms, too. All the talk in the sports pages was how the championship was a pipe dream for me because I was so out of shape. My best days on the tour were behind me, they said. I hadn’t won a tournament since 2005. I was a lost soul who’d been away from the game for too long to get back to the top.
My first thought was, Moo.
I just had to laugh. It was either that or cry, and I wasn’t about to let these people get to me, so I tried to smile and press on. On the body-image front, I’d always been comfortable as an adult with how I looked. I’m big and athletic, so I know I’m never going to have one of those rail-thin, supermodel-type bodies. I’m not some blond, blue-eyed thing. I have big boobs, and I have a big butt. That’s me—and I love it! But from time to time, like most women, I stress about my appearance. I don’t want to, but I do. I know better, but I do. I look in the mirror and everything seems too big, too much, too fat… too, too, too! Most times, I se
e my reflection and what I get back is hot and sexy and all that good stuff, but I have my low moments, same as everyone else. I have my worry spots, and here in Australia, carrying all that extra weight, I had more than my share, so it wasn’t as easy to laugh off these hurtful comments as it might have been at some other time in my career.
Of course, it wasn’t how I looked that mattered. It was how I played, and I reminded myself that even though I’d always played to win I had to be realistic. I was coming off that long layoff, and the mean-spirited comments about my fitness and my game were rooted in truth. I was a little heavy—maybe twenty pounds heavier than I wanted to be at that point. And I wasn’t expecting to win, not with the same confidence or certainty I usually brought to each tournament. Don’t misunderstand, I wanted to win, but I wasn’t counting on it. Rather, I was putting myself in position to win the next time out, or the time after that.
Even if I had been in top form, in top shape, the tournament draw was stacked against me. As an unseeded player, now ranked 81st in the world, I would have to face six seeded players on the way to a championship. No one had ever done that before, so there was that to consider. Actually, there was a lot to consider, and I went into my first match thinking it wasn’t so easy, getting my head around this tournament. So many people were counting me out, the same way they had when I first came up.
All these negatives added up, and I remember lacing my sneakers in the players’ lounge, going through all my last-minute preparations and thinking there was a lot of pressure on me to do well here. I’d meant to kind of sneak up on the tournament in a no-pressure sort of way, but that clearly hadn’t happened. Of course, I was putting a lot of this pressure on myself, but some of it was external. And then, just to add insult to insult, I received an upsetting visit from a Nike representative, who told me in no uncertain terms that if I did not perform at my accustomed level the company might drop me from my sponsorship deal. This guy actually came right out and said, “You really have to do well here.” In the players’ lounge, right before my first match! To which I answered with something like, “Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe it, that this was what this man was telling me, right when I was getting ready. So that was another distraction I really didn’t need going in to a major tournament.
On the Line Page 21