Is Serena Williams’s fame as a cultural icon eclipsing her tennis?

Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but one of her shots is an exception. Her serve is not only one of the most destructive strokes in tennis, it’s also one of the most beguilingly beautiful. Her action begins slowly, even ponderously — as if her limbs are reluctant to emerge from stillness. But from this heaviness comes a sudden gathering, an explosive acceleration, as racket, arm, trunk and legs are flung up in unison towards the ball. Gerald Marzorati devotes a couple of pages to Williams’s serve in Seeing Serena, and he points out something I’d never noticed, which is how ‘effortlessly smooth’ her ball toss is. No one, he writes, not even Federer, has ever used their non-dominant arm so efficiently on serve.

Marzorati knows his tennis well, and is good at observing such things — nuances of style and technique that often get overlooked. Watching Williams partner Andy Murray in a mixed doubles at Wimbledon, he notes that her ability to hit low volleys on the move has always been (and remains) ‘a challenge’. He also writes well about her service return, and the terror it must inspire in opponents. Just imagine the stress of knowing that if one of your hardest serves is fractionally misplaced, it is likely to be dispatched for a screaming winner. As someone whose serve rarely goes where intended, I can imagine that feeling only too well.

Marzorati got the idea for his book in the wake of the 2018 US Open final, scene of that torrid argument between Williams and the chair umpire Carlos Ramos, during which she accused him of ‘stealing’ a game from her, and later suggested that he’d been sexist. So much heat did the incident generate that it got Marzorati thinking about how Williams had become much more than simply a tennis player.