Serena Williams’s 6–1, 6–1 thumping of Maria Sharapova at the U.S. Open on Monday evening came as no surprise, really. Williams vs. Sharapova has always been less a tennis rivalry than a personal feud. In 2004, when she was just seventeen, Sharapova upset Williams in the Wimbledon final and then beat her again later that year. She didn’t register another victory against her until the 2018 French Open—and it was by default, Williams having withdrawn with a pectoral injury. Before Monday, the two had played twenty-two times, and Williams had won nineteen of those matches. Since 2004, Sharapova had won precisely four sets against Williams. Both being power-baseline players, they’ve lacked even the contrast in playing styles that can make for something like a rivalry, however one-sided. The matches have tended toward the brutal and brief.
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What’s made things interesting is their evident mutual animus. In her as-told-to autobiography, “Unstoppable,” which was published in 2017, Sharapova traces her discord with Williams to that Wimbledon final fifteen years ago. She describes hearing Williams “bawling” in the locker room after the match and claims that Williams knew that Sharapova had heard her—and that she later told “a friend” of Sharapova, who is quoted anonymously in the book, “I will never lose to that little bitch again.” Whatever the truth of that story, there was bad blood for sure by 2013, when a reporter for Rolling Stone heard Williams, speaking on the phone with her sister Venus, describe a “top five player who is now in love” as “boring,” and persuasively speculated that she was talking about Sharapova. At a Wimbledon press conference soon afterward, Sharapova remarked, in a reference to Williams’s relationship at the time with her coach Patrick Mouratoglou, “If she wants to talk about something personal, maybe she should talk about her relationship and her boyfriend that was married and is getting a divorce and has kids.” It also understandably irked Williams that, for years, Sharapova, being blond, willowy, and white, brought in more endorsement money than she did, even as Williams was throttling her on the court. But, these days, Williams outearns her off the court, too.
Sharapova, who is now thirty-two, has won five Grand Slam tournaments and is a former world No. 1. She has won the U.S. Open once, in 2006. In her prime, even as Williams was defeating her again and again, she was a fierce competitor who seemed to will victories against other players and was in possession of a corner-seeking backhand that, when she had time to step into it, was hard and flat and dictating. Injuries, particularly one to her shoulder that robbed her of an effective first serve, were diminishing her game even before she was suspended, in 2016, from the tour, for fifteen months, after testing positive for meldonium, which had been recently banned as a performance-enhancing drug. (On Monday, Williams’s husband, Alexis Ohanian, sat courtside in a T-shirt bearing the slogan “D.A.R.E. Keeping Kids Off Drugs.”) Sharapova returned to the tour the following year, and, in the first round of the 2017 U.S. Open, upset Simona Halep, who was then ranked No. 2 in the world. But her shoulder has continued to cause her pain and trouble her serve, and she arrived in Flushing this week ranked eighty-seventh in the world. How far off can retirement be?
Williams, meanwhile, approaching her thirty-eighth birthday, reached the finals at Wimbledon, in July, and, a month later, at the Rogers Cup, in Toronto, where, in a quarter-final match, she crisply and decisively defeated Naomi Osaka in a rematch of their notorious U.S. Open final of last year. Williams developed back spasms in the final in Toronto, against the Canadian phenom Bianca Andreescu, and had to retire, tearfully. But there were no signs of back strain on Monday night. And there was every sign that Williams’s fitness is the best it has been since she gave birth to her daughter, Olympia, nearly two years ago. She never once seemed out of breath, even in the handful of longer rallies that dotted a match of bang-bang points. Her lateral movement along the baseline appeared unstrained, her first steps quick enough to insure that she’d get to shots out wide in time and with proper spacing, neither crowding the ball nor—as has often been the case this past year—being forced to lunge and stretch for it.
There was, too, a calm focus that Williams sometimes lacks in the first match of a tournament. Her serve was there from the start. Sharapova was putting most of her first serves in, too, but to little effect; they were not making Williams move, and Williams was punishing them. She broke Sharapova in the fourth game and again two games later. Neither time did Williams show a trace of celebratory zeal—there were no shouts of “come on,” no fiery fist pumps. She held at love to take the first set, in twenty-four minutes.
It went much the same in the second set. Sharapova had two break chances in the fourth game, but Williams saved both. On the first one, Williams hit a kick serve that Sharapova mistimed, driving the ball into the net. On the second, Sharapova followed to net one of her best backhands of the match—deep and sharply angled—only to see Williams pass her with a spectacular down-the-line backhand of her own. The crowd, filling Arthur Ashe Stadium for this celebrity square-off, roared and rose, and Williams, at last, raised her fist and shook it. Sharapova lost that game and never won another. She won very few points on her serve in what remained of the set, including just one as Williams broke her in the final game, for the match.
There were no signs of enmity in either of the players’ press conferences that followed. Maybe they’re past that. Or maybe the match had said everything that there was to say. Williams succinctly summed up the rivalry that has never really been a rivalry. “I always said her ball somehow lands in my strike zone,” she said. “I don’t know. It’s just perfect for me.”