When Venus Williams, the big sister in the royal family of tennis, wears a champion’s smile and clutches the big silver dinnerware from Wimbledon, we eat it up.
For the better part of 10 years, the lone reasons why tennis has not become less relevant than tiddlywinks in the United States are named Serena and Venus.
“Thank you, All England Club,” Williams announced to the crowd at Centre Court after
beating Marion Bartoli 6-4, 6-1 Saturday to win the only tourney that really matters. “We’re
playing under equal terms.”
The blow Williams struck for female athletes on Saturday was bigger and more powerful than the nearly 125-mph serves this 27-year-old American used to blow away Bartoli in straight sets.
First place was worth $1.4 million.
For the first time since Wimbledon began offering prize money in 1968, women and men received equal pay for winning the singles title.
It was about time.
For all the claims about what a long way female sports have come, baby, the most chauvinistic location on the planet remains anywhere games are played.
In 2007, when so many U.S. households depend on the earning power of women, but we still aren’t quite sure it would be OK to put a female in charge at the White House, there are only two sports where guys don’t hog the headlines and applause.
Figure skating is ruled by women, if only because 21st century dudes are squeamish about any competition that ends in the kiss-and-cry zone.
But, in this country, tennis is now a racket dominated by women, whose athletic and artistic merits have pushed men aside as little more than afterthoughts.
Doubt it? Pete Sampras was a legend to folks who string their own rackets, but little more than a rumor to everyone else in America. And, in a delicious reversal of stereotype, Roger Federer is watched as much for his hair as his Grand Slam titles.
Fighting back from injuries that had her feeling as if she were missing in action for more than a year, Williams became the lowest seed in Wimbledon’s open era to win the championship.
Williams, known for brute force on the court, needed more than a sledgehammer to beat down Bartoli, who refused to be intimidated. In fact, it was a graceful, acrobatic backhand shot from an impossible angle above her head that Williams used to finally break the challenger’s spirit in the second