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MELBOURNE, Australia — Naomi Osaka knocked Serena Williams out of the Australian Open on Thursday, but in relentlessly moving her from side to side on the court, did she also push Williams closer to retirement? After her 6-3, 6-4 defeat to Osaka in the semifinals, Williams left the Rod Laver Arena court to a standing ovation, which she recognized with a wave of her hand and a tapping of her heart.
After 20 Australian Opens, was Williams saying goodbye to a country of tennis fans that she described as “so amazing”?
“If I ever say farewell, I wouldn’t tell anyone,” she said in her post-match news conference, smiling weakly. “So …” Her voice trailed off.
Williams already had bemoaned her 18 unforced errors, including 10 on her forehand, considered one of the fiercest strokes in the women’s game.
“Not like I was on the run or anything,” she said, looking up at the ceiling to drive the tears back down. “They were just easy, easy mistakes.”
To what did she attribute all the unforced errors? Was it Osaka’s suffocating power? A bad day at the office? It was the eighth question of the news conference, and Williams’s composure crumbled.
“Uhh, I don’t know,” she said as she rose from her seat, crying. “I’m done.”
Williams has been stuck at 23 Grand Slam titles, one shy of the Australian Margaret Court’s career record, for four years, since winning the 2017 Australian Open while two months pregnant with her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian.
Since returning to competition in 2018 after a difficult childbirth, which included a C-section delivery and complications stemming from blood clots, Williams has played in 11 Grand Slam tournaments and advanced to the semifinals or finals in six.
Meantime, the generation inspired by Williams is asserting itself. Players like Osaka are building their own legacies. Osaka quietly has compiled a 4-0 record in Grand Slam semifinals and won the championship in her previous three trips to the finals. “I have this mentality that people don’t remember the runners-up,” Osaka said, adding: “I fight the hardest in the finals. I think that’s where you sort of set yourself apart.”
Those are Williams’s sentiments exactly. During a recent tour of her South Florida home for Architectural Digest, she dismissed a runner-up prize on the shelf in her trophy room, saying she’d have to “put that one in the trash” because “we don’t keep second place” awards.
Over the past three years, Williams’s love for tennis and the joy she finds in competition have carried her through a pectoral injury, knee injuries and a left Achilles injury. She rededicated herself to the arduous — her word — task of improving her fitness, and where has it gotten her but on the wrong end of score lines in slugfests against considerably younger opponents like Osaka, 23, who fashioned her game after that of Williams, her childhood idol?
Williams looked fitter and faster in her first five matches of this tournament than she did when she made the finals of Wimbledon in 2018 and 2019. She looked more formidable than when she played for the championship at the U.S. Open in 2018 and 2019. And she still couldn’t catch Court.
There will be a player representing the United States in Saturday’s final, but it will be Jennifer Brady, 25, who defeated the Czech Republic’s Karolina Muchova 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 in the other semifinal.
Williams’s latest loss came five months after she took the first set off Victoria Azarenka but still exited the United States Open in the semifinals. Williams hurt her Achilles tendon in that match, which meant she could tell herself that if she could only stay healthy, victory would be hers. By coming up short in the semifinals, Williams technically went backward — in her mind if in nobody else’s.
The Australian player Samantha Stosur, who defeated Williams in the 2011 U.S. Open final for her only Grand Slam singles title, said that Williams didn’t need to equal or surpass Court to cement her status as the greatest player in the history of the women’s game.
“I think many players would already think that and argue that fact regardless, whether she gets this 24th title or not,” Stosur said Thursday.
It is not by chance that in 77 Grand Slam appearances, Williams has withdrawn mid-Slam only twice, both times in the post-motherhood chapter of her career (the French Open in 2018 and 2020). Childbirth has given Williams more faith in her body’s strength and resilience. But no matter how young she feels, her body has absorbed three decades of pounding on the tennis court and one difficult labor.
The long-sleeved, one-legged catsuit that she unveiled at this tournament, while stylish, also served a more important functional role as a compression garment. She continues to deal with circulation issues. There are days, she acknowledged after her 6-3, 6-0 victory against Nina Stojanovic, when her right foot swells and it is so painful that she puts off until the last possible moment slipping the shoe on and tying the laces.
Between the tape job on her swollen right foot and the tape job on her injured left ankle, “I’m basically wearing a cast on both my feet,” Williams said.
The difficulty of standing on the precipice of history, as Williams has for the past four years, is focusing on the here and now under circumstances like those on Thursday, when she was so close to the milestone that she could hear her name being carved into the game’s annals.
“It’s definitely not easy,” said Patrick Mouratoglou, who has coached Williams since 2012.
He added: “The only way is to focus on how to get what you want. You don’t think about what you want, you just think about what you have to do.”
Osaka acknowledged that her poor serving in the first set, where she put 36 percent of her first efforts in play, was because Williams was an intimidating presence on the other side of the net.
“I’ve grown up watching what she does to people’s returns when the serve is soft,” Osaka said, adding, “I was thinking about what could happen if I didn’t serve perfectly. I think that’s what made me sort of overdo it.”
Williams’s serve for a long time was considered the gold standard of the women’s game. But she was broken four times by Osaka, including at love right after Williams had broken Osaka to even the second set at 4-all. “I had all these thoughts about how she’s the best server, I’m probably not going to be able to break her,” said Osaka, who added, “Then I told myself to erase those thoughts. and just to, like, in a way I was telling myself I don’t care because I can only play one point at a time.”
Osaka held at love, winning the last eight points of the match. She described their hug at the net as “definitely a surreal thing” because of how much she looked up to her as a child.
It’s not a given that children will grow up to compete against, much less defeat, their idols on their sport’s biggest stage.
“Every time I play her, I feel like it’s something I’ll definitely remember a lot,” Osaka said, adding, “I want her to play forever. That’s the kid in me, I guess.”
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