I’ve been sitting on a Serena Williams post (actually, a Williams sisters post) for weeks now, which is never a good thing for someone who’s at least partly a news reporter armed with the power of the Internet. There was a reason for this. I felt after the U.S. Open that the sisters are at a crossroads, and that if the tournament wasn’t a wake-up call (starting with the fact that because of their declining rankings, they had to meet in a fourth-round match), they would never get one, or, in any event, ever recognize one for what it was.
But I also felt that as the Williams sisters have been a frequent target of TW criticism this year, their rabid fans (and trust me, the sisters are above reproach in the eyes of their true fans to about the same degree that the Doping Argies can do no wrong in the eyes of so many of their countrymen) would have accused me of gloating, or piling on, if I spoke too soon after the U.S. Open, while passions and emotions were still running high.
It’s time to move, though, for yesterday the WTA sent a press release about Serena, the first paragraph of which provided a hilarious example of turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse (a trick better known today as “spinning”). Proclaimed the WTA:
We take it from this effusive start, that we all—including Williams' hungry fans in Zurich, Switzerland and Philadelphia—are meant to leap up now and cry, “Great! You go, girlfriend!”
Now get a load of this, well, garbage:
OK, I breathed a great sigh of relief when I saw the word “bothered” (by injury), happy that Serena was not on her deathbed. I scratched my head in puzzlement at the bit about how Serena was one of the most “internationally-recognized” of sports stars, wondering what that had to do with anything. Then, when I read about the “extraordinary competitiveness” of women’s tennis, I smacked my forehead with my palm and cried out, “Of course! How could I have been so insensitive as to think she just threw her career down the toilet because she was undisciplined, arrogant, and out-of-shape. It’s the competitiveness, stupid!”
All I can say after reading the drivel put out by the WTA is that the association ought to be ashamed of itself. It’s a sad day for the women’s game when the WTA has to so cravenly and transparently bend over and apply its lips—with the whole world watching—to the backside of a single player. It’s a sad day when the WTA flagrantly (almost merrily, judging from the upbeat tone of the release) violates its own good-faith obligation to tournaments, not to mention its own ethics (the WTA is duty-bound to ensure that players fulfill their obligations precisely because it is a players organization).
The WTA’s word, as of today, is worth nothing. Zippo. Zilch. Squat.
If I’m, oh, Lindsay Davenport (plagued most of the year by back trouble), I blow off the rest of the year, too, and demand that the WTA issue an equally disingenuous and excuse-laden release. And then if I’m Maria Sharapova, Kim Clijsters, Mary Pierce, or Sveta Kuznetsova, or any other player who wants to kick back for the rest of the year, I do the same. And nobody has a right to say a single critical thing about it.
The worst thing about this mondo-bizarre episode is that it tells me one thing above all else: the WTA has no control over the players; it’s running behind Serena, with a slop-bucket and mop, trying to clean up whatever mess she makes while pretending to the world that everything is fine. This also means that we don’t really know what Serena is thinking or doing, and—perish the thought—Serena doesn’t either. She’s Caligula, living in her own world where there’s no distinction between fact and fantasy and everything is whatever she wants it to be. You know what? That’s a recipe for disaster. Always has been.
How do I know I’m right about this? Because the press release so stinks of calculation, damage control, spin. I can almost hear the Williams camp and the WTA’s excruciating negotiations over the wording going on in my head, each faction desperate to save face and avoid censure.
So there’s the rant. Now, on to some calmer reflection.
In a way, this episode has very little to do with Serena; the worst you can say about her is that she feels no overpowering need to be good for her word, either to the WTA or the tournaments. This does, however, have a lot to do with the insanity of trying to run a year-round tour for a gaggle of players for whom competing, winning titles, and fulfilling the obligations of a profession are increasingly weak priorities. Some of the top WTA players don’t seem to want to be tennis players anymore; they just want to be stars.
Some of this has to do with the insane amounts of money top players earn; it certainly robs them of the incentive to play during the post-Grand Slam season, in, say, Zurich. But it also has to do with the calendar. Let’s not kid each other, friends. The majors are what matter, and tournaments like the Masters Series events are significant to a large degree because of the way they foreshadow, prep the turf, and build our interest for the majors. Now that the Grand Slams are over, all else seems a little hollow.
