London
On Friday at Wimbledon, the sisters shared a similar fight, locked in simultaneous battles on adjacent courts for a place in the tournament’s fourth round.
Serena marched on with a 7-5, 7-6 (7-2) victory over little-known Kristina Mladenovic of France, not learning until reaching the locker room that No. 9 seed Venus had been ousted 30 minutes prior by Kiki Bertens, 6-2, 7-6 (7-5), 8-6.
Along with the day’s earlier upset of American Madison Keys, that left just two of Wimbledon’s top 10 seeds in the women’s field. And the tournament hasn’t reached its midpoint.
One analysis of the early exit of elites here is that women’s tennis is loaded with so much talent that upsets aren’t really upsets at all.
“A lot of those matches were really tough matchups,” said No. 10 seed Keys, 23, referring to the unseeded players who toppled No. 2 seed Caroline Wozniacki, No. 3 seed and defending champion Garbine Muguruza, No. 4 Sloane Stephens, No. 5 Elina Svitolina, No. 6 Carolina Garcia and No. 8 Petra Kvitova. “There is lots of really good players right now. One player has a slightly bad day; the other player has a really ‘on’ day. It can go either way.”
But there is another analysis that’s less sanguine.
It’s that many of the top-ranked women’s players who boast the requisite talent and power to win one Grand Slam title appear to lack the all-consuming hunger to win back-to-back majors.
As former pro Mary Carillo, at Wimbledon as a Tennis Channel analyst, puts it: “You want to see more players grow fangs.”
The past 18 months have presented an opening, while Serena Williams, 36, and fellow big hitters Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka were alternately sidelined by maternity leave, a drug suspension and personal issues following childbirth.
Instead, four players took turns winning their first major — Muguruza, Stephens, Wozniacki and Simona Halep — each claiming a share of the spoils as if it were a sumptuous cake to be divided rather than devoured whole.
The “fangs” Carillo hopes to see were personified, she said, by Monica Seles, who won nine Grand Slam titles between 1990 and 1996 before her brilliant career was halted by an attack from a deranged fan.
“She never took off a point in a match! Never. Ever,” Carillo said of Seles, citing past champions Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Tracy Austin, Martina Navratilova and Martina Hingis as sharing that quality.
“It’s not they won a major and said, ‘All right, now I can relax.’ All they did was feel the heat more and take it on!”
Evert, an 18-time Grand Slam winner who both mentors rising players and serves as a tennis analyst for ESPN, believes there are multiple reasons so many seeds have tumbled from the women’s field in Wimbledon’s first four days.
For starters, she notes, there is more depth in women’s tennis.
Moreover, grass is “a great equalizer,” she argues. Because the grass-court season is so short (just three or four weeks), it’s tricky for players to master. It’s the fastest of the four Grand Slams. The ball doesn’t bounce as high, which means players must bend lower. And because it can be slippery, it demands different footwork.
That said, Evert said she was surprised that no single player pounced at the opportunity to dominate in Serena Williams’s absence. Where was the player demanding the No. 1 ranking and refusing to let go?
“Champions have the ability to win a tournament like Serena (who boasts 23 Grand Slam titles) and then forget about it the next day and look forward to the next tournament so they can build on that and carry on the momentum,” Evert said. “They almost get a little greedy.”
She calls it a “hunger factor” and points to Serena Williams, Steffi Graf, Jimmy Connors and herself as consumed by it. And she’s unclear why more current players don’t seem to share it.
Could it be that there’s too much money in the sport? Are players today too comfortable? Are they happy with winning one Grand Slam?
“I’m not quite sure,” Evert said. “But that’s the hunger factor. It might not be great for the development of a human being. But it’s certainly great if you want to excel at something.”
Keys, for one, looked inward after her shock defeat on Friday to a Russian qualifier ranked 120th in the world. She attributed it to “a massive mishandle of nerves” and the mistake of looking ahead in the draw, to a potential fourth-round meeting with Serena Williams, rather than focusing on the opponent in front of her.
After jumping out to an early lead, Keys played a few sloppy games, and suddenly the score was tied. That’s when she got nervous and played “not to lose.”
Down one set and 0-4, she went for broke and clawed back in the match to force a third set. But she never took command, lurching instead from one extreme to the other.
For Venus Williams, 38, Friday’s loss was her third consecutive come-from-behind battle, having dropped the opening set in all three matches played this week.
But after leveling the match in a second-set tiebreaker, she couldn’t subdue the 20th-ranked Bertens, who handled her pace and serve with steady efficiency.
With just two top seeds remaining — Halep, the reigning French Open champion and world No. 1, and seventh-seed Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic — Serena Williams was asked if she was encouraged about her chance of winning an eighth Wimbledon title.
“A lot of the top players are losing, but they’re losing to girls that are playing outstanding,” Williams said. “If anything, it shows me every moment that I can’t underestimate any of these ladies. They are just going out there swinging and playing for broke.”