Serena Williams Playing One Last Wimbledon?

While the PGA Tour still looks a lot like it did when Tiger Woods burst on the scene, it’s hard not to notice a “Williams Effect” in tennis. More than half the American women in the top 100 tennis players are Black. Innumerable players outside the traditional demographic have picked up the sport, knowing a country-club membership is no prerequisite.

As long as Serena was winning events and capturing audiences, the majors could not possibly pay women less than men. And they no longer do, also due in large part to behind-the-scenes work from Venus. Tennis embraced technology to determine line calls, something owed largely to Serena. She was robbed at the 2004 U.S. Open, rightly complained and, as a result, human error has been reduced. She led the way in pushing tennis’s fashion boundaries with her beads and boots and catsuits. She has been an exponent for maternity leave and body positivity. No less than Roger Federer marveled at how Serena’s “confidence as a woman transfers to her tennis. She always finds a way.”

Along the way, she has offered us, and maybe herself, abundant lessons. There is no substitute for competitive resolve—Serena so often competes as though she is refusing to accept that defeat is among the battery of options.

Sports—and tennis, in particular—are a beautiful meritocracy. There is no one right background, no one right path, no one approach to your career. Win, and nothing else matters. If there were some regrettable moments along the way, they partially underscored Serena’s greatness. She has been superhuman, but she was—is—very human and complex like anyone else. That Serena was fined for threatening a lineswoman with asphyxiation-via-tennis-ball at the 2010 U.S. Open, that she was penalized in the ’18 U.S. Open final—those are also part of her legacy. So be it.

If she never gets to her goal of 24 majors, it’s a minor footnote. And a lesson, too. Even if you don’t achieve it, the courage of stating a goal and going for it is, in itself, worthy and righteous.

After a quarter century and so many false starts, we now brace for the post-Serena era. When the day comes, we will hear that the sport is poorer for it. True as that may be, one could as easily argue that, thanks to this towering champion and all she has contributed, doing it her way from start to finish, women’s tennis has never been richer.