Overcoming Body and Mind

When Serena Williams tossed the ball to serve at 4-1, 15-0 in the second set of the French Open final on Saturday, she must have thought the worst was finally behind her. The flu, the day spent in bed, the coughing fits, the three-set matches, the comebacks from the brink of disaster, the sturm, the drang: She had left them all behind, as well as her final-round opponent, the stubborn but overmatched Lucie Safarova. Surely now she was on her way to her 20th Grand Slam singles title.

Not so fast: Just when Serena’s body had been defeated, her mind decided to get in the way.

Serena double-faulted. OK, no problem; she quickly followed with an ace and a forehand winner for 40-15. Just five more points to go. But Serena did something funny after she hit that forehand winner. She jumped high in the air to celebrate. At the time, it looked like she might be practicing her victory leap. In reality, she was happy because she had, for the moment, fought through the thicket of nerves that she could feel growing inside her.

It turned out that this would be Serena’s last happy moment for the next hour or so. Instead of cruising to major No. 20, she found herself pinned down by those nerves and unable to swing her way free. Serena double faulted two more times in that game, two more times in her next service game at 4-3, and she was broken a third time while serving for the match at 6-5.

“I choked,” a blunt Serena told NBC afterward. “It’s as simple as that. I think you have to admit to it. I hit a lot of double faults. It was a big moment, going for 20.”

By the time she had lost the second-set tiebreaker, Serena had created a ball-striking monster on the other side of the court, in the form of a newly confident Safarova.

“She’s a great player,” Serena said. Once she had opened the door and Lucie had stepped through it, Serena wondered what she had just done.

“Oh, no, that’s not the girl I wanted to play!” she thought to herself.

By the the third set, Williams was thinking and saying a lot of things to herself. When she won points, she raised her arms and screamed, “What are you doing?” When she lost them, she said something worse, often enough to earn a code violation from the chair umpire for an audible obscenity. As she tossed the ball to serve at 0-2 in the third set, it suddenly seemed possible that, despite her 19-4 record in Grand Slam finals, we might be about to see one slip away from her.

But the fans in Court Philippe Chatrier should have known that this is how No. 1 players do things these days. Earlier in the afternoon, the top men’s seed, Novak Djokovic, had squandered a two-set lead to Andy Murray before turning on a dime and running away with the fifth, 6-1. Serena did the same thing in the deciding set against Safarova. It's as if Williams and Djokovic both need to see their worst fears realized before they can relax and forget them.

When Serena fell behind in the third set, she said she asked herself a question: “What are you going to do about it?”

First she buckled down and made her returns; at 1-2, she drilled a forehand return within an inch of the baseline to reach break point. Soon her serve followed suit; at 2-2, she hit two aces and two service winners for a love hold. Finally, she regained control of her ground strokes. In the past, when nerves have struck, Serena has found her way past them by taking a little off her shots and working the rallies. She did the same on a few key occasions today.

Serena had to block out her troublesome mind, the same way she had blocked out her troublesome body earlier in the week.

“I stopped thinking and just started doing,” she said.

When Serena was doing things well, there wasn’t much Safarova could offer in return. She began the match aggressively, when the smarter tactic might have been to keep the points going and make Serena move as much as possible. But there was no denying Safarova's brilliance when Serena served for the match at 6-5 in the second set. The Czech stunned the American first by returning two of her hardest serves, and then by threading two ground strokes up the line for winners.

“I was really just trying to stay in the moment,” Safarova said, “but she came back really strong [in the third set], and it kind of slipped away.”

Safarova was disappointed—will the 28-year-old ever be this close to a major title again? But she had no problem saying that this had been “the best two weeks” of her career. She has another crown, in the women’s doubles, to play for on Sunday.

As for Serena, despite her 6-3, 6-7 (2), 6-2 win in the final, she said this was decidedly not the best two weeks of her career, or her life.

“Oh my gosh, it’s been a living nightmare,” she said of her flu-plagued French Open, which she described as “by far the most dramatic” of her 20 winning Grand Slam campaigns.

While it may not have been a dream run, Serena’s 2015 Roland Garros is on the short list of her most impressive achievements. Besides winning five three-set matches and overcoming problems of body and mind, she also reminded us of just how nerve-wracking it must be to try to close out a Grand Slam title with the whole world watching, but with no one allowed to help you.

In that situation, when you’re far ahead and the finish line is near, and you’ve essentially already won, how do you avoid thinking, “If I choke, no one will ever forget it”? And if that thought enters your head, how do you swing the racquet? And if you stop swinging the racquet, how do you start again? Watching from the outside, I can comprehend the choking part, but not the shrugging it off and winning anyway part. Where does it come from?

That’s why we watch the frighteningly lonely sport of tennis and its champions, to see that hard-to-fathom resilience that must be found from somewhere within, even as millions stare from a distance. That’s why we watch Serena, tennis' greatest 21st century champion: She can prove herself a human and a champion in the space of one afternoon. And that’s why she has something else that’s hard to fathom: 20 major titles.