Taiwo Olatunji.
Serena Williams’ 23rd major title, catapulting her beyond Steffi Graf as the most decorated champion of the Open era, can be depicted either as a stirring affirmation or a chilling warning.
It is easy enough to subscribe to the first school of thought, given the serenity with which she swept aside sister Venus for a 6-4, 6-4 victory and a seventh Australian Open title, itself another record in a career creaking under the weight of its own history.
What tennis struggles to accept, though, is the counter-argument that Serena’s sustained pre-eminence casts her would-be rivals in a deeply unflattering light. For all that the sport bathed in a soothing all-our-yesterdays feel at Melbourne Park, as Venus and Serena met in a Grand Slam final 16 years after their first, it needed also to come to terms with the pitiful lack of depth among the chasing pack.
The reality is that Serena, at the age of 35 – Graf, let it be noted, retired at 30 – has won her latest major without dropping a single set and despite playing nowhere close to her best. Just listen to the verdict of her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou. “She played well enough to win, but she can play much better,” said the Frenchman, doing little to enthuse about a match where, yet again, sport’s most celebrated sister act seldom caught light.
In nine major finals between this pair, only two have gone to a third set. The love and respect that Venus and Serena never tire of expressing for one another equates on court to an inescapable lack of intensity, to a feeling that, even after 28 meetings on tour, they have never quite become used to facing across the net for such heightened stakes.
Venus and serena
The sisters had kind words to say about each other after the match.
It was different when they were little girls on the rutted public courts of Compton, Los Angeles, where one-upmanship could prevail, but few of their encounters with a championship on the line have touched the realm of classics. For both of them, this was a familiar replay of treasured memories but seldom a compelling contest, as Serena made a decisive break late in the first set and never took another backward step.
Today, only Australia’s Margaret Court stands ahead of her in the compendium of all-time greatness, with 24 titles to her 23, but it is largely an incidental detail. Court belonged to an amateur era when the main draw comprised 16 players, not 128, and when she could juggle the stresses of the tennis circuit with the demands of being a mother-of-four. Already, Serena stands alone.
