Serena’s Return: US Open Preview

Welcome back to The Debrief, Box Score’s freewheeling conversation. Today, we talk tennis, and the burning questions around the US Open, which kicks off this week.

Cecil Harris
Author of Charging the Net: A History of Blacks in Tennis from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters and Different Strokes: Serena, Venus, and the Unfinished Black Tennis Revolution. Host of the narrative podcast All-American: Venus & Serena.

Andrew Lawrence
Senior features writer at the Guardian US who has covered tennis and the US Open for the past 20 years at the Guardian and Sports Illustrated.

Albert Chen
Co-creator of the Webby Award-winning podcast All-American, author of Billion Dollar Fantasy, full-time tennis obsessive.

We got the news over the weekend: Serena Williams is officially back at the US Open — not in the singles draw, but in mixed doubles, where she’ll pair up with Carlos Alcaraz. With their debut set for Tuesday in Flushing, what exactly are we looking at here: a genuine comeback, a glorified exhibition, or the most Serena Williams way possible to dip her toe back into tennis?

Andrew:  I feel like I'm partly to blame for this. Last year at the US Open, I interviewed her former coach Patrick Mouratoglou, and we talked about her transition into health influencing and touting her weight loss gains. And he was like, Man, I wish she was approaching her weight loss this seriously when I was coaching her, because if she'd done it then, we would be on track as far as smashing all the records. And I feel like some part of her heard that and decided like, Oh, maybe I should give this tennis thing another shot.

Two things are happening. One, she's watching Venus have this fanciful late-stage act where she's just playing for the purity of it. And the second thing is she's seeing the Olympics in LA looming and feeling like it would be something special for the two of them to win a gold medal. So I feel if any part of it is serious, it's a tune-up toward the LA Games. 

Albert: Given the spectacle that mixed doubles at the Open has become, this does have a bit of a Tom Brady-suiting up-for-flag-football feel to it, where technically there is a competition, but the attraction is the legend showing up. 

Whatever the case, the USTA is no doubt thrilled — they get a huge promotional event dropped into their lap before the main event even begins. And there’s no question a lot of people will be tuning in, including me — it will be genuinely cool to see Serena playing alongside the game’s greatest showman, Carlos Alcaraz.

Serena acquitted herself well at Wimbledon — she was serving well, moved better than I thought she would, and looked like she could still make many players very uncomfortable out there. 

Cecil: I do think what’s driving part of this is, she’s been looking at the tennis landscape since she stepped away from tennis in 2022,  and there have been so many first-time champions on the women's side that no one expected to win a major. She probably thinks, “If I can get my tennis game in gear, I may be able to win that 24th major and tie Margaret Court.”

She has made the conscious decision to stay away from singles at the Open. She could have just taken a wild card and taken her best shot, but after she hurt her knee playing in the match at Wimbledon, maybe she just wants to make sure she can get through mixed doubles and then see where it goes from there. But if they offer her a wild card at the Australian Open — which I'm sure they will — Serena most likely would take it, and then we'll see where she is as a singles player. 

Serena's very successful these days, mainly as a venture capitalist. She's a married mother of two. But I do wonder how much of this is just her missing the spotlight, because she’s not in the spotlight unless she’s playing tennis. 

Andrew:  Shaq has talked about just how not having 20,000 people rooting for him anymore has literally given him incurable post-retirement depression because there's nothing in his life that will ever fill that hole that was filled for the first half of his life. So I wouldn't be surprised if something like that is going on with her, too.   

Speaking of GOATs … Novak Djokovic is gunning for Slam No. 25 at age 39, while also trying to shape the final chapter of his legacy with a new documentary, Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter. What did the doc tell us about where Djokovic is in his career — and do you think he still has another major run in him?

Cecil:  These retrospectives are better when they come after someone's career. With Rafa Nadal's Netflix series, he had enough separation where he could look back on his career and talk about it, and as someone who is content with his place in tennis history, he can put it in better perspective. With Novak, I get the sense that he wanted to set the record straight on certain things — for example, the COVID-marred Australian Open, even though it doesn't mesh with the widely reported facts of what happened there. 

It's not likely he's going to do it, but I admire the fact that he keeps getting out there to win No. 25. He's not content being tied with Margaret Court. He wants to stand alone. 

Andrew:  I feel like I had my Novak awakening at the 2011 Australian Open, which I covered for Sports Illustrated. When he won that, he sat there and he's like, “I wanna be number one in the world, and I wanna win Wimbledon next.” I was just like, “What the hell are you talking about, guy?” But he was so serious and righteous about how this is not a flight of fancy, this is happening. That really comes across in the documentary, and then just his whole war-survivalist attitude that he brings into tennis, and how he treats that game as a game of existentialism. He's living and dying on every point.

