“The atmosphere was a lot,” she stated later. “When I walked out the reception was really overwhelming. It was loud and I could feel it in my chest. It was a really good feeling, a feeling I’ll never forget. I was just thinking, ‘Is this real?’ And at the same time, I was thinking ‘I still have a match to play.’ And I wanted to play up to the reception.”
It was a really massive ask. Williams, 40, got here into the event having performed simply 4 matches in 14 months, three of which she’d misplaced. Still, possibly she may discover the outdated inside vibration, the aggressive rage that powered her to 23 Grand Slam titles. Williams had all the time been a participant who may lay the racket down for months at a time, after which decide it again up and bang off the rust with the sheer fierceness of her flailing.
“I’m the kind of person who, it just takes one or two things, and then it clicks,” she stated three weeks in the past throughout a event in Toronto. “So, I’m just waiting on that to click.”
That’s precisely what occurred. She got here out of the Arthur Ashe Stadium tunnel Monday evening for the final massive event of her profession in a mock black evening-gown full with cape and prepare — however she had on the black sneakers of a boxer. Her aggressive instincts clicked again in, and her elbows began flying.
Williams has all the time had a particular affinity for the Open — not only for the excessive exhausting bounces of its acrylic courts, however for all the pieces else that’s exhausting about it. In a manner the atmosphere was an opponent in its personal proper, and it was as if she loved assembly its ruggedness with her brawn, answering its noise with her deep aggressive howls, and its hassles by punching the lights out of Danka Kovinic, 6-3, 6-3.
Her will to win lower straight by means of the cacophony of mass transportation, the sound of jets from LaGuardia Airport vacuuming up the sky, the kerlack-kerlack of road vehicles rocking alongside the tracks and the skreeee of prepare brakes, the yeering of sirens, the gabbling of cocktail-soaked crowds. Her tennis was guttural, louder than all of it, and the appreciative roars constructed from the group.
As she wrote in Vogue journal in her first-person retirement announcement, “There were so many matches I won because something made me angry or someone counted me out. That drove me. I’ve built a career on channeling anger and negativity and turning it into something good.”
Farewell retirement tournaments are emotionally difficult for all nice gamers, however most particularly for the best of the greats. In 1989, when Chris Evert performed her closing Grand Slam event on the U.S. Open, the ovations and adulation virtually obtained in her manner, threatened to show her head away from the job at hand. “I’m not out there so they can applaud all the years of tennis,” she stated on the time. “I’m out there to win a match.”
Williams voiced the same ambivalence. “I’m not looking for some ceremonial, final on-court moment,” she instructed Vogue. “I’m terrible at goodbyes, the world’s worst.”
Clearly, at some point in the past few weeks, Williams decided she wanted this match to be more than just a ceremony, and a terrible goodbye. Just a couple of months ago, she had seemed so diminished after a first-round loss to unseeded Harmony Tan at Wimbledon that she sounded already retired. “Today was what I could do,” she said after that match. “At some point you have to be able to be okay with that. And that’s all I can do. I can’t change time or anything.”
Nevertheless, Williams found a way to wrest the hands of the clock backward, if only for 90-some minutes Monday night. Williams simply hadn’t worked as hard at the game in the past couple of years as she once had, splitting her court time with mothering a 4-year-old daughter, and nurturing venture capital investments. Her game has always relied on supreme fitness and physicality — she said it best herself back in 1999 when she won her first U.S. Open. “I have to go sweat in the sun every day when I could be at the pool with some lemonade.”
She built toward this Open with single-minded commitment. She sharpened her strokes and her fitness by doing something she never had before, asking fellow players to serve as sparring partners in practice matches. Her friend Rennae Stubbs, the former player turned TV analyst who is serving as her coach, told a camera crew after Williams’s last hitting session Monday afternoon, “She’s practiced really, really hard. And you know, she’s trying to do everything she possibly can to be at her very best tonight.”
At first, it seemed like it was too much — she was overwhelmed, too taut. She lost three games in a row to trail by 3-2 in the first set, uptight and short arming the ball. But then it happened — a big windmilling topspin backhand lopped off a corner line for a winner — and everything suddenly elevated, the mood in the stadium, the bullying dynamism of Williams’s strokes, the twist and velocity on her serves. She ripped off the next 11 points.
When she took the first set, concluding it with a barrage of 100-mph serves, she issued the old trademark shuddering scream, “Commme onnnn!”
By triple match point the crowd was on its feet — and it stayed there, roaring, this time not in tribute to the past champion, but to a player who for the moment was still very much present.
