There were no tears this time. Serena Williams left Centre Court defeated, but in triumph.
Only time will if a 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (10-7) loss to Harmony Tan, a Frenchwoman ranked 115th in the world, marked her final appearance at Wimbledon. Yet if this was her swansong, then she departed in a manner befitting of her legend: courageous, defiant, raging against the dying light.
It was not a vintage performance from Williams. Of course it wasn’t. At the age of 40, and after a year out with injury, it would have been foolhardy to expect as much. It took time for the synapses to fire, for the muscle memory of old to kick in. A couple of doubles matches at Eastbourne were never going to prepare Williams adequately for the physical, mental and emotional demands of competing on one of the game’s most historic stages.
Yet it was also a million miles removed from the distressing scenes that unfolded last year, when the seven-time champion slipped and tore a hamstring, her anguished cries reverberating around Centre Court as she was forced to forfeit her opening match against Aliaksandra Sasnovich. This time Williams left with a smile and a wave, unhappy with the outcome, for sure, but content that she had given everything.
“Today I gave all I could do,” said Williams. “Maybe tomorrow I could have given more. Maybe a week ago I could have given more. But today was what I could do. At some point, you have to be able to be OK with that.”
Tan, with her deft touch play and bewitching array of slices and sidespins, brought variety of shot and singularity of purpose to the contest. Playing her first Wimbledon at the age of 24, she showed remarkable composure, weathering the numerous momentum shifts of a battle spanning three hours and 11 minutes as she frustrated Wiliams with the sheer unpredictability of her game.
Tan said afterwards that she had been daunted by the prospect of playing the 23-time slam winner, yet everything she did on court belied the suggestion. Having capitalised on Williams’s own evident anxiety to claim an early break, Tan quickly found herself pegged back. Yet she persevered with her policy of testing Williams’s movement, and when she fired a forehand winner to clinch a probing exchange, breaking for 6-5, she even sought to harness the support of the crowd.
Tan did not let her head drop when Williams prevailed on her seventh break point to clinch a 20-minute game early in the second, after the roof had been closed. She repeatedly came from behind in the decider, recovering from 3-1 down, breaking Williams as she served for the match at 5-4, and shrugging off a missed match point in the 12th game before clawing her way back into the decisive tiebreak from 4-0 down.
“I’m really surprised,” said Tan. “When I saw the draw, I was really scared because it was Serena Williams. She’s a legend. I was like ‘Oh my God, how can I play?’ If I can win one game or two games, it was really good for me.”
Williams refused to be drawn on whether she had played her last Wimbledon.
“That’s a question I can’t answer,” she said. “I don’t know. Who knows? Who knows where I’ll pop up?
“Like I said coming into this, I’m just planning for right now, seeing how I feel, just to go from there.”
On one point, however, she was unequivocal. Asked whether she would be content if defeat to Tan proved to be her final memory of the tournament, Williams replied: “Obviously not. You know me. Definitely not.”
Hope springs eternal for a return.