Doing The Ace Walk Again

It had been four months since Serena Williams had played a match. Which meant that it had been four months since she had done her patented “ace walk.”

You know the one; you’ve seen it a million times. It starts when Serena is challenged, briefly, on her serve. Her opponent, hopeful for a second, pumps her first. Serena notices this. Then she bares down, gets to game point, and holds by reaching back and hammering an ace with a few extra M.P.H.s on it. As she walks to the sideline for the changeover, she raises her head a little higher and shoots her opponent a stern glare for good measure. Sometimes I think Serena, consummate champion and consummate dramatist that she is, tries harder to end a game with an ace when she knows there's a changeover coming up.

As I said, it didn’t take long for Serena to bring out her ace walk at this year’s Australian Open. It happened in the first set of her first-round match, a slam-bang 6-4, 7-5 win over Camila Giorgi. You could see it coming. The Italian was doing something unusual to Serena, something that the world No. 1 has never liked from her opponents: She was dictating play and forcing Serena to defend. This really wasn't surprising, because Giorgi, who owns wins over Maria Sharapova and Caroline Wozniacki, doesn’t know how to do anything else. During rallies and in between rallies, she has one gear: She swings fast and moves even faster to the next point. Nothing, not even a dozen double-faults, can slow her down or get her to react.

Giorgi’s style, which you might call “let’s get this over with one way or another,” worked against Serena to an extent. The last time they played, she had pushed her to a first-set tiebreaker, and, despite those 12 double-faults, Giorgi hit enough aces and winners of her own to keep both sets close.

In a sense, though, her game worked a little too well. Her go-for-broke approach got Serena’s attention early. On other days, against less-aggressive or dangerous players, she might have dropped a set or gone through a sluggish stretch, especially after a layoff. But Giorgi offered the world No. 1 a challenge she couldn’t resist. Serena doesn’t just believe she should win matches, she believes she should win them on her racquet, and eventually she did. It was Serena who finished with more aces (nine to seven) and more winners (19 to 17).

“A for effort,” Serena said when she was asked to assess her performance. “I’ve played her a couple of times before, and just wanted to be as consistent as I could. She definitely doesn’t give you a lot of rhythm, so it’s definitely a different match.”

“I think I served well today. I think, you know, I got broken once, but other than that I was able to stay focused on that part.”

Over the last year, Serena has been compared to a variety of other champions. Steffi Graf, the woman whose major-title total she’s chasing; Ronda Rousey, the mixed martial arts fighter who, along with Serena and the U.S. soccer team, helped lift the profile of women’s sports in 2015; Muhammad Ali, the iconic African-American athlete of an earlier era. Serena was even compared, by Sports Illustrated, to the United States itself.

Comparisons are always imperfect, of course, especially with a personality as bracingly individual as Serena’s. But after watching her beat Giorgi, I can’t help but add one more to the list: Michael Jordan. The NBA legend used to say that, even after he had won multiple championships and MVP awards and established himself as the best player of his generation, he was always motivated by a new audience. Wherever he was, no matter how meaningless the game, he wanted to show that audience—always a sellout—what the real Michael Jordan was all about. He didn’t, in a sense, want to let them down.

Seeing Serena begin the year with an ace walk and a glare reminded me of Jordan's words. Serena said in her pre-tournament press conference that she doesn’t have anything left to prove, but when she’s out on the court, she can’t help herself. Unlike Jordan, it isn’t the crowd that motivates her; it’s her opponent. You might say that this what happens with any halfway decent competitor, but if you watch enough tennis, you know that for many players it's a business—nothing personal. Not for Serena. Part of what separates her from the rest is that, like Jordan, she never forgets who she is, and never lets her opponent forget it, either.

After watching Serena lose to Roberta Vinci at last year’s U.S. Open, I thought things might finally be different for her this year. It seemed that she was due for a competitive letdown. Maybe Serena sensed it, too; she took time off at the end of last season, because, she said, she hadn’t had a real break since the Olympic year of 2012, and she knew that 2016 was another Olympic—i.e., extra busy—year.

Serena may have that letdown yet; it only takes a couple of bad sets for a tournament to be over. But judging from her first match of the season, it won’t come because of a decrease in desire. Against Giorgi, Serena couldn’t help but bring the same emotion to the court that she has always brought. Some have said that she’ll continue to be motivated by the thought of passing Graf on the all-time Slam-title list (she’s currently one behind her), and I think that’s true. But she won’t need that as motivation. She'll find it in every big match she plays.

There will, after all, always be another player to ace. And there will always another chance to show an opponent what Serena Williams is all about.