“The world is a solemn place, with room for tennis…”
—from “Dream Song #175,” by John Berryman, in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY 1969)
Old tennis fans, we settled down to watch the Women’s Singles Championships on TV. It was 4 p.m., practically cocktail hour, so we cheated a little. Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Open, and played in Arthur Ashe Stadium, the largest tennis stadium in the world, it was a special event.
Arthur Ashe won that first championship in 1968, and he was being celebrated, too. St. Petersburg’s Ray Arsenault, historian at USF/SP, had just published his much-praised biography, Arthur Ashe: A Life, so it added up to good things coming together with perfect timing. Ashe fought for civil rights all his life, and today’s finalists were Serena Williams, a black woman and probably the best female tennis player of all time, and the young Naomi Osaka, the child of a Japanese mother and a Haitian father. This was a contest Ashe could only have dreamed about.
The pre-game entertainment continued this unspoken theme, “America the Beautiful” being sung by Canada’s Deborah Cox, whose parents are Guyanese. An integrated contingent of U.S. Marines with mixed sexes and colors marched smartly past the packed stands. Nearby, the Statue of Liberty, a known tennis aficionada, was smiling over New York. The ceremony was more welcoming and dignified than the football machismo openings, complicated by Trump-pushed misunderstandings about the protests during the warlike “Star Spangled Banner.” The cultural critic Touré, in his review of Arsenault’s book, wrote, “In many ways, Ashe, more than Muhammad Ali, is the spiritual father of Colin Kaepernick,” the quiet-spoken quarterback who started kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality.
So the stars were aligned: the perfect set, the perfect players, at the perfect time. What could go wrong?
The match started with lively tennis, the surprise being that the 20-year-old Osaka was more focused than Williams, especially on important points. On long exchanges she kept Williams back and outlasted her, dominating the first set 6–2. Throughout the set, the cameras would flash over at Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratogiou, who was illegally sending her hand signals, urging her to charge the net — which Williams started to do, with some effect, and broke Osaka’s serve early in the second set. (The camera often catches coaches coaching; umpires, after all, are mostly looking the other way.) But Saturday’s umpire, the respected Carlos Ramos, spotted Mouratogiou, and called Williams over to give her a warning. As everyone knows by now, this opened the floodwaters.
Williams has had many bad moments with umpires, most infamously threatening the also respected Shino Tsurubuchi, who called, correctly, a foot fault against her: “I swear to God I’ll fucking take the ball and shove it down your fucking throat!” she screamed at the diminutive bespectacled line keeper.
The timing of that outburst, and others, was the same as against Osaka: a tense moment in the match, and Williams, channeling her inner John McEnroe, was losing, that time to Kim Clijsters. She was fined heavily, and Stacey Allaster, the chief executive of the Woman’s Tour, said, “I have no doubt that she has learned from this incident and we will never see her act in this manner again.”
Well, Williams hasn’t learned, in spite of behaving beautifully at the awards ceremony, trying to console Osaka. Williams, like McEnroe, gets over these things fast, after trying to rattle the opponents and officials. Katrina Adams, the USTA president, showed she hadn’t learned either, when she offered, “At the end of the day, Serena could have handled it a little bit differently.” A little bit? Of course there’s racism and sexism in tennis, but this wasn’t it. If the supremely sportsmanlike Arthur Ashe was watching from some ethereal stadium, he would have wept. But quietly.
Arthur Ashe was cool.
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev’ry gain divine.
—from “America the Beautiful” (1910); words by Katharine Lee Bates, put to music by Samuel A. Ward (c.1773)
This article appears in Sep 20-27, 2018.