Heck, I don’t blame Serena for not wanting to go to Zurich or Philadelphia, even if it is home to Philly cheesesteaks and that great pioneering hip-hop act, Three Times Dope. But by the same token, I’d like to think that the players are conscientious enough to feel some sense of responsibility for how their actions affect their fans, the game, and even their own images.
Beyond this issue, though, lies the larger one of where the Williams sisters go from here. It seemed to me the U.S. Open might have been the tipping point, although we have yet to see in which direction it sent the girls. The part of me that wants to see the sisters in their full glory, winning Grand Slam titles (sorry, I don’t care about leopard-print slipcovers, or benumbingly stupid sitcoms), fantasized that when they got home to Palm Beach Gardens, they walked into their living room and right into an intervention.
But instead of the intervention being staged by concerned friends and family members, it was called and carried out by ghosts—Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen and Fred Perry, Althea Gibson and Pancho Gonzalez and Arthur Ashe.
The ghosts would then advise the girls on what to do in order to get their careers back on track, and the message would amount to something like this:
First, get your finger out and realize you’ve got a problem. Nobody cares that you can beat anybody when you’re on top of your games (for gosh sakes, Anastasia Myskina can also beat anyone when she’s playing at her best—it’s called a tautology, look it up). The important bit is that you aren’t ever on top of your games any more, and your games may very well be going down—that happens too, you know?
Second, decide what you want out of your lives and careers, and apply yourselves full to it. If you don’t want to play tennis, throw away the racquets and the biker boots. If you want to win Grand Slams, throw away all the scripts from the smarmy TV producers and ignore the buttlicks and come up with a game plan for getting yourselves back in touch with the game, back in touch with a joy and beauty you can feel and express, the way that guy Andre Agassi feels and expresses it.
You want to be “more” than tennis players? Hell-ooo. You’re going about it exactly backwards, because nobody cares about a loser tennis player. You want to be “more” than a tennis player? Go ask Andre about that. He’ll tell you that he didn’t become “more” than a tennis player until precisely the day he looked in the mirror and said, “A tennis player is what I am.”
Third, hire a coach. Each of you. And turn yourselves over to them.
Tell Richard, thanks, Dad, but no thanks. Tell Oracene, we love you Mom, but let’s leave the X’s and O’s out of it, okay? Form yourself a small brain trust, including Richard and Oracene (you know how sensitive parents are about rejection), come up with a list of candidates, and make a decision. And then turn yourself over to that coach, fully, and with an open mind and heart. Ask that coach to come up with a blueprint for your game and fitness, as you would ask an architect to come up with the new home you plan to build on a vacant lot. Ask that coach, humbly, to make of you what you cannot make of yourselves and promise him you’ll listen.
So that was my fantasy. In the real world, I called a few folks, including Nick Bollettieri, to find out how they felt about the sisters and their dilemma. He said:
"Number one, they’ve wasted their ‘fear factor.’ The other girls now feel that they can beat Venus and Serena, they’ve seen how others—including some less gifted than themselves—have done it, and that’s made a huge difference. It’s going to keep going in that direction, too, unless the girls find a way to make a dramatic turnaround."
What would such a turnaround entail, I wondered?
"You have to keep your mind and body in condition You saw this with both girls, but especially with Venus in her loss to Kim Clijsters at the Open. Once the physical starts to break down, the mental goes, too, and the stroke-work and discipline go right along with them. The thing that struck me about the Venus-Clijsters match was that I haven’t seen Venus breathing as heavily since she was 10 years old. People say that forehand is gone—No! It’s the foundation that’s gone, the fitness. The forehand is there, but Venus isn’t {at the ball}."
Did Nick think the sisters could preside jointly over the kingdom of tennis again? He said, “They could do it, but they would have to eliminate 90 percent of the other stuff they have going on.”
The only ray of hope I see right now is that I’m terribly wrong about the WTA release and that Serena has indeed had a Road-to-Damascus experience about her career. Perhaps it was a joint realization, with Venus. I guess we’ll see.