By Bill Simons
When Jimmy Connors played the US Open, he would strut into town with a certain bravado: New York, New York. With Maria Sharapova, it’s always sequins and elegance: strike a pose. But with Serena Williams, you never know. She’ll come to Manhattan and more often than not leave Broadway reeling. Serena and her sister Venus brought women’s tennis to primetime: bright lights, much sizzle. Her black boots and motorcycle skirt caused a tizzy like few other tennis fashion happenings. Her righteous (and right) rant over bad line calls in ‘04 led to the installation of electronic score keeping. And then there were those back-to-back meltdowns like no others. In ’09 she verbally assaulted a linesperson at the end of a quarterfinal against Kim Clijsters, and in ’11 she flipped out at a zealous chair umpire when she was penalized for hindrance for yelling just after what would have been a key forehand winner against Sam Stosur in the final.
So who knows which Serena will show up at this year’s US Open? These days, like many an inspired African American before her—from dancer Josephine Baker to writer James Baldwin—Serena has become infatuated with Paris. It would seem she’s in love with her coach Patrick Mouratoglou. Plus, she now seems to relish the preferred surface of the French, clay. She swept to the French Open title, her only major of the year, but then, despite having won five Wimbledons, seemed slightly uneasy on grass at the All England Club, where she suffered a shock fourth-round loss to Sabine Lisicki. She went on to play a small clay court tournament in Sweden. Rather strange, you might say, for an American who grew up on hard courts. But then again, you never know with Serena, who seemed at ease as she took the title in Toronto, but who openly admits that she “lives too much on the edge.”
According to Pam Shriver, no player has a greater gap than Serena between confident and doubt-ridden play. Plus, in the documentary Venus and Serena, Serena revealed that she has a wide range of distinct personalities. There is “Summer,” a kind of benign personal assistant, “Megan,” “Psycho Serena,” and the dreaded “Laquanda.”
When IT quizzed Serena about her personalities, she explained them with a resigned whimsy, “Summer is my assistant who lives inside my body,” she said. “It’s weird. She’s very effective. She’s unbelievable. She’s really organized. She’s amazing. I love her … Megan was a bad girl. She liked to have a lot of fun. [I] haven’t seen her in a long time.” As for “Psycho Serena,” her tamer version said, “I haven’t seen her either in a while. I have been trying to keep that one under wraps. That’s a girl that gets really crazy on the court and just fights really hard, she takes it a little too far sometimes.”
Asked about Laquanda, Serena bristled. “Oh, she’s not allowed to come out. She’s on probation. She’s not nasty. She’s just keeps it real, keeps it honest. You definitely don’t want to cross her. Because if you cross her, she snaps. She’s just a real person.”
And when it comes to the US Open, who else is more real these days than Ms. Serena?