But the doc does a good job of showing how incredibly flawed Djokovic was when he came out. He was a great defense player who had no sort of endurance and wilted in heat and humidity. And he systematically addressed every one of his physical deficiencies line by line: diet, training, then tactically building his offensive game, building an incredible serve that was on par with Federer and Nadal, and making himself a complete player by sheer force of will,  at a time when the idea of him surpassing those two seemed impossible. He's a great example for believing in yourself. 

Albert: He’s also a great example of doing ridiculous things at age 39. I am fascinated by how he’s doing it. We’ve heard about how he’s gone gluten-free, his pioneering use of analytics, his obsession with sleep — I really wanted to understand the full architecture of Djokovic’s greatness: what he eats, how he sleeps, how he trains, how he uses data, and all the obsessive little choices he makes to maximize his performance and extend his career. And, unfortunately, we don’t get much of that at all in the doc.

It does capture well how Djokovic has always been, as The Athletic writer Matthew Futterman put it, a “party crasher” rudely interrupting the Roger-Rafa party in Act I of his career, and now, in his final act, he’s still in that role, crashing the Alcaraz-Sinner party. Djokovic savors that role, and I think people are underestimating how much it’ll fuel him to win No. 25. It’s remarkable; he’s still routinely getting into the second week and he’s often there to the end. Getting deep into a Slam still feels like the baseline for him. The oddsmakers have him as the third favorite, but there’s not much daylight between Djokovic and the second favorite, Zverev. If Alcaraz stumbles because of the rust, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Djoker still standing at the end.

It’s been 23 years since an American men’s player won the Open. With Sinner out of the draw, is this the year? Which American has the best shot to end the drought?

Andrew: This is Ben Shelton's surface, and he has the biggest weapons of any of the American players. He's more experienced. I feel like we were picking him as a potential finalist when he broke out three years ago, and so now that he actually is more prepared for the moment, I would say that he's probably the American to beat.

Cecil:  I agree — he’s playing very well on hard courts, having won in Canada for the second straight year. If Shelton plays Djokovic and Shelton wins, there will be a phone call. Payback is a you-know-what. I want to see an American man win the US Open. 

I want to see a Black male tennis player win a major. We haven't seen that since Yannick Noah at the French Open in 1983. These droughts need to end at some point, don't they? I think it’s Ben Shelton’s time. 

Albert: Shelton is obviously huge for American tennis, but I think he’s just as big for men’s tennis overall — the sport needs someone with his charisma to step into the top tier alongside Alcaraz and Sinner, who isn’t exactly Mr. Personality. But the interesting story is that the American men finally might have enough depth that it’s not just about finding one guy to carry the country. Taylor Fritz has the big-match experience. We all know Frances Tiafoe’s ability to catch fire in New York, and he’s played well this summer. Brandon Nakashima has quietly become the kind of player nobody wants to see, and then there’s Learner Tien. Shelton may have the biggest weapons, but the fascinating thing is how many different versions of an American contender there are right now. 

Serena is the talk of Flushing this week, but what will be the big story coming out of the Open?

Cecil: The women’s side is so wide open, I will pick what I think would be the best story: Naomi Osaka. She's playing much better this year. It's been a five-year drought for her at the majors, and she hasn't won any significant tour event in a while, but I like this incremental progress that I see her making. The crowd loves her, she'll make her fashion statements, they'll get behind her, and if she handles the big points a little better than she did last year when she lost in the semifinals to Amanda Anisimova, why not Naomi Osaka this time?

Albert: Coco Gauff seems to be skating under the radar, which is a great position for her to be in. If she makes that one drop shot at Wimbledon, we’re probably talking about her as the Wimbledon champ coming into the Open. Remember how much of a mess she was a year ago coming into the event, and she went out and double-faulted 18 times in her first two matches at the Open. It is possible that her serve issues might be “in the rearview mirror.” Coming off a straight-set win over Jessica Pegula in the final in Cincinnati, she’s peaking at the right time. No matter what, though, you just know the journey will be agonizing and it won’t be easy, because nothing ever is with Coco.

Andrew: I like that Coco is building the plane in the air. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is a work in progress. The shot that was good one week is now the thing that we're tooling, and vice versa. When have we ever seen this of an athlete where they can just sort of vibe their way into major championships? She wins, and she's like, "Death to all my haters." She's a perfect zillennial torchbearer for the  women's game right now. 

The other story people will be talking about is the price gouging at the Open.  The fact that a grounds pass costs almost $400 and the USTA has turned this thing into a Fifth Avenue cash register. I don't know how that's going to bode well for the future of tennis. With sports moving to streaming and venture-capital incursions into ownership, it feels like the Open in its small way is getting swept up into that and distancing itself from the original mission of being the Open for the people. 

I just feel like they're missing their moment. Because the quality of the players, the actual tennis and the storylines have never been better and more compelling. 🎾

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