Serena Williams' media onslaught hardly ended after she seized her 18th Grand Slam singles title on Saturday. She is a forever-polarizing figure for tennis fans and a never-ending font of scuttlebutt and speculation among all observers, from Page Six to The Times, social media to The New Yorker. Here's just a few of the headlines that circulated (and have hardly died down) since she joined Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova at 18:
- She declared that she is, in fact, a single lady.
+ <em>The New Yorker</em> christened her America's greatest athlete in a generation, saying, "the failure to fully appreciate her importance is perhaps evidence of our inability to appreciate the stubbornly unfamiliar narrative arc of her career. Williams is underloved because, at times, she has been unlovable and, in the end, mostly unrepentant about it—something that might be admired as iconoclastic in a male athlete, but rarely endears women to a wide audience."
- Andy Roddick, a Serena crony who expressed concern after her health scare in that fateful Wimbledon doubles match, interviewed her by night after her New York victory:
- Reps for both Serena and Venus Williams played down reports that an allegedly "icy" rift between the two was at hand.
- She made her New York Fashion Week debut in conjunction with Home Shopping Network, and VOGUE's Anna Wintour was there:
- She missed TV appearances with Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan, among others, because she partied into the night alongside Caroline Wozniacki, Joe Jonas, and more friends. The excuse that she didn't have the energy to appear after two weeks of competitive tennis doesn't really hold water given that Serena has won singles (and doubles) Slams many times before and had no issue in appearing on TV the next day.
- Her new Beats by Dre promo appeared, although it actually dropped a day before she won the U.S. Open.
Suffice it to say, Serena is not holding anything back on Twitter:
This brings to mind her statements from 2013, when she determined that someone (Grigor Dimitrov?) had a "black heart." Come what may, Serena will remain herself. The rest of the tennis world—and the world at large—will keep watching. As painful as some of her episodes have been to regard, no one seems to be looking away.
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