NYT; By KURT STREETER JAN. 14, 2019<\/p>\n
MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 The last time Serena Williams came here for the Australian Open, in 2017, the talk swirling around her focused on tennis. Could she capture her 23rd major title and break past Steffi Graf on the list of Grand Slam title winners since the sport went professional?
\nShe did indeed emerge victorious, beating her sister Venus in the final and doing so, she would later reveal to the world, while in the early stages of pregnancy.
\nOn Tuesday, Williams returns to the sunbaked Melbourne courts, with her 16-month-old daughter in tow, bidding for another place in the record books. This time, though, her tennis is nearly an afterthought.
\nFour months ago, in the final of the United States Open, Williams\u2019s most compelling moments came during angry outbursts against the umpire that won both praise and criticism, propelling an already epochal athlete to the very forefront of debates about sports and gender, race and power.
\nThat flare-up is still being frequently discussed as the Australian Open begins this week, though Williams herself is not expected to speak to reporters before she plays.
\n\u201cSerena has actually expanded her presence in people\u2019s lives,\u201d Delia Douglas, a Canadian sociologist who studies women in athletics, said in an interview. \u201cThe way people talk about her, the way people debate her and what she stands for, is now heightened.\u201d
\nHer tennis is certainly still part of the discussion.
\n\u201cWe all know Serena is very dangerous when she\u2019s fit and when she\u2019s healthy,\u201d said Chris Evert, the former world No. 1 who is now an analyst for ESPN.
\nBut just as many, if not more, focus on what Williams means.
\nAs Soraya Chemaly, a prominent feminist activist and social critic, explained: She fits perfectly in these times, \u201cwhen so much of what is happening in our world is related to gender and race and power. And right now, you can see it. Serena is sitting at that nexus, at the very intersection of all these important social conversations.\u201d
\nThe powerful combination of her celebrity, the internet and social media amplifies the discussion each year she continues to play, threatening to overshadow the tournaments she plays in.
\nThe last time she played the Australian Open, she was pregnant. Eight months later, she nearly died during childbirth. She named her baby girl Alexis Olympia. Months afterward, she married her daughter\u2019s father, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of the popular website Reddit.
\nWilliams, same as ever, did not shy from attention \u2014 or from making a point. She shared her story publicly and said she was experiencing the same troubles faced by many other mothers. In her first Grand Slam tournament after childbirth, the 2018 French Open, she was not in shape, and she withdrew with an injury in the fourth round. She wore a sleek, black, full-body tennis suit. It was part fashion statement, part medical necessity \u2014 it reduced the chances of a recurrence of blood clots she experienced during childbirth.
\nBut the \u201ccat suit,\u201d as it came to be called, was so controversial that French tennis officials discussed banning outfits like it from Roland Garros in the future. (As a countermove, the WTA, which governs the women\u2019s tour apart from the Grand Slams, clarified its rules to allow compression garments to be worn without skirts or dresses over them.)
\nUndeterred, Williams spoke pointedly at Wimbledon about protecting rights of new mothers \u2014 on the tour and in the workplace. She marched through the draw. But, still out of shape, she lost in the final. A few weeks later, she withdrew from the Rogers Cup in Montreal, eventually citing postpartum depression, a condition that afflicts about 15 percent of all mothers but is often dogged by stigma.
\nThen came the United States Open.
\nNobody here in Melbourne has forgotten what happened during the women\u2019s singles final. Carlos Ramos, the umpire, spotted Williams\u2019s coach motioning at her to be more aggressive. Ramos warned about a coaching infraction. Williams shouted with an angry, unyielding insistence that she had done nothing wrong, that she would never cheat.
\nNobody has forgotten the smashed racket, the point deducted as a penalty, her continued shouting: \u201cYou\u2019re a thief,\u201d she defiantly yelled at Ramos.
\nNor has anybody forgotten the game taken away as another penalty, Williams\u2019s assertion that male players often behave badly and get away with it, the booing and the tumult, and finally her surprising loss to Naomi Osaka, a rising star who may threaten her again in this tournament.
