Tennis, for so long a staid sport played by posh, country-club types, is now far more diverse, partly thanks to Serena Williams
Open tennis tournament reaches its climax, with the women’s and men’s finals. Yet for many fans, this year’s highlight has already come and gone. That was Serena Williams’s last match at Flushing Meadows, and possibly the last of her career: a valiant third-round defeat to Ajla Tomljanovic on September 2nd. It drew a peak of almost 7m viewers onMs Williams has not yet confirmed that she is hanging up her racket, but said in August that she would be “evolving” away from the sport.
Behind the grand-slam count lie three remarkable factors. One is Ms Williams’s durability. In women’s tennis, in particular, teenage prodigies are common, but often fade fast. In that firstOpen final, the 17-year-old Serena beat Martina Hingis, who won her first grand slam at 16 and her fifth and last at only 18. Steffi Graf, whose record is closest to Ms Williams’s in the modern era, carried off 22 slams in the space of 12 years.
The third factor has been Ms Williams’s combination of athleticism, strength and skill. Her serve was vicious—topping out at 208kph, the eighth-fastest ever sent down by a woman—but so were her returns. Her backhand was perhaps the best the women’s game has seen, hit in an open stance with scant regard for conventional technique. Neither did she pay much heed to tennis’s other conventions.
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