A Phase of Venus

“I don’t expect anyone else to believe in me,” Venus Williams said over the weekend in Miami. “I expect to believe in myself.”

By now, three months shy of her 35th birthday, Venus has become as reliable at dispensing worldly wisdom as she has at cracking first serves past her opponents. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering everything she's done in this sport.

Asked whether she feels like she’s playing at home when she comes to Crandon Park, Venus smiled and said, in her nonchalant way, “Oh, yeah, definitely. Been down here little over forever.” She first hit these courts, she said, back in 1991, before more than a few of her current tour-mates were born.

And it was experience, once again, that Venus cited as the difference-maker in her latest victory at Key Biscayne. On Monday, she ran her record over the fourth seed, Caroline Wozniacki, to 7-0 with a 6-3, 7-6 (1) fourth-round win.

Williams says that her confidence has been growing with each match so far in 2015, but this will not go down as her finest performance, technically or aesthetically, of the season. She was broken five times and threw in seven double-faults, including a disastrous three in a row (not the kind of triple-double you want in the record books) when she was up 40-0 at 5-5 in the second set. Yet as soon as the second-set tiebreaker began, and the prospect of a third set started to loom in her mind, Venus began cleaning things up in a hurry. Afterward, she attributed the turnaround to the hard-won lessons of two decades on tour.

“I’ve lost a few tiebreakers before,” Venus joked. She knew, first and foremost, what not to do in this one.

She also knew, from her experience against Wozniacki, not to worry if her error count rose, or if her form and consistency wavered over the course of the match. Those things are bound to happen against a wallboard like Woz. What matters is that, if Venus sticks to her guns, she'll also be rewarded with winners—good things, in this case, come to those who don't wait. Today Venus utterly dominated in the winner count, 40 to 9, and she broke Wozniacki seven times. There was a sense that, even when she played a poor game on her own serve, she knew there would be a chance to turn it around right away on Wozniacki’s. And when Venus reached the tiebreaker and knew there were no more second chances, she played her best tennis of the day.

“I have so much respect for Caroline,” Venus said, “I knew I had to go for it.”

Can she keep going for it, and succeeding, in Miami? Williams won this tournament all the way back in another century, in 1998, ’99, and 2001, and she reached the final in 2010—when it comes to her career, that counts as very recent history. Now she’s into the quarters here for the first time in three years, and her draw makes another run to the final feel like a possibility. Venus plays Carla Suarez Navarro next, and as of this moment, the other women in her half are Ekaterina Makarova, Andrea Petkovic, Karolina Pliskova, and Daria Gavrilova. Could we get another all-Williams final in Key Biscayne, 16 years after the first one?

We’ll see how it goes. As Venus also knows from experience, a bad day can follow a good one for no particular reason, especially when you're in your 30s. Plus, she and Suarez Navarro have split their four matches evenly. But looking more broadly at the WTA’s top tier at the moment, this probably won't be Venus’ last opportunity for a significant breakthrough in 2015.

A glance at the WTA’s Top 10, and another glance at the draw in Miami, is enough to let anyone know that the tour's upper echelon in an unsettled state. Agnieszka Radwanska, Eugenie Bouchard, and Victoria Azarenka are all working with new coaches this year, and all made early exits from Crandon Park; their combined record for the season is a pedestrian 25-17. Ana Ivanovic is in a slump, Wozniacki has done little at the big events, and Maria Sharapova, who looked so solid to start the season, was hurried out early in Indian Wells and Miami. Petra Kvitova, another woman who came into 2015 with high hopes, pulled out of Indian Wells, citing exhaustion, and said she wasn’t well enough to play Miami, either. Even Madison Keys, the early breakout player of the year, who is also working with a new coach in Lindsay Davenport, is struggling again.

Some of these issues will work themselves out. Azarenka is too good not to return to the Top 10, Bouchard and Radwanska should steady themselves over the course of the season, and the 20-year-old Keys is a long-term project who will have plenty of ups and down to come. Right now, though, this spells opportunity for the 16th-ranked Venus. Maybe it also qualifies as another lesson from the WTA’s leading dispenser of worldly wisdom.

Venus has been working with her coach, David Witt, since “a little over forever,” as she might say—they started hitting together back in 2002. In her approach and dedication to her profession, Venus seems to have changed little over the years. She’s still as stoic in defeat and delighted in victory as she was when she played her first WTA tournament at 14 in 1994. Through those years, she's refused to follow anyone's lead but her own.

“When I’m on the tour,” Venus said this weekend, “I’m focused on my results. I’m focused on how I’m going to get better. Everybody’s set of circumstances is different. If you get out there comparing yourself to anyone, that doesn’t work.”

“I’m focused on how I’m going to get better,” may seem like a simple statement, but coming from Venus it sounds like a profound, and truthful, insight. She’s still out there at 34, she's in the quarters in Miami with a chance to go farther, and she has the Top 10 is in her sights again—she hasn’t finished a season there since 2010. When you’re Venus Williams, and you’ve accomplished what she’s accomplished, you don’t have to reinvent yourself.