The Matches that Made Serena the GOAT: Williams d. Steffi Graf, 1999 Indian Wells final

Tennis Honors: Naomi Osaka on Serena Williams

This week, Steve Tignor looks back at five contests that made Serena Williams the greatest of all time.

It means a lot to me, because Steffi is a great champion.

Sometimes it can seem like fate when champions of different eras overlap just long enough to face each other. Think Federer vs. Sampras on Centre Court in 2001, or Nadal vs. Agassi in the same arena in 2005. But the most historically serendipitous clash of the titans took place in 1999, when a 17-year-old Serena met a 29-year-old Steffi Graf in the Indian Wells final. Williams had won the first of her 73 titles a month earlier; Graf would win the last of her 107 three months later. Never have two players with more combined Grand Slam titles—45—squared off.

At the time, only Graf was a major winner—she had won 21 of them. In June, she would turn back the clock long enough to win her 22nd and final Slam in Paris. When she couldn’t do the same at Wimbledon, she called it quits. But she hung around long enough to meet her successor. That January in Sydney, Graf beat Williams 7–5 in the third. She could see Serena’s talent, and that it was still raw.

“I kind of thought, you know, she has a lot of potential,” Graf said. “It’s going to take time for her to choose the right shots at the right time.”

The process was already underway. Serena won her first title, at an indoor event in Paris, in February.

“It was really good for me to win that tournament...because I really was able to see that I can go out there and I can win,” Serena said.

Against Graf, she showed she could win against anyone. The German was famed for her power, but it was Serena who dominated their rallies. She hammered her two-handed backhand into Graf’s one-handed slice, and closed relentlessly, finishing ahead the winner count 35 to 11.

Serena’s inner monologue was a sign of the times: “I had to keep saying to myself, ‘I’m not going to win at the baseline; no one’s ever won at the baseline.’”

Graf showed her mettle by winning the second set, and going up 4–2 in the third. That would have been enough to demoralize most opponents. Instead, Serena showed her own mettle by winning five of the last six games.

“It means a lot to me, because Steffi is a great champion,” Serena said. “She has more titles, from what I hear, than any man or lady playing tennis.”

That cheeky “from what I hear” is telling: Even as a teen, Serena never allowed herself to be overawed.

It’s also part of the reason why, two decades after edging her out on court, Serena would edge out Graf in the Grand Slam race, too.