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It was 10pm on Saturday night at a near-deserted Wimbledon, more than six hours after Serena Williams held the Venus Rosewater Dish to her heart once again, safe in the knowledge that at last a 22nd Grand Slam title was hers.
The hours between had comprised countless interviews sandwiched around the women’s doubles final, where she and older sister Venus duly won their sixth title here. This was to be her very last interview of this long, triumphant day.
Fittingly, the eternal super-achiever appeared anything but weary. Instead she engaged with the questions, thinking carefully as she pondered each query with that steady gaze. So… now that she has equalled Steffi Graf’s mark, and with her 35th birthday looming in September, just how many more Slams can she win?
“Venus came out with a good saying,” mused Serena. “Great players are greedy – they’re never satisfied. That was so perfectly said. When you’re great, you ARE greedy. You want more. You keep going back to the table for more, to eat more. There is no ‘enough’. You have to be really selfish - this is how it is, I come first.”
Among the key members of her team who live by that edict, Patrick Mouratoglou is key. Nine of her 22 Slams have been swept up since they teamed up in the wake of her humiliating first round exit at Roland-Garros 2012. The two of them are a perfect fit. He understands every detail of her competitive needs implicitly. What if that partnership had never happened? Can she imagine whether she would have achieved as much? Serena shook her head.
“It’s a great combination. He’s been so very influential, producing not just the wins but the super-consistency. We make a great, formidable team. We’re a lot alike, especially in terms of professionalism. We’re never satisfied unless we win – and even when we do win, we pick apart what we could have done better. For me to meet someone who has that same hunger and drive is very rare.
“I don’t know if I can imagine doing it for three, four, five years more. I don’t look too much in the future. I’m living for now, trying to take this up and enjoy it, embrace it, and then I’ll go on to the next title, see how I feel then. I’m playing a little less, but I’m really zeroed in on those tournaments I’m playing.”
When you’ve won 22 Slams, does each victory have its own memory? Or is all just one haze of humungous triumph?
“There's definitely some blurs between eight, nine and ten,” she laughed. “I don't even know where they were or when. I definitely don't remember where 12 was. I remember one through four. Gets really blurry after that.
“But I feel differently about myself when I’m winning. When I lose, I do not feel as good about myself. Then I have to remind myself, ‘You are Serena Williams. Do you know what you’ve done? Who you are? What you continue to do - not only in tennis but off the court? You’re awesome.’”
She laughed at herself as she said it, but it gave a clue about something she will have to face somewhere down the road – gauging when to call a halt. Elite competitors on the brink of retirement can find themselves wondering: “Who am I, if not this winning player I have been all my life?”
But what is clear at Wimbledon 2016 is that Serena has no earthly reason to face that thought yet. How strange these shifts in the tennis axis are – just a few weeks ago, observers were questioning whether her losses at Flushing Meadow, Melbourne and Roland Garros indicated that at last her historic run of achievements was past its peak; and that maybe it was not, after all, inevitable that she would gallop past Graf’s Open Era record, nor eat up the ground to reach Margaret Court’s all-time record of 24 Slams.
Yet Wimbledon 2016 has proven the fallacy of such theorising. The world has turned again, and Serena is on the march once more.
“One morning in the days after Roland Garros, I literally woke up and thought ‘I can do better’,” she remembered. “I told myself, ‘Not only can I do this – I am going to do this. And nothing in this world is going to stop me.’”