\nAdmirers praised Williams for showing courage, for being willing to stand up to a man, for being a black woman ready to argue her point in front of everyone, for enduring long years of racial slights, for engaging boldly nonetheless \u2014 and for never losing any of her fire. (A cartoon with racist imagery lampooning Williams in an Australian newspaper shortly after the U.S. Open was yet another reminder of those slights.)
\nCritics saw her as unhinged. This had nothing to do with womanhood or being African-American, they said. To them, she had behaved like a spoiled and raving maniac. More than that, they claimed, she had obscured the performance of a lifetime by Osaka, who had played remarkably from the start.
\nBut who could be surprised that Osaka got short shrift? Win or lose, the talk is almost always about Serena.
\nChemaly, the social critic, noted how, during a tour for her new book, \u201cRage Becomes Her,\u201d \u201cpeople kept bringing up Serena.\u201d
\nThe book urges women to be unafraid of showing rightful anger.
\nChemaly said she had been asked: \u201c\u2018What do you think of Serena Williams?\u2019 \u2018What does she mean for this moment?\u2019 \u2018How would you compare what happened at the U.S. Open to Brett Kavanaugh\u2019\u201d and the anger he displayed before a Congressional panel?
\n\u201cPeople really want to think about what it means,\u201d Chemaly said.
\nDuring 2018, Williams, 37, went without a major title for the first time since 2011 (she skipped the Australian Open in 2018, still recovering from giving birth in September 2017), and she did not play another tournament after the U.S. Open.
\nBut this is a new year. Based on her play during a string of exhibition matches in Perth \u2014 where fans greeted her warmly \u2014 and during practices this week in Melbourne, she looks primed to win again.
\nIf she does, she\u2019ll have achieved yet another milestone: a 24th major singles title, tying the former Australian great Margaret Court, whose Grand Slam championships came in both the amateur and professional eras.
\n\u201cShe seems fitter than last year,\u201d Evert said of Williams. \u201cThe scary thought, looking at the women \u2014 they have to be thinking at this point, \u2018Gosh, she was 60-70 percent last year, reaching two Grand Slam finals. And now she seems fitter, leaner. She\u2019s moving better. She\u2019s fresher.\u201d
\nPeople are talking. \u201cShe\u2019s so controversial now, everyone here will be paying close attention to that first match,\u201d one local fan, Jess Stow, 34, said, echoing a commonly heard sentiment as she walked with her 2-year-old son near the Australian Open grounds a day before play was set to begin. \u201cWhat will she end up saying?\u201d
\nBut so far Williams hasn\u2019t said much. In Perth, she avoided discussion of the U.S. Open partly by keeping her news briefing to just a few minutes.
\nShe did tell GQ Magazine in November that Ramos, the umpire at the U.S. Open, should have defused the contretemps by telling her about the signals from her coach before punishing her. It would have let her set things straight without the penalty, she said.
\n\u201cTell me that something\u2019s happening,\u201d she said, and she would tell her coaching box, \u201c\u2018Whatever you\u2019re doing, don\u2019t.\u2019\u201d
\nOtherwise, she has held her peace in Melbourne. Her racket may offer her most meaningful reply.
\nFollow Kurt Streeter on Twitter: @KurtStreeter
\nBen Rothenberg contributed reporting.
\nRELATED COVERAGE
\nSerena Williams Came In on a High Road. It Made Her Fall More Devastating. Sept. 10, 2018
\nUmpire in Serena Williams Dispute Was a Stickler From the Start Oct. 3, 2018
\nSerena Williams Spotlights Tennis Inequities, but in the Best Way? Sept. 9, 2018
\nSerena Williams Cartoon \u2018Not About Race,\u2019 Artist Says. Experts Strongly Disagree. Sept. 11, 2018
\nGo behind the N.B.A.’s curtain with the league’s foremost expert. Sign up for Marc Stein’s newsletter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NYT; By KURT STREETER JAN. 14, 2019 MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 The last time Serena Williams came here for the Australian Open, in 2017, the talk swirling around her focused on tennis. Could she capture her 23rd major title and break past Steffi Graf on the list of Grand Slam title winners since the sport went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tennis-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.ireneeng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}