With the loss of Roger Federer and Serena Williams to retirement, tennis is deprived of two figures who soared above the courts.
Federer, who will play his last tournament next week, and Williams, who played her final US Open at the end of August, brought theatre and a unique bearing to the sport that few could match. They were also qualitatively different.
Williams emerged from the Los Angeles ghetto of Compton, her hair in beaded cornrows, and introduced white tennis to a black American culture for which it was barely ready. Using fashion and attitude as an expression of self and a weapon of change, it was not in the traditional tennis columns that Williams announced her career end but in the pages of Vogue. Her diary piece was accompanied by a cover shoot in an array of evening gowns. Williams’s style was self-confident and self-made and always with a bigger plan, her co-designed tennis wear smashing traditional dress codes, her presence larger than anything in the sport.
Williams, in Swarovski crystals or a black catsuit, seemed always aware of the legacy, its historical importance; she was a black woman, empowered and unstoppable.
Modernism in Irish Women’s Writing review: Great insights into work of female writers
Ireland’s best-kept secret: our climate is heaven
LIV defectors Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton should be cut adrift from the Ryder Cup
Darren’s abuse by the priest ended when he was 11. His story remains one of the worst I’ve heard
Federer brought a mesmerising balletic flow to the game that was easy on the eye. Never anything but pressed and dressed, his one-handed backhand was not just a scalpel under a surgeon’s control but a palate knife in the hand of an artist.
Combined with easy social confidence and the air of a statesman, Federer’s default position was graceful, distant cool. Conde Nast’s Anna Wintour, a regular in Wimbledon’s Royal Box, was one of his biggest fans.
Although he spent many hours at practice, Federer could not have knowingly built the game he possessed, elegance and grace of movement the gifts he was given.
Style is personality and means something. Otherwise, the numbers alone define the greatness of a player. Williams and Federer hit the numbers, but they coloured the canvas too.