![]() As the match wore on she came to realise what all dominant champions realise sooner or later: she had been caught up. The harder she hit, the louder she grunted and screamed, the more she tried to assert her ferocious body language, the faster the ball came back to her. What was extraordinary about watching Maria Sharapova, a 17-year-old Russian, win the final was just how easily Serena Williams was overpowered. This observation was most graphically demonstrated at Wimbledon last year. And that was the case for Venus and Serena.' ![]() Eight or nine months away from any sport is going to take you out for a while. You have to do things a little bit differently than you did to get to where you were. 'I think the hardest part about it,' Garrison says, 'is that first and foremost, you have to realise you're not where you left off and neither are the people that you left before you were there, because they're moving on, they're getting more experience. It has been proved again by Venus and Serena. That was proved forcibly in the case of Monica Seles following her on-court knife attack. ![]() When you return it is often to a different game entirely. As their friend and sometime mentor Zina Garrison, herself a former Wimbledon finalist, points out, being out of an individual sport such as tennis creates unexpected problems. The sisters both took time out of the game to grieve and then, having lost some of their conditioning, were beset with injury when they tried to return. She was personal assistant, confidant and adviser, and her death leaves a void that can never be filled.' Yetunde was, they said at the time, 'our nucleus and our rock. The chapter began in September 2003 with the horrific murder of their beloved elder sister, Yetunde Price, in a gangster shooting in Los Angeles. The story of that 18 months is the bleakest chapter in the Williams's fairy tale, that astonishing narrative of the 'ghetto Cinderellas' crashing the 'lily-white world of tennis' that was scripted for them by their father before they were born. Eighteen months on, having only recently secured numerous long-term endorsement contracts that will make her the richest woman in the history of the sport, it is odd to think that Serena must be wondering just a little whether she might have to settle for the six grand slam titles she has already won, and no more. Then, it looked to her and to any other observer to be mostly a question of how long she cared to go on - five years? Ten years? - and how many titles would be enough. Give or take the erratic Belgians, the only genuine rival to her pre-eminence of the sport was her sister, she suggested, whom she had recently defeated in four consecutive grand slam finals. Sitting outside in the sun in a fluorescent orange T-shirt, she looked and sounded like an irresistible force. I remember talking to her just before her last Wimbledon triumph in 2003. That Serena, in particular, should be going into the Australian Open, which starts on 17 January, without a major title to her name is remarkable. What looked likely to be a decade of dominance by the sisters is beginning to seem like little more than a three-year historical moment. It is 18 months since Serena won a grand slam event and a year longer since Venus threatened to do the same. Venus Williams is now 24, her sister Serena is 23. But Richard Williams's words are, not for the first time, beginning to look just a little like prophecy. 'When they've finished their tennis careers,' Williams added, 'I don't want a couple of gum-chewing illiterates on my hands.' By 26, can start setting businesses up.' By 35 they could be producing grandchildren for him, new prodigies. Actually, I prefer retirement at 19, but Venus says: "No, Daddy, 23, 24".' Once they had retired, having briefly and spectacularly dominated their sport, they should, he suggested, spend 'the first six months of the year travelling round the world, and then go full-time to college. When Richard Williams gave his first interview to the New York Times, in 1997, he said that he hoped his daughters, Venus and Serena, would be 'out of tennis by 23, 24 years old.
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