A line judge led me back the way we came, pointing out a door beneath the stands. So that’s how it began for me—as soon as I’d made my entrance, I went back the way I came, to pee. It was a fancy members’ bathroom right next to the court, with plated handles and silver sinks and real towels instead of paper. “They’ve got a good maintenance budget,” I told myself. I stayed there for what felt like a long time, listening to the crowd, the ambient noise, then went back, got my racket, and started to play.
Serena Williams has an almost arrogant look on the court, a kind of detachment, as if she were viewing you from a great height. I recognize it because I have a similar look of my own. It’s gamesmanship—her way of telling the opponent, “You have no chance.” Usually it works, and they don’t. But it does not always work, especially if the opponent has the same attitude and carries herself in the same way.
Maybe, if you work long enough and hard enough, you will be given a single perfect day, a few hours when everything clicks and even the moves that seem wrong at first turn out for the best. For me, that was the Wimbledon final, July 2004. I served the first game, and held. Serena served the second game, and held. But even on the points I lost, it was clear that I was looser than my opponent. Some of it probably had to do with just where we were in our careers. Serena was number one in the world, a returning champion. Everyone wanted something from her. Everyone expected her to win. If she did win, she’d therefore be doing nothing more than what had been expected. There was little upside and an abyss of downside. How could she lose to… what’s that girl’s name again? And me? I was no one from nowhere. I was supposed to go down in straight sets. Just being here, years ahead of schedule, was my victory. I was lucky to be on the same stage, with John McEnroe calling the match from the broadcasting booth. In other words, while Serena had everything on the line, I had nothing to lose.
I think this dawned on Serena in the fourth game of the first set. She was up 0–30 on my serve. This is when, in the normal course of events, she begins to put players away. Instead, I returned each powerful shot with a powerful shot of my own. On this point, I blew the ball past her and she fell down. People made a lot of it, but she did not need to fall down. I love the way she plays—she’s an incredible athlete—but there’s a lot of drama in her game. It’s like she’s acting, showing everyone in the world just how she feels. Is stumbling when she doesn’t need to her way of telling the world, “Oh, I could have gotten that if the grass wasn’t so fucked-up”? It doesn’t feel real. She got up fast but I won the point, held my serve, and won the game. Serena suddenly knew that I would not quit and would not break. And even if she did break me, she was going to have to break me again and again. Now she knew that she was in for a fight.
In the fourth game, as we played points that went on and on, I felt something shift. In a moment, Serena’s look of confidence, which she carries like a racket—it’s almost as important for her game—gave way to something else. At first, I could not tell exactly what sort of look it was, though I knew I’d seen it on the faces of other girls before. Then, amazingly, as I went on to break Serena’s serve in that first set, it hit me. Fear. Serena looked afraid. It was as if she’d suddenly realized how upsetting it would be to lose to this skinny seventeen-year-old kid in front of all these people. I did not lose another game in the first set.
Still, for a moment in the seventh game, it did look like Serena would get back into the set. I was down two break points and battled back to deuce. We went in and out of deuce for what seemed like hours. Serena is a great champion, and great champions are toughest to beat when it comes time to put them away. They grow stronger the closer they get to defeat. They will not go down easily. Game and set point: I finally managed to put a ball exactly where I wanted it, skidding across the baseline. Serena got to it, but her shot was weak and ended up in the net. First set: Sharapova, 6–1.
I sat during the changeover, drinking water and staring straight ahead, trying hard to think about nothing. The changeovers are short reprieves, like the blissful break a boxer gets between rounds, without all the blood. I wiped off my face and took a bite of a banana. I stared into the crowd. Everywhere I looked, people looked back, smiling as if they knew me. I looked and looked till I located my box. My father was up there with my coach and my trainer. Not my mom—she was back in the States. It made me feel good seeing my father, knowing he and my coaches were with me all the way. And yet, at the same time, the presence of these people, so close and still so far away, reminded me that I was really all alone. Tennis is not a team sport. It’s not a sport where the coach whispers to you on the sideline between plays. You are surrounded at nearly every moment of the day by coaches and partners and friends, surrounded right up till the first point is played, and then you are alone—as alone as you can possibly be, which is alone in a crowd. Surrounded but apart, with no one to help you or hold your hand. The bigger the game, the more alone you will feel.
I passed by Serena as I went back out on the court. It’s a strange moment—the changeover walk-by. You come close enough to brush shoulders, but do not acknowledge it. You are entwined with this person, as close as you can get to another player, yet cannot acknowledge each other.
Time had gone by. The light was changing. I had won the first set. I had one more to get. It was the middle of an unbelievable day. Serena would try to bring real pressure—this was her moment. She needed to break me early in the second to flip the plot. She held her serve in game one, then pushed me to break point in game two, but I hung on.
Something interesting happened in game three of the second set, the sort of thing that does not show up in statistics or on charts, yet that can mean all the difference. We both came to the net in the middle of a rally. She hit a hard shot, but I hit it back even harder. It caught her flush on the nose. I won the point, and she seemed at first irritated, then angry. There was a flash in her eyes. It’s humiliating to take a shot in the face on Centre Court at Wimbledon, with the TV stations showing it, then showing it again in slow-mo, then again in super slo-mo, then from a reverse angle. A thing like that can be exactly what a player needs to get going, to reverse the momentum. Serena won that game, then pushed hard to break my serve. I hung on, but she played with a new fury in the games that followed. I did not win a point in the fifth game, and in the sixth she broke my serve.
Just like that, Serena had seemingly turned the tide. We were deep into the second set and she was ahead 4–2. Another possible future opened up before me, a future that fit the common pattern: Serena Williams wins the second set 6–2, goes on to win the third, and secures her third consecutive Wimbledon championship, cementing her place as the number one player in the world. They would say I should be happy to have made it so far, winning a set in the final before Serena took over. You could feel it in the crowd—it was how things were starting to look, that it might be Serena’s day after all. It can happen a dozen times in the course of a single match. Fortunes shift, fates change. The minute you accept it, you’re finished. At such moments, here’s what you say to yourself: Good! I need to be down if I want to be known for making an amazing comeback. In other words, it was the gut-check moment.
Do I fold and give in, or do I stand and fight?
As I’ve said, it’s my defining characteristic. I’m a fighter. I do not quit. Just because you’re beating me 4–2 does not mean I will roll into a crouch for games seven, eight, and nine. In fact, that’s the time to counterpunch, just when that other girl is starting to believe in her own victory. So what did I do? I took the force of Serena’s serve—now and then, it hit 120 m.p.h.—and turned it right back on her. She broke my serve? I broke her serve, then hung on to win the next game. Now it was 4–4 in the second set. That was the crucial swing. It set up the all-important ninth game of the second set. This was where I’d have to take it. Serena was serving. I watched her bounce the ball, take a second, bounce it again. She was the same old Serena Williams, yet something had changed. Something in her seemed diminished, faded. Maybe she knew that she was going to lose. She’d already seen it in my eyes. And she knew how bitter it would be. And still, because she is such a fierce competitor, she would fight every step of the way going down.