As forceful as fearful, Serena Williams (40) appeared at Wimbledon, a flan in the first game, her first game after a year inactive.
The scene seemed like a joke, a bad joke, because Serena Williams was a caricature of herself and no one would have considered her a legend who is after the 24th grand (Margaret Court's absolute record), a milestone that everyone except herself predicted as unlikely.
And then?
Then, Serena Williams got bigger and lowered her percentage of unforced errors and raised that of winning points, and signed a range of serves-volleys to enter the match and manage the French Harmony Tan (115th in the WTA) , in theory a comparsa in the show of the American star.
(she was a Wimbledon big draw debutant, after all)
And from there, to suffer.
Serena Williams, a committed but inefficient tennis player in the first set, came forward.
She was not at all the Serena of other times, the one who in her day had aspired to the novamás, the absolute record of Margaret Court, the one Rafael Nadal dreams of
(In the previous turn, the man from Manaco had invested 3h33m to get rid of Francisco Cerúndolo)
Serena Williams went from here to there, and the nostalgic memory shuddered when contemplating her suffocated gasp: we have seen her rule the WTA circuit for so many years and adding titles, a long 17-year career that goes from 1999 to 2017 and includes 23 great , seven of them in the garden at Wimbledon.
Now the mother of 4-year-old Olympia, businesswoman, fashion star and even movie character, Serena Williams is also a willful gamer obsessed with something beyond her.
How many times must he have cursed his missed opportunities!
He has lost four major finals in the last five years, two of them at Wimbledon and another two at the US Open, and all those wounds have been tormenting his soul and even his body: so much had been broken last year, the back area of the knee, during her first round match against Alexandra Sasnovich, precisely at Wimbledon.
From that mishap the doubts had surfaced, the conversations on the divan.
What I do? Do I go back or let it go?
The exercise this Tuesday on the Center Court was going to come out of those debates, an experiment as sporty as it was sociological that attracted thousands of curious and tennis lovers, since Serena Williams will be the 401st in the WTA, but she is still Serena Williams , that adult who, as a child, had heard how Richard, her father, told her:
-Your sister Venus will be number one. But you will be the greatest of all time.
Without rhythm (a hit was followed by a nonsense), without depth (how she suffered when the rallies were lengthened) and without agility (she did not reach the drop shots or hits to the lines), Serena Williams only had tenacity left, the obsession to relive a time that is gone and may not return.
Holding on to that tenacity, and also to Tan's weaknesses (especially with her second serve, a black hole in her tennis), the American was going to correct things in the second set to add five games in a row and force the third. manga, and a Russian roulette that would be resolved in the match tie break and would end up opting for the French side, more solid in the decisive moments.
On the night of Wimbledon, Serena Williams crashed her windmills.
Perhaps the specter appears behind.
