The Color of Thunder

(Ed. note: It's been a rough day, folks. I haven't been able to get on to post comments since the second set of the Williams-Peer match. Hopefully, this problem will be resolved by tomorrow. I understand, though, that your comments are being posted. Let me or Steggy know if you're having problems - Pete)

Sometimes, it's a really good idea to keep in mind that when it comes to the gene pool, some people come out of the shallow end and some from the deep. I'm not really sure what, exactly, Serena was trying to say with this response to the question: Do you real the positive things that are written about you?  - a follow-up to a rambling rant by Serena on how she never reads the papers or magazines (many well-known players say this, but I find that it's usually a bald-faced lie) because of all the "haters."

Still, the admission struck me as a pretty interesting if inadvertent (and borderline incoherent) interpretation of a fairly common celebrity impulse: I'm down to earth, down deep I'm just like the person next door. How dare you treat me like the person next door! Don't you know who I am?

Of course, when it comes to Serena it's always valuable to keep in mind that this is Richard Williams's daughter; steam-of-unconsciousness runs in the family, and tennis in some ways is all the better for it. Serena is larger than life, although her current girth suggests that it isn't by all that much anymore. She is, truly, the bomb, both as a kind of outre personality who may or may not be aware of how arrogant she appears to many of us (celebrities: they're always the last to know), but who also has a startling way of backing up her most bombastic self-glorifications and  oxygen-robbing appearances with results.

Today, after she beat Peer, just about the first words out of her mouth were, "I didn't  play that well today" - this, after her youthful, inexperienced and pleasantly well-rounded opponent played her big heart out and came within two points of beating Serena to an Australian Open semifinal berth.

Yet cringe-inducing as she may be, as much as you or I or any of the others whom Serena today characterized as "haters" may criticize or even ridicule her, this one thing is certain:

This girl is pure chocolate thunder (hat tip to the original owner of the name, the former Philadelphia 76er basketball star, Darryl Dawkins).

Given the delusional and self-glorifying sermons-on-self that Serena is in the habit of unloading on us - Reminder No. 2: This is the daughter of Richard Williams, who once blithely boasted that he was in the process of buying Rockefeller Center - she ought to be predicting big blowouts and then losing, two-and-one, to the likes of Anne Kremer. . . Nadia Petrova. . . Jelena Jankovic. But Serena isn't following the script. Like she says, "I'm a good writer, so I usually do all the writing." Reminder No. 3: Richard Williams himself has served as the poet laureate of Planet Jive. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

But all the rhetoric is just so much. . . rhetoric. Serena's, Richard's, yours and mine. The important thing is that Serena is delivering something that she herself might be hard pressed to adequately explain, even if she were given to the precise logic and verbal clarity of an Ivan Lendl. She is winning tennis matches that everyone thinks she should be losing, and she's done it so consistently now - both at last year's Australian Open and this one, that nobody can explain it away. The bottom line is that as a competitor, this girl truly is the Bomb. She beat Peer today for a couple of reasons, the most important ones being that Peer, especially as the match wore on, was hitting the ball to the right places, but never with enough depth, Serena served Big at critical times, and she made up for whatever fitness deficit she has with her relentless will.

I thought John Barrett pretty much nailed it in a deceptively banal but useful observation made right after the handshake at the net: "Once you're a champion, you're always a champion. That never changes." And of Peer, he said: "At the critical times, she experienced just that little bit of lack of self-belief that led to her undoing. She wasn't quite sure that she could do it, so she didn't."

So let's cut to the chase. Serena is the Warrior Moment made flesh. Chocolate Thunder, in game and spirit. It's taken me a while to get my mind wrapped around this, because it just doesn't jive with the way she's handled her career, or herself, in the past few years. It doesn't seem right that Serena, a young woman who seems to take her gift for granted and then adds insult to injury by battering it with the sledgehammer of neglect, should win with the kind of steely resolve and appetite for competition shown by a variety of players who had precious little in common besides this: They dedicated themselves, heart, mind, body and soul, to their careers. They protected their ascendancy  with the force-shield of nearly ascetic self-denial. Nothing that could even remotely threaten their status as heroes made it through the barrier.

Serena is nothing like any of them.

You know, there comes a point when it's not enough to deride choking Nadia or mock high-strung Jelena. It's no longer good enough to say that the other women turn to quivering wads of Jello at the very sight of Madame Thunder. It falls short, by a wide margin, to say she just clubs her way to victory. It's inadequate to say, "She should have been beaten today." - which is just what a British reporter sitting near me said a moment ago. There are no shouldas or wouldas  or couldas in tennis. There is only the final score in a match. There is only what is. Serena is twice, maybe three times, the player anyone else is, and for reasons that have more to do with her than with them. I include every active player in that company, including Justine Henin-Hardenne. Serena has done everything in her power to enable them to overtake her. What the hail is this girl supposed to do, take the scalping knife to her own brow? Blow a leg off?

We all have an instinct as well as a hunger for fairness, and Serena both short-circuits our instincts and frustrates our hunger. That, I think, is the animus of her critics.

It doesn't seem fair that Serena wins (please, no protestations about the hardships of her personal journey; many people who have experienced lives as difficult as hers in every dimension have toiled as hard, or harder, to no comparable end). It's as simple as that.

It isn't that the "haters" dislike her; they dislike what she has come to represent, despite her stunning successes:  the apparently willful waste of talent; the impolite refusal to cultivate the semblance or substance of professionalism, the triumph of sloth over industry, indifference over passion, Doritos over Tofu, promiscuity over fidelity.

Serena sends all the wrong signals but the results she generates suggest that the signals, on which we rely so heavily in our everyday lives, are a bourgeoisie fiction. That those deep-rooted tropes about hard work, sacrifice and self-denial are myths we embrace in our petty and fearful quest for conventional success by conventional standards. They are our lodestars of aspiration - comfortable, clear rationalizations that disguise and soften the edges of an overarching reality that Serena could express thusly: I am a warrior and you'renot.Ha ha ha, jokes on you, suckah!

Reminder No. 4: Richard Williams decided to raise himself a couple of tennis players when he saw Virginia Ruzici being presented with a "big" check (it might have been for $20,000) for winning this odd thing called a tennis tournament. He thought, heck, that sure beats working for a living! You know what they say about apples and trees.