Pulling Another Serena

NEW YORK—Is there a better bet in tennis than Serena Williams? I don’t ask that because she always wins. I ask it because she so often wins in exactly the same way, by exactly the same third-set score. When in doubt with Serena, bet on a first-set loss, a tight second-set win, and a bagel in the third.

Knowing Serena's history, the scores of her 3-6, 7-5, 6-0 win over Bethanie Mattek-Sands here on Friday were strangely predictable. Serena is now 12-1 in three-set matches in 2015, and 10 of her 24 Grand Slam wins have gone the distance.

It’s called, as Williams says herself, “Pulling a Serena.”

“It’s like when you’re down and maybe down a break in a set," she said last month in Cincinnati, "and you ‘pull a Serena’ is when you come back and win.”

Leave it to the woman who coined the phrase "Serena Slam" to replace the word "comeback" with her own name.

By now, there are various gradations to Serena’s great escapes. There are the moderately worrying ones, such as her second-round win over Kiki Bertens here, when she trailed 4-0 in the first-set tiebreaker. There are the briefly baffling ones, such as the French Open and Wimbledon finals, where she had the match in hand, let it slip, and gathered herself a second time to win. Finally, there are the teetering tightrope walks, such as her win over Heather Watson at Wimbledon, where everything looks utterly impossible for Serena, until she walks off court a winner.

Williams walked out onto the tightrope on Ashe on Friday night, but she never quite let herself teeter. She made errors, 28 of them. She threw in double-faults, six of them. She squandered break points, 15 of them. She hammered easy returns into the net, umpteen of them. Yet unlike against Watson, Serena’s opponent never served for the match, and was never up a break in the second set.

Yet when Mattek-Sands broke Serena for 4-5 and held for 5-5 in the second, Ashe became as tense as I can remember. Was the Grand Slam going to end right here, tonight, at the hands of the world No. 101, a woman sporting a hair color that she described as “probably tangerine”? If Mattek-Sands could get Serena to a tiebreaker, anything seemed possible. There she wouldn’t be able to rely on her serve quite as much to keep her on level terms.

So, looking back, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Serena did whatever it took not to let Mattek-Sands get her into that tiebreaker. Suddenly, the returns she had been missing found the corners, and the nerves she had shown earlier on break points vanished. At 30-40, with one more chance to break, Serena put her approach just where she needed to; it wasn’t a winner, but it was enough to force Mattek-Sands to miss a backhand passing shot.

Serena is known as a free-swinger, and she is. Her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, said she wasn’t as “efficient” as she could be on big points. But Serena still has the ability to play percentage tennis when percentage tennis is called for. In the third set, the Mattek-Sands dam burst, and the winners flowed from Serena’s racquet. She finished with 53 of them, to just 13 from her opponent.

“I knew that I could play better,” Serena said, “so with that in the back of my mind—because I made a lot of errors, I knew, like, this wasn’t the best game, my best game. I guess knowing that always really helps me play better.”

Through the first set and a half, Mattek-Sands was every bit as good as Serena was bad. She played high-energy, kitchen-sink tennis, throwing everything she had Serena’s way. She served and volleyed. She rushed Serena by taking the ball on the rise. She used drop shots and angles. She sliced her forehand return one point and belted it on the next. She charged on second serves when she had the chance. And she ran. There wasn’t much else, in the end, that she could have done.

“There were some great points when we were both at net, lobs, winners,” said Mattek-Sands, who had hip surgery last spring and was given a wild card into this event. “It felt like the crowd really got into some of those points.”

“I was really happy with how many times I broke her today. I know she serves big. I was ready for it.”

Mattek-Sands didn’t choke or fold, and she didn’t appear intimidated by her opponent or the moment. She brought a feisty, upbeat spirit into Ashe. But there's a ceiling on this court now, and she hit it at the end of the second set.

“I was just sticking to my plan of attack, my game plan,” Mattek-Sands said. “When she’s on fire and ripping the ball, it’s just out of reach. I mean, there’s not much you can do except play the next point and do your best.”

Mattek-Sands got a big hand when she left the court; she had helped put on what may have been the show of the tournament so far. As for Serena, she moves on to play a very different, and perhaps even more dangerous, opponent in Madison Keys in the fourth round on Sunday. As she did at Wimbledon, Serena seems to be trying to avoid the topic of the Grand Slam, or at the very least downplay it as much as possible.

“I don’t have to win this event,” she said today. “It’s not the end of the world for me.”

We’ll see if Serena sticks to that line if and when she wins the whole thing. There’s obviously tension when she plays, and at times it can look suffocating. But so far it has also helped her focus. Against Bertens, she got it together in time to win the first-set tiebreaker, and against Mattek-Sands she got it together in time to avoid a second-set tiebreaker. She’s letting the competition and the challenge bring out her best.

If she isn't going to admit to being on a Grand Slam journey, she at least seems to like finding names for it.

"I don't know what to expect," Serena said, "I've never been on this train—I love metaphors—I've never been on this train. It's definitely different....I have to make sure I stay on the train and not, you know, in front of it."

To stick with her metaphor, I'd say she came to New York with a good head of steam. I thought that her title last week, with its various tests, would be a confidence boost, and from what she says it has been.

“From the week, from Cincinnati, I felt good,” Serena said today.

Why shouldn’t we believe her? A good gambler might not take her at the start, but he'll always take her at the end. Serena has four more matches to go, and, if needed, four more Serenas to pull.