By Bill Simons
Just before Babe Ruth set his home run record, his brother didn’t strike him out.
On the eve of Roger Banister breaking the four-minute mile, his brother didn’t beat him to the finish line.
Jack Nicklaus doesn’t have to worry about a family member surpassing his golf mark.
Patrick McEnroe hardly detracted from his brother John‘s career. Claire Evert didn’t exactly rain on her sister Chrissie‘s parade.
You get the point.
Still, in any sport, it’s dicey to play a sibling. Murphy Jensen, who won the French Open doubles with his brother Luke, sighed and said that when he did play against him “was a trip. It’s crazy. But at the end of the day, it’s just a tennis match.”
Except that Tuesday night in their quarterfinal match, when Serena and Venus meet as opponents for the 27th time, history will be on the line. Cliff Drysdale mused, “The mental dynamic between these two, the ramifications….”
English writer Rose Macaulay noted that siblings “know one another’s faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries and desires.”
Serena desires to win a record 22nd major, to become just the fourth woman to win a calendar Slam. The pressure is relentless. Venus wants to score her first win over Serena since the 2014 Canadian Open, to collect her first US Open in 14 years, and her first Slam in eight years. But there’s zip pressure on her. She can swing free and breathe deep. She knows every little thing about her little sis. “It might help me in the match, right?” she told IT.
Of course, there have never been two more impactful sisters in tennis, or, for that matter, no two more impactful siblings in all of sports than the Williams sisters. And, sorry, Malia and Sasha Obama and Nicky and Paris Hilton – the Williamses are the most famous sisters on the globe, this side of the Kardashians.
They have each other’s back.
Still, in a journalistic coup, IT got Serena to admit there was one thing that got under her skin about Venus. She’ll be alone for a while at the Florida home they share, and will bond with Venus’s dog. But then when “V” comes home, the hound shifts all its tail-wagging attention to the elder Williams. What a bummer.
As for Venus, she confided that, “We have a family gathering every year, and I don’t get much say. She always picks the theme, so that bothers me.”
On court, Serena has been picking the theme of late. She has won six of their last seven matches. Plus, Serena has survived two huge scares this week and – serving big and hitting out – she was impressive in her tidy fourth round 6-3, 6-3 win over Madison Keys.
But Venus is in orbit. Almost giggly, she told us that she’d love to win the Open this year: “It would feel so good.”
But not to Serena, and not to lovers of feel-good narratives and jaunty sporting fairy tales. After all, if Venus derails Serena on her journey to destiny, it would be the biggest sister-shock since Queen Elizabeth I did in her royal sister, Mary, Queen of Scots back in 1587.
