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player ready...Courtesy is not fundamental to the Williams sisters, nor is modesty, not that either is essential in whacking a tennis ball for location and alacrity.
Venus Williams, unlike sibling Serena, did after all shake Virginia Ruano-Pascual’s hand. Venus was already waiting at the net before Ruano-Pascual’s final forehand landed long.
“I wanted to win all the points that Serena couldn’t win against her,” Venus said.
To say that Venus, 18, and Serena, 16, are not making friends along the tennis tour is irrelevant since all they require are one another. They may spat over who gets to take the occasional long-distance call from Dad, but they make a wall against the world of tennis. Hurt one, hurt both.
“Serena is always there supporting me,” Venus said. “But she doesn’t talk and talk like some people until your mind wanders and you don’t hear anything they say.”
Attention span is a generational flaw, of course, and these two girls are not the first to fail to see past their own appetites. They are as raw socially as they are on the tennis court, all swat and little thought.
“I never look at the draw,” Venus said, “except to see where I am and where Serena is.”
This was supposed to be the day the draw put the two sisters across from each other on court, but Serena had quit the day before as she was losing to Ruano-Pascual with a convenient injury considering the score at the time.
Serena said because she and Venus would not be playing she felt sorry for England, not having something to get excited about “for once.”
A local overhearing this observed wryly that Williams v. Williams certainly had all the pubs abuzz, more so than that little soccer tiff with Argentina.
“I expected to go all the way,” Serena said. “In the future, I definitely see myself as one of the champions.”
This is from a kid who has won only two matches at Wimbledon, whose career highlight is a semifinal loss in Chicago. Confidence? Arrogance? Insolence? Choose one.
“The younger generation,” Chris Evert said, “does seem to be a little light on character.”
Serena suggested that now that Venus did not have to play her, the way to the title would be less dire for her sister. Venus, too, agreed that Serena would have been the hardest opponent to defeat, never mind that two-time finalist Jana Novotna is next, to be followed by Martina Hingis and either Lindsay Davenport or Monica Seles, pretty much the aristocracy of women’s tennis.
“What can I say?” Novotna asked. “That’s the way young American kids are brought up nowadays, I guess.”
Not just nowadays, as anyone who was around the young Jimmy Connors can recall. And not just America, unless Ilie Nastase was adopted or, currently, Marcelo Rios has dual citizenship in Chile.
A more intriguing match than Venus and Serena would have been Venus against Irina Spirlea, who missed the chance to reprise the rancor of last year’s U.S. Open by losing to Novotna.
It was Spirlea who shouldered Venus during a crossover in the Open and then referred to her vulgarly as “the (bleeping) Venus.” This, in turn, caused Venus’ father Richard to call Sprilea “a white turkey.”
This is not typical tennis behavior, but priceless as hype. And tennis can use all of that it can find.
The misdemeanors of the Williams girls rise out of the assumption that tennis is not an in-your-face sport, though, of course, aside from boxing, it is the most confrontational game around.
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If the Williamses are not well-liked in the locker room, who is? Every tennis player is isolated with his or her own collection of sycophants. This is not a team game, nor is it even, as Bill Parcells once identified football, “a game for well-adjusted people.”
Their crime is not that Venus and Serena have each other, but their salvation may very well be that they have each other.