Serena
Last month, the GOAT announced her retirement via a piece in the Vogue. It was a vulnerable and profoundly inspiring piece from one of the greatest tennis players of all time, and one of the finest athletes to live. To me, her life, her domination in her sport, and her legacy defy words.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to watch her live at the US Open in one of the last Grand Slam matches of her career, against Anett Kontaveit, ranked No.2 in the world and the tournament’s second seed. It was an evening I will never forget—from the roaring crowd, to Serena’s emotional victory (an incredible 7-6 (4), 2-6, 6-2 match), to the tributes she received to her words after she won: “I feel like I’ve had a big red ‘X’ on my back since I won the U.S. Open in ’99. Tonight, I was like, ‘Serena, you’ve already won, just play. Be Serena!”—being there to witness it live was a dream.
As the spotlight returns to what her legacy is and will be, to how the world views her and speaks about her, I find myself disappointed and enraged at the sexism and racism that remain the inescapable companions to her career and life.
It kills the men I know when I call her GOAT—or even when I call her one of the GOATs. I have argued and defended this title for her with many of them. This is an age-old debate that wouldn’t be a debate if she weren’t a woman. These men insist on adding a gender qualifier—sure, she’s the greatest ‘woman’ tennis player of all time. Not the greatest. What would it take for her to be the greatest, I ask. No other player, male or female, has the number of Grand Slam titles she does in the open era. Her domination across more than two decades is leaps and bounds ahead of what anyone has accomplished in the sport. If she played Federer, would she win or lose? they want to know. Is her serve as fast as Nadal’s? they ask.
And there you have it. They want her to play the men and win, otherwise she cannot be the greatest. There is much wrong with this misogynistic question. I want to break it down.
This question makes women’s tennis out to be a subcategory of men’s. Male players like Nadal and Federer get called GOAT all the time by commentators, sports headlines, ex-tennis players (male) and so on. They are never called ‘the greatest male player of all time’. If by competing only in their category, they can qualify to be GOATs, then so can Serena. But what we see in reality is that the men are the “greatest ever” but Serena is only “the greatest woman player”.
This insistence on using a gender qualifier carries the misogynistic insinuation that winning in the women’s category is inferior to winning in the men’s category. That makes women out to be a lesser subset of men. Only by being a man can you be the greatest player or athlete of all time, and if you’re a woman you’re in a subcategory called the greatest woman player of all time. There is an obvious implication here that Serena has only earned the most Grand Slams by playing to some lesser competition i.e. women.
Women’s and men’s tennis are different sports. This has been stated and accepted repeatedly by tennis players and sports commentators, and makes common sense when we consider the differences not only in body mass, muscle, bone density and so on between the bodies of female and male players, but also in the rules of the game. At the point where they are different sports, players in each category need to play in, and be judged by their domination in their sport/league. Asking a woman to compete and win in the men’s category is like looking at Nadal and saying, “ok 20 Grand Slams is great but can he wrestle?”
This demand of Serena playing male players is an old one—throughout her career, she has been asked (mostly by white men) to play the men. Online commentary about her is rife with men saying she should play a man and then see how she fares. Back in 2013, Andy Murray insisted on challenging her to play him to the point where she was cornered and forced to respond to his challenge on TV segments like David Letterman, where she said she would lose to Murray, and chooses not to take on the challenge but to play in her own league. What we have to ask here is why men continue to challenge her thus. To me, this insistence that she play male players is only aimed at diminishing her greatness, at rejecting her domination, at belittling her achievement in sports. Serena has often, and very articulately, spoken about how being a woman athlete is a whole different sport of its own—how she is always judged differently than men, from the aggression she is allowed on the court, to what each title and each achievement has signified for her greatness, to the questions she gets asked by reporters. Obviously, her being not just a woman but a black woman, exacerbates this burden she has had to carry.
Absent from most commentary about Serena is how her being not only a black woman, but a mother makes her achievements even more awe-inspiring, more meaningful, more noteworthy. We pretend that it’s a level playing field where every player should be judged solely on their stats (which she has to boot), but that’s simply not true.
After she won the Australian Open in 2016 while pregnant, I wanted to make a meme with Federer’s face on it that said: “But has he won a Grand Slam while pregnant?” How can we possibly discount the impact of one of the most disruptive bodily experiences known to humans on Serena’s body as an athlete? How can we ignore the impact on her sport, of being pregnant for 9 months (which necessitated taking a long break from professional tennis), then going through childbirth—a C-section that almost took her life—and then returning to professional tennis to give us more of some of the best tennis moments we have witnessed. How can we discount all of this in the conversation about her athletic domination, her prowess at this sport? How can we not speculate on what more she could have done, how many more Grand Slam titles she could’ve won, if she hadn’t had to deal with pregnancy and childbirth? We can, because it’s a man’s world. If men became pregnant, this would be part of sports commentary— look at the feats these athletes have achieved through and beyond pregnancy. It takes a woman to know what a body is put through in pregnancy and childbirth. I don’t expect male sports figures to factor this in anytime soon into their commentary.
But it doesn’t end there—as a woman athlete, Serena not only had to bear the disproportionate bodily burden of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, but she also has to think about what the future holds and how she can continue to be an athlete if she wants to have more children and raise a family. Serena says in her Vogue piece: “I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family. Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity.”
Serena, I will forever love you, and fight for your GOAT title and your domination in every instance of misogynistic commentary in my circles.
