KEVIN MCCALLUM: A ‘setback’ for Serena, but one she will turn into a victory

When you google “Serena Williams”, up pops a list of what “people also ask” about the her.

They are, in order: “Who is more better Serena or Venus? (sic)”; “How much did Puma give Serena Williams?”; “At what age did Serena Williams turn pro?”; “What is Serena famous quote? (sic)”; “Why is Serena so inspirational?”; “Why Serena Williams is a good role model?”; “Who is the best female tennis player of all time?”

The answers to the first four are, again in order: Serena; $13m (this was her first big endorsement, a five-year contract negotiated by her father when she was still ranked 99th in the world); 14 years old; “I don’t like to lose — at anything — yet I’ve grown most not from victories, but setbacks.”

The last may not be her most famous quote, but it works well enough. The next three must, surely, are easy to answer: she is Serena Williams, a girl straight out of Compton who overcame barriers of race and background to win 23 Grand Slam singles titles, 16 Grand Slam doubles and four Olympic gold medals. She is, as Etan Thomas wrote in the Guardian on Thursday, a “beacon to black girls everywhere”.

“Serena showed black girls like my daughters that they have to be confident and proud of themselves, because the larger society is not always going to encourage their Black Girl Magic,” wrote Thomas, a former NBA player.

She overcame racism, body-shaming and double standards. She has had to do more than others to be considered a superstar because of the way she looks and doing it her way. She has transcended to a level that, to quote Thomas again, is “unapologetic greatness”.

That is why her retirement, announced in a self-penned article in Vogue magazine (now that is one hell of a way to go out with a bang), feels like an end and a beginning, the completion of her on-court career and the start of the building of her legend and legacy for young black girls who dare to dream, and not just about tennis. Williams did not call it a retirement in Vogue, but an “evolution”, which might sound like new age waffle, but is, in reflection, just about perfect.

“I have never liked the word retirement. It doesn’t feel like a modern word to me,” wrote Williams. “I’ve been thinking of this as a transition, but I want to be sensitive about how I use that word, which means something very specific and important to a community of people. Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, towards other things that are important to me. A few years ago I quietly started Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm. Soon after that, I started a family. I want to grow that family.”

Family is important to Williams. She was two months pregnant when she won the Australian Open in 2017. The birth of her daughter, Olympia, was hard and took her close to death, requiring four surgeries. She breast-fed when she was playing. Now she and her husband are trying for another baby and, at the age of 41, she has decided that she “definitely” didn’t “want to be pregnant again as an athlete. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out”.

Retirement — evolution — is not easy, she admits. She is, she told her fans,  “terrible at goodbyes, the world’s worst ... I’m going to miss that version of me, that girl who played tennis. And I’m going to miss you.

“It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads. I keep saying to myself, I wish it could be easy for me, but it’s not. I’m torn: I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to look at this magazine when it comes out, knowing that this is it, the end of a story that started in Compton, California, with a little black girl who just wanted to play tennis.”

Just a little black girl who ascended to unapologetic greatness and black girl magic