This one goes out to my friends Jeff and Michael, who tell me they really enjoy reading my writing about sports, which certainly inspires me. Thanks, guys.
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The Australian Open is kind of a weird tournament. The main tennis season ends in early November with the WTA and ATP finals. After the tour finals, some players play events like World Team Tennis and the like to make a few bucks during what amounts to the off-season, matches that are all but exhibitions and don't count for much. And some players just go home and take some time off from competition.
When the new season starts at the beginning of January, almost everyone plays exactly one warm-up tournament, be it Brisbane or Sydney or Doha, before going to Melbourne to compete in the first Major of the year. You see odd situations and uncertain mental states. There's a wobbliness to a lot of the play. And so you get some results that wouldn't make much sense if it was March and everyone had been playing for a couple of months. Consider: this year on the women's side, eight of the top sixteen seeds lost in the third round or earlier. Twelve of the top thirty-two didn't even make it past the first round.
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Maria Sharapova. After what Serena did to Maria in the semis at last year's Wimbledon--a 6-2 6-4 thrashing in which Maria's second serve was to Serena what a Home Run Derby pitch is to a baseball slugger--and after Maria served beautifully against Belinda Bencic to win 7-5 7-5 in the round of 16, one hoped that maybe in this quarterfinal we'd finally see the battle that, on paper, Serena-Maria should provide but basically never does--going in, Serena led the head-to-head 18-2, with seventeen straight wins. But it was pretty quickly evident that whatever changes Maria had made to her game and whatever confidence she carried with her out of the Bencic match didn't carry over once she stepped onto the court with Serena. It's pretty clear that she is literally afraid of Serena, which, well, after seventeen straight losses, I guess you could consider well earned.
After the Wimbledon match, I said semi-seriously that Maria should start second-serving underhand, trying to drop balls just over the net with very little bounce. It might not look pretty, but at least it would limit the options Serena has in response. A high-bouncing short ball, which exactly describes a Sharapova topspin second serve, is, as we already discussed, Home Run Derby for Serena.
I looked over the match stats on the official Australian Open website, and it said that Serena only had three return winners in the entire match. It's hard for me to fight with data, but that's not how I remember it at all. I remember ball after ball coming right back down Maria's throat.
I have to wonder: might it not be better for Maria to hit two first serves, which, yes, risks additional double faults, but at least creates favorable conditions when she actually gets into a point? If Maria ever wants to be more than the pretty blonde girl who, in this racist world of ours, makes more money off-court than Serena--if she wants to be a champion tennis player again--then she's going to have to take some risks with her game.
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Angelique Kerber. Gotta hand it to her. Kerber was playing her first Grand Slam final, against probably the greatest player of all time, who had to that point rolled through the draw like an eighteen-wheeler through a field of carefully folded origami kittens, and Kerber came out playing to win. And she did. While Kerber's clearly no match for Serena when Serena's playing at the top of her game, well, no one else is either. The best anyone can do against Serena is play her best and hope that Serena succumbs to the stress, which she has shown time and again that she is capable of. Serena did, and Kerber took advantage. Congratulations to her.
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Serena. Looking back, I realize that I was subtly rooting against Serena at the U.S. Open. The reason was nothing personal. I just got sick of all the fucking media hype around the goddamn Grand Slam. American parochial triumphalism wears me out sometimes.
And I had to own that I was half-rooting against Serena for the same reason here. That if she won, there would be endless talk about, "Will she do in 2016 what she almost managed in 2015?" Especially if, as seemed likely after her first six rounds here, she demolished Kerber like she'd done to everyone else and lifted the trophy without dropping a set and (it sometimes seemed) barely breaking a sweat.
But she came out nervous and stressed against a player with nothing to lose, a strong desire to win, and the strategic mind to put together a game plan that would give her a shot. And that was all Kerber needed.
I don't think I'm likely to root against Serena again. I'm finding that the more I watch her, the more I like her. It's not especially because she's an astonishing athlete, which my oh my is she. It's because, though she always looks and usually plays like a superhero, she's so incredibly human. Despite just rolling through the tournament, and despite facing an opponent whom she's capable of defeating easily, she was nervous and tight and she lost.
The best moment of the tournament happened after the last ball was hit. Kerber fell to the court in tears. Serena was surely gutted at having lost, and no one would have questioned had she simply waited at the net to shake hands as is traditional, but she didn't wait. She came around the net and gave Kerber a congratulatory hug. Her graciousness and warmth to her competitor were clearly honest and unforced. There are at least 18,000 reasons why Serena should be a pretty terrible person at this point, the way a weird successful famous life can warp someone. It would surprise no one were she the Kanye West of tennis. But it seems the opposite is true. She appears to be a genuinely good person. I hope to meet her someday.
And now any potential hype about "2016 Grand Slam?" is over. Though there is still all the talk about equaling and then surpassing Steffi Graf's record of 22 Grand Slam wins, and though it's clear that Serena feels that pressure, short of some unlikely accident like a satellite falling on her, she will win a few more Slams. At 34, she's still far and away the best player on the tour. None of the current crop of top players are going to get much better than they already are, and the promising players of the next generation (particularly Bencic, Keys and Muguruza) are still too green to offer consistent competition. It won't surprise me at all if Serena wins the three remaining Slams of 2016.