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WASHINGTON, D.C. – The stadium wasn’t full, but a great crowd came out on a Tuesday night in Washington, D.C. to see 45-year-old Venus Williams return to singles after her latest layoff.
And they went home happy, as a joyful Williams pulled off a 6-3, 6-4 victory over fellow American Peyton Stearns, who at 23 is barely half her age.
It’s hard to know how to process all that, to be frank. Even after sleeping on it. Because it’s really two concurrent storylines.
The headline narrative is that a legendary champion, after years of not playing regularly and dealing with all sorts of health issues, steps on court after 16 months and (on some level) turns back time.
It will be a headline that pierces through the tiny tennis ecosystem and into the mainstream the way so many great tennis moments cannot.
In most cases (doping, deportation, default), that piercing is for all the wrong reasons. In this case, it’s a great story – because of her status in a universe that extends far beyond tennis. And, of course, because of her age.
Martina Navratilova was 47 when she beat Mara Santangelo at Eastbourne, and Catalina Castano at Wimbledon in 2004. Kimiko Date was 46 when she was double-bagelled by Aleksandra Krunic in Tokyo back in 2017. There are precious few examples of women winning matches at the WTA level into their 40s. Beyond the Williams sisters, of course.
Sister Serena was a couple of weeks away from her 41st birthday when she defeated Danka Kovinic and Anett Kontaveit in the first two rounds of the 2022 US Open, before bowing out to Ajla Tomljanovic in that emotional farewill on Arthur Ashe Stadium in the third round.
Williams served very well Tuesday night – a whole lot better than she did in her practices here or even in the doubles match she played on Monday. She moved … reasonably well. But Stearns was unable to do the one thing she needed to do – keep the rallies going, move Williams from side to side. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat again. A simple plan, not executed.
But the thing is, you understimate the will of a champion at your peril. Williams seized the moment like a legend; Stearns, to be kind, failed to do the same.
While Stearns didn’t say that specifically (and wasn’t asked anything close to something that might elicit that – “How would you describe JUST HOW WELL Venus played today!” doesn’t quite get that done), she did credit her opponent.
“Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of pressure, because you can’t do a lot of homework on the match. Of course she hasn’t played in a while. You don’t know what to expect. We knew she was going to hit some big serves, though. That was something we could expect. Yeah, it’s a lot, you know, learning in the moment, not knowing anything about your opponent. So it’s not easy,” Stearns said after the match. “I mean, she played some ball tonight. She was moving really well, which I wasn’t expecting too much, honestly. Her serves were just on fire, so …”
As you can see from the video above of her post-match interview, Williams was pretty joyful about the outcome. It was a great moment.
“There is a lot of work that goes into this kind of preparation. I think each week that I was training, I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know if I’m good enough yet’. And then there would be weeks where I would leap forward, and there would be two weeks where I was, like, ‘Oh, God, it’s not happening’. Even the week leading up, ‘Oh, my gosh, I need to improve so much more.’ So it’s all a head game,” she said.
“I think more than anything, it’s just about love, right? If you have enough love for it, then you’ll put in the effort, and then you’ll find that little extra little bit at the end because I love it so much.”
Her second-round match will be against No. 5 seed Magdalena Frech, a 27-year-old ranked about 10 spots above Stearns and who is a bit of a late bloomer.
Before that,she will take the court for the third day in a row for doubles, along with Hailey Baptiste. Unlike their opener, against young Clervie Ngounoue and the nearly-retired Genie Bouchard,they’ll face top-flight doubles players in Taylor Townsend and Zhang Shuai Wednesday afternoon.
Here they were warming up earlier.
The prospect of Williams coming back and actually winning matches has generated plenty of buzz, although the very magenta elephant in the corner of the WTA room is willfully ignored for the most part.
And that is, if a woman that age – as legendary a career as she had in the 1990s and 2000s – who is not in optimal shape and has barely played in years, can win matches on the WTA Tour, what does that say about the WTA Tour?
Because this entire scenario is not just what it says about Venus Williams, whose champion’s credentials are indisputable.
If you weren’t a ride-or-die Venus fan Tuesday night, you couldn’t help but feel for Stearns. Most of the time, she looked like a deer in the headlights. Most of the time, she missed shots she wouldn’t normally miss.
She came alive, briefly, in the final game on her serve,saving five match points. But for the most part, she played as though she almost wished Williams would be too slow, too error-prone to win and she wouldn’t have to step on the gas.
You can understand it. Throughout Stearn’s life as an American tennis player, the Williams sisters have been the gold standard – leagues about anyone else, and with an aura to match.
That Stearns would express surprise that Williams was able to move pretty well gives you a little insight.
The 23-year-old Stearns had a fantastic run through Madrid and Rome on the clay this spring.
Among the players she defeated: Amanda Anisimova, Anna Kalinskaya, Madison Keys, Naomi Osaka and Elina Svitolina.
So she has faced big serves before. She has faced a buffet of players who move a lot better than Venus at 35 – never mind 45.
But she didn’t even push Williams to do as the legend thought she might have to – as evidenced in her pre-match warmup: shorten points, at the net if necessary. It didn’t get to that point.
But Stearns didn’t come in on a confidence high; she also had a sleeve on her left knee she said was more to help her physical confidence than anything. After Rome Stearns played Roland Garros, Eastbourne and Wimbledon. She won just one match in all, against a British junior at Eastbourne.
Stearns gave full credit to Williams, though.
“I have so much respect for her to come back here and play, win or lose. That takes a lot of guts to step back onto court, especially with what she’s done for the sport,” she said. “You know, you have a lot behind you. You have accomplished a lot. And there is a lot of pressure on her and to kind of upkeep that at this age. So massive credit to her for that.”
There aren’t many examples, as mentioned, of WTA players playing into their 40s – not in singles, at least.
There’s a reason for that. Speed and movement are at more of a premium than they ever were. And it doesn’t much matter if you still strike the ball beautifully and cleanly, if you can’t get into position to do it. If women that age could keep up with women half their age in that area, some would probably play longer.
The easy narrative here is to say that Williams is just such an amazing champion, that she’s able to battle back against Father Time in a way no other player ever could. Even against a 23-year-old in the top 40.
That makes for a lovely fairy tale. And maybe there’s a tiny smidgen of truth to it. But if Williams comes back on the WTA Tour and can continue to pick off wins here and there, it also sends a message about the level of the women writ large.
(We’re deliberately not even going there with the other elephant in the room).
There’s no escaping the fact that just shouldn’t happen. Even when it’s Venus Williams.
That’s not a Venus problem; that’s a Tour problem.
Frech is a solid player, an excellent mover. Let’s see what she can do.
If Williams continues to play, it will be fascinating to see how that plays out – which players can put aside the legend across the net and focus on beating a 45-year-old woman whose body has been put through the wringer.
But whose desire, at least from what we’ve seen this week, might carry her a long further than anyone might think.
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