serena williams locked herself in saferoom

Serena was just a couple of weeks shy of turning eighteen, in 1999, when she won her first U.S. Every tennis fan who loved Serena has her own highlight reel, and it’s likely to be lengthy. This, for sure, is how it works with our recollections of sports stars. What we mostly recall of an experience or relationship, beyond its end, are its keenly witnessed or intensely felt highs and lows a remembrance is the smoothed-out sum of sharp shards. Kahneman and Fredrickson posited another heuristic at work in the shaping of memories: the power of what they termed “peak” moments. Where in sports do you ever see something like that? That’s the last impression that will stick with me.

They all might have been more comfortable, and had a better view, at home, in their living rooms but here they were, standing, cheering, and, in some larger sense, paying their respects. As she was closing out her first-round win Monday night, I wandered out of Ashe, onto the south plaza, where hundreds, maybe more, were gathered to watch on the big screen outside of the stadium. Serena’s three matches broke attendance records and attracted ratings that just aren’t seen in the first week of a tennis tournament. It may well be that what Serena’s most fervid fans remember of her last hurrah is themselves, coming together in Arthur Ashe Stadium and before television sets to scream their last hurrahs and to express how much they cared one more time. Serena’s fans may also remember the poise and determination of her final opponent, Ajla Tomljanović, a twenty-nine-year-old, Croatia-born Australian player, who wore Serena down with hard, up-the-middle ground strokes designed to keep points going and going, and who never cracked, not after falling behind 0–4 in Set Two, and not when Serena kept fending off match points-five in all-before Tomljanović prevailed 7–5, 6–7 (4), 6–1.

For certain stretches, such as the first games of the second set, Serena struck aces and open-stance backhands and swinging volleys as if time-and giving birth to a daughter, five years ago-had taken nothing from her game. Her fans will remember the fight she showed in her last match, which went three sets and three hours. That forehand into the net, those moments when she seemed spent and flat-footed, those last games she didn’t win: none of that is likely to mark the end for those who cared about Serena Williams. The last ball she hit was a forehand into the net, and it was likely the last ball she will ever hit on the women’s tour-she announced, in August, that she was “evolving away from tennis,” and the understanding was that the U.S. Now and again, the expression on her face was of someone straining to keep an upwelling of emotions in check. She watched balls heading to the corners without moving her feet. At times during those games, she looked every bit the player who will be turning forty-one in a few weeks. She lost the last six games of the match. Open-the earliest she’d been knocked out of the tournament since 1998, when she was sixteen years old. Serena Williams lost on Friday night, in a third-round match at the U.S. It’s doubtful that these final moments, long anticipated if nonetheless wistful when they arrive, figure much at all in how we recall the legends we become attached to and end up caring about in ways that can seem unreasonable-even, at times, to ourselves. Athletes diminish professionally at an earlier age than most of us, and even the greatest among them tend to falter and fail on big stages in the glare of fame before calling it quits. In the beginning, we are transfixed by an athlete’s promise at the end, unless it is unusually abrupt, we endure her or his decline and warmly wave goodbye. Trevor Berbick? To be a fan of any athlete is to know the ending and to begin processing it before it arrives.

If Muhammad Ali mattered a lot to you, was that relationship altered in any way by his last fight, against . . . Last impressions, good or bad, can deeply color, or discolor, our memories.īut is this true of how we remember great athletes? Maybe not. When we recollect and judge an experience-a medical procedure, a vacation, a love affair-we’re liable to overemphasize its final moments. It was Daniel Kahneman, with the American psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, who recognized that, in what and how we remember, there tends to be a cognitive bias at work.

Serena williams locked herself in saferoom