The Ardent and The Elegant: What Serena Williams and Roger Federer have meant to tennis

WATCH: Serena Williams speaks at Wimbledon, after her first singles match in 12 months

Editor's Note: On Tuesday, Serena Williams posted that she will "relish these next few weeks" before officially calling in a career in professional tennis. Click here for the latest updates.

Every tennis champion is an anomaly—an inexplicable divergence from the flawed human norm. The sport’s finest coaching minds have yet to hit upon a formula for creating Hall of Fame players. No nation has a monopoly on their manufacture. There’s too much that must go right, mentally and physically, to know which prodigy, from which part of the world, has the Slam-winning stuff.

The same goes for the two players with the greatest Slam-winning stuff of all. Roger Federer and Serena Williams are among the most famous athletes of the last 25 years, but they’re as hard to comprehend as any other tennis champions. One of them came from a country, Switzerland, that had never produced a major men’s star. The other came from a city, Compton, Calif., that had never appeared on any U.S. tennis map. Yet Federer and Williams made themselves into the two best players of the Open Era’s first half century (1968-2018), and changed our ideas about how long a champion can remain one.

As 2022 continues to unfold, they may finally be confronting the inevitable. Both are in their 40s, and neither has played much since last year's Wimbledon. Federer’s last Grand Slam title came in 2018, Serena’s in 2017. You can never count them out, of course, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if this season is their final hurrah.

That makes this a good time to remind ourselves of what Federer and Williams have accomplished, and what they’ve done for tennis. Their careers have run on parallel tracks, and ascended to similarly unprecedented heights. But their polar-opposite personalities and playing styles also showed that there’s no single way to succeed in this solo game. Together Roger and Serena have represented two fundamental sides of tennis—the elegant and the ardent—more purely than anyone else.

I had played big hitters before. But I was still amazed by how hard she hit the ball, and how she raised her level when she needed to. Former Top 10 player Chanda Rubin, of her first meeting with a 20-year-old Serena, in 2002.

Amazed, but not surprised. Chanda Rubin had been struck, watching Serena win the US Open at 17, by how fully-formed she was as a player and competitor.

“With little experience, she beat future Hall of Famers,” Rubin says of Serena’s 1999 run in Flushing Meadows, which included wins over Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport and Monica Seles.

Serena may have been a pro-tour novice, but she had spent her life practicing against another future Hall of Famer, her older sister Venus. Serena first picked up a racquet so she could play the same game that her sister loved; she imitated her so well, she ended up doing it better.

Together, Venus and Serena set about updating women’s tennis for the 21st century. They created a new standard for serving. They turned the return into a point-ending weapon. They hit open-stance two-handed backhands, something that had hardly been imagined before. They took Seles’ fearless attack and gave it an athletic makeover. They believed what their father, Richard, told them: They would be ranked No. 1 and 2. Richard was right, and he was right about which of them would be No. 1 longer.

“The sheer physicality, the serve, a new level of pace and power; it was a complete shift with Serena,” Rubin says. “Everyone had to get better.”

It took nearly 20 years before another player—Naomi Osaka—could beat Serena at the game she had reinvented. By then, Serena was more than a tennis player. She was a symbol—of Black excellence, of modern motherhood, of female success without compromise, of survival. From Indian Wells in 2001 to the Osaka-Carlos Ramos US Open final in 2018, Serena was at the center of a dizzying number of tennis tempests. That she put them all in her rearview mirror and kept going may be an even greater tribute to her indomitability than her 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the last of which she won while pregnant with her daughter, Alexis Olympia. Today Serena is one of a group of Black women, along with Beyoncé, Rihanna and Oprah, at the center of American culture.

“Serena exuded strength and confidence, emotional exuberance,” Gerald Marzorati writes in his 2020 book Seeing Serena. “She sought agency and would struggle to obtain it…not by making nice, but making room—cultural space—for exactly who she was.”

This was a new space for tennis, and it has since been filled by a cast of young U.S. players—including Sloane Stephens, Frances Tiafoe and Coco Gauff—more diverse than ever before. That diversity has extended to those who watch the game.

“Serena created a whole new base of fans,” Rubin says.

For Howard Bryant, author of The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, Serena’s career will be seen as a dividing line when it comes to how we talk about women and African-American sports stars.

“With her standing, and her empire, she’s created a counter-voice and a new perspective,” Bryant says. “It’s changed how we scrutinize behavior. You can’t just gang up on her or make off-handed comments about her body. She has the stature of any great male athlete.

“In 100 years, if we ask, when did that shift happen, we’ll come back to Serena.”

First memory of Fed was definitely not the guy you see out there today. He wasn’t as focused and let things get to him…he broke racquets. He really overcame something that was in him, and he got rid of it and he got the steel focus. Former pro Jan-Michael Gambill, to journalist Mark Malinowski

Serena was Serena from the start, but it took a few years for Roger to become Roger. Hers was the battle of the outsider; his was the drama of the prodigy: Could he make the most of his obvious talents? For a time, Federer had all the makings of an underachiever. His attention span was so short that his coaches hired a circus performer to entertain him during practice.

But Federer had a deep well of competitiveness and emotion inside him. It took a tragedy to bring it to the surface. In 2002, the person who believed in him the most, his early coach Peter Carter, was killed in a car accident in South Africa, while on a trip that Federer’s family had suggested he take. Grief and guilt overwhelmed Federer, and he decided he would do whatever he could to become the player Carter believed he could be. The following summer, he won his first major title, at Wimbledon.

Winning a Slam is one thing, but it seems unlikely that even Carter believed Federer could win 20 of them. He did it by fusing the best elements of the sport—power and finesse, attack and defense, past and present—into one artistic, athletic, strategic package. Federer didn’t hit the hardest serve, but few have bailed themselves out with that shot as reliably as he has. Federer didn’t hit the biggest forehand, but no one has attacked with it more relentlessly. His one-handed backhand was a throwback stroke that gave his game more dimensions—he could drive it, slice it, and approach with it—than his opponents had.

Even as a teenager, Federer was proud of what he called his “beautiful technique.” Unlike so many others to whom the sport came easily, Federer showed that the more precise and elegant your technique is, the more you can win. Federer’s game was art, but it wasn’t just for art’s sake. He made beauty matter.

“He had all the components, and an ability to manage them,” former No. 1 Jim Courier says of Federer. “Tennis classicists could maintain a connection with him, because the genesis of the sport seemed to be flowing through his game.”

If Serena brought a new audience to U.S. tennis, Federer brought in new and old fans wherever he went. Every city he visited, people claimed him as one of their own. Federer was so blazingly dominant in the mid-2000s—he won 11 of the 16 majors held between 2004 and 2007—that many fans still consider his two younger rivals, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, to be usurpers of his rightful throne.

“I never saw a stage or a match where they weren’t with him,” Hall of Fame tennis historian Steve Flink says. “There was the grace of his game, his sporting manner, the fast clip at which he played. He played the game the way so many thought it should be played.”

Rather than usurping Federer’s throne, Djokovic and Nadal inspired Federer to find new ways to hold onto it. In 2017, at 35, with a revamped topspin backhand, he became the oldest No. 1 in ATP history. According to Christopher Clarey, author of The Master: the Brilliant Career of Roger Federer, Federer’s longevity can be attributed to his knowledge of himself. He has turned the short attention span of his youth to his advantage as an adult.

“Federer has been very intentional, understanding what he needed to remain mentally fresh,” Clarey says. “Novelty, variety, breaks, new cities, new projects like the Laver Cup, new influences like Bill Gates.

“It is as if he plans for being in the moment, which is something I think all of us can learn from him. We can’t copy his hand-eye coordination or his grace on the move, but we can strive to give our full attention to whatever task we face and to find, if not joy, then at least satisfaction in it.”

Any pro athlete still competing in their 40s can be said to have fought Father Time to a draw.

If Serena never quite catches Margaret Court at 24 singles majors, and if Federer finishes behind Djokovic and Nadal in their Grand Slam chase, it won’t change the fact that the Swiss and the American set new standards for tennis excellence, longevity and influence.

The fact that Federer and Serena are so different is proof of how much individuality tennis can contain. In them, two seemingly contradictory sides of the sport come together.

The dream of most of us who play tennis is to play it with total freedom, to show what we can do when there are no limits or obstacles holding us back. Watching Federer in full flight, seeing him rise up on his right toe like a ballet dancer and sweep through the long arc of his one-handed backhand, is to see that freedom in action.

But those of us who play also know that beneath the surface politeness, tennis is a war, one in which your job isn’t to play elegantly, but to vanquish your opponent. To see Serena power a ground stroke for a winner and punctuate it with a fist-pump and a full-throated roar is to see tennis played with unapologetic desire and raw exhilaration.

We can’t explain Roger and Serena any more than we can explain any tennis champion. Hopefully we still have a little more time to appreciate them before they go.