The easiest of Venus Williams’s four Wimbledon triumphs – which is by no means to decry the contribution of Marion Bartoli to the championships – was greeted with undiluted joy by an American contingent that won the boys’ singles and paraded finalists in the men’s doubles and girls’ singles. As the United States exports some of its finer tennis minds to Britain, its domestic game enjoys one of its more exceptional recent hours.
Of Williams’s three previous final victories at Wimbledon, two had been won in three sets and the other – her first, in 2000 – a straight-sets affair against Lindsay Davenport. Now it is back to the hard courts at home to see if either she or Serena, her sister, can end four years of external dominance of the US Open.
Whoever reaches the climax in New York, if recent trends are maintained, the final will be over in a jiffy. The last 11 finals there have been won in straight sets, with only one of those 22 sets going to a tie-break. One-sided matches have become the norm in women’s finals in New York and Paris, whereas at Wimbledon, where the surface makes for far less predictability, they tend towards greater theatre. The memory of Steffi Graf allowing Monica Seles only three games in the 1991 final seems like a mirage.
Which is why, as The Times reported last week, the heads of tennis – at least those of a grand-slam bent – are coming round to a consensus that best-of-five-set finals on the four biggest occasions of the year are no bad thing. Arlen Kantarian, the chief executive officer of professional tennis at the USTA, confirmed yesterday that the subject is “definitely on the front burner”.
Kantarian would have considerations, not least whether a five-set final would be conducive to CBS, the American broadcasting company which pays through the nose for the rights to the Open and may be averse to the prospect of a women’s final – at prime time on Saturday night – spreading late into the evening. That conveniently overlooks the patrons who spend hard-earned dollars on tickets for these events and are fed up with being short-changed by women’s finals that barely scratch the surface.
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When Williams thanked those in her coterie for helping her to Wimbledon victory, she made special mention of Amber Donaldson, a Sony Ericsson WTA Tour physiotherapist working on site, and Kerrie Brooks, her personal trainer at home in Florida. This may have been only her eighth tournament of the year (as opposed to Bartoli’s seventeenth), but she completed it with a welter of bandages on her left thigh. It is remarkable that there was a supply left after Serena’s imitation of an extra in Holby City in her fourth-round and quarter-final matches.
The women’s drive for equal prize-money and professional recognition has been determined and painstaking. How could they not, in the circumstances, embrace the concept of a five-set final in the grand-slam championships to help to silence those who remain fundamentally opposed to the principle? Dee Dutta, the head of marketing for Sony Ericsson, the communications company that has plunged $80 million (about £40 million) into women’s tennis, agreed that “it would not be an unfair request”.
Of course, as with Williams’s victory, two reasonably one-sided sets could become three, which might lead to half an hour’s more purgatory for the loser. But it would be half an hour more tennis, and that is what the ticket-holders want and deserve. After three games of the final, one had a horrible impression of Graf/Seles revisited, but Bartoli nudged her way back into contention.
But, as she was to say later, Williams possesses the greatest wing-span in the women’s game and has an innate ability – like Rafael Nadal – to turn defence into attack in a indistinguishable flash of wrist speed and racket momentum. Bartoli wondered how so many of her best strokes came back across the net and into such difficult areas that she was working twice as hard on subsequent strokes just to stay in the rally.
That is Williams and the attitude she has had since childhood. One more shot, her father, Richard, would say, just one more. We could, perhaps, be on the cusp of another period of Williams dominance; they have won two of the three grand-slam tournaments this year and one would be favoured to win in the United States, not least with the prize-money about to be raised for the champion to more than $1.4 million. Should they not play at least three sets to earn such extravagances?