NEW YORK—A little more than half an hour into Serena Williams’ 6-1, 6-3, 60-minute demolition of Ekaterina Makarova on Friday afternoon, a cry came from a woman in the upper deck of Arthur Ashe Stadium:
"Slow down Serena," she pleaded, "I'm not going home yet!"
It was a classic case of one person saying what everyone else in the building was thinking. By that point, Serena was already ahead 6-1, 3-0 and didn’t appear to be in the mood to slow down for anyone—even for 15,000 paying customers who were staring at a very early trip back to the parking lot. Who could blame her? When you’re playing this well, you want to see the next ball coming toward you as soon as possible.
On most days, it's next-to-impossible to predict anything about a player’s performance from what they do in their warm-up, but that wasn’t the case with Serena on this afternoon. Something about the way she bobbed and weaved and smacked her first few backhands—with a deep knee bend, a loud wallop at contact, and a full follow-through—caught my eye and made me keep watching her. The way she was hitting the ball looked and felt right. Makarova could feel it as soon as the points began. Even though she had played Serena five times before, it came as an unpleasant shock.
“Today she was so aggressive,” Makarova said. “I don’t know, maybe I didn’t think that she will be that aggressive. Like she’s coming, you know, so early, so sometimes I was too late because she was too fast.”