Wondering what the Tournament of Champions is, and how we got here? Read more about our 50th Anniversary Celebration and get caught up on all the matches so far.
“I protest,” Pam Shriver says. “This should be the final!”
Such is the (bad) luck of our all-time draw that the most accomplished women of the last two generations, Williams and Navratilova, meet in a quarterfinal. But at least we get to imagine them meeting. “Here are two outstanding athletes sharing a court, testing each other comprehensively, playing different brands of tennis with similar verve and excellence,” Steve Flink says.
Navratilova was a relentless aggressor with her legs who used her biting lefty serve, the best of her era, to set herself up at the net. Serena is equally relentless and aggressive from the backcourt, and she uses her serve, the best of all time, to demoralize opponents and win points outright. Whose pressure would be more suffocating? “Martina is going to play smart and mix things up, but she’s going to see a lot of aces,” Shriver says. “Serena could get on Martina’s second serve on a slower surface.”
On the other hand, as Mark Knowles says, “Serena has never played anyone like Martina, and this would be a very tight match.” Navratilova, a nine-time Wimbledon champion, would seem to have the better grass-court game, but Serena’s power-baseline attack and get-out-of-jail-free serve, would be tough for her to counter on clay and hard courts.
