Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka after the blow-up
Tuesday
I must confess to having very mixed feelings about the Serena Williams-Naomi Osaka match. For much of the U.S. open finals, I thought I was seeing a young Serena Williams stepping onto the stage. One reason the actual Serena Williams lost her cool was because she didn’t have answers for Osaka’s game. The 20-year-old was playing Serena’s game better than she was playing it. I was rooting for Serena and felt bad for her, but I couldn’t help but thrill to Naomi’s performance.
Then the blow-up happened and I felt like I was in the middle of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. The novel contrasts two women, a quiet, dutiful one and a transgressive scandalous one. Although once the best of friends, class differences push them apart. Nel becomes a respectable wife, Sula a scandalous woman, and in a climactic development Sula steals Nel’s husband. While we seek to understand and sympathize with Sula, it’s never easy. Yet after she dies, Nel realizes how much she misses her.
Morrison doesn’t let us sentimentalize Sula and we can’t sentimentalize Serena either. She’s the greatest woman tennis player ever, but her fierce competitiveness has also gotten her into trouble. I’ve read many columns defending her actions and I agree with them only to a point. It’s true that women aren’t allowed to get as angry as men on the tennis court (or elsewhere in sports), and it may well be that the ref would have been more tolerant of male outbursts. Perhaps Carlos Ramos was intimidated by a fierce black woman and overreacted in the way that white police officers react to black men, with results we know all too well. Maybe a woman ref would have defused the situation better.
That being said, however, Carlos Ramos is famous for docking points from other well-known players, including Nadal and Djokovic. He’s had run-ins with both as each pushed certain boundaries, especially with regard to time violations.
And technically he wasn’t wrong in his calls. Serena’s coach had in fact been trying to coach her—it didn’t matter whether she saw him doing so or not—and smashing a racking is an automatic penalty. Serena blew up when, after finally having broken Osaka’s serve, she surrendered the break right back. Serena’s serve has been the greatest weapon in the history of woman’s tennis, and it’s understandable why she would feel unnerved when suddenly it was no longer producing the expected results. At that point in the match, Serena resembled a chess player who, upset when the game appears to be getting out of hand, knocks the board over.
Martine Navratilova, who admits that a double standard exists about men and women acting out, nevertheless faults Serena for her antics. No one, neither women or men, should behave that way, Navratilova says. For one thing, it’s not fair for the other player. It says a lot for Osaka that she stayed cool and finished out the match as she did.
Dutiful readers often prefer Nel in Toni Morrison’s novel while rebellious ones go for Sula. But in the end, each woman needs the other. As a woman of color, Osaka will find her road much easier because of Serena, who has made racist haters seem small. Serena, meanwhile, may come to appreciate how the next generation model themselves on her.
It hurts, of course, when they beat her in the process, and competitors often don’t behave well in those situations. Sula resents Nel for having an easier time of it and finds a way to disrupt her marriage, as Serena robbed Osaka of the full pleasure of her Open victory. But after Sula is gone, Nel realizes that Sula fought battles that she herself didn’t have the courage to fight and that she is the better for it.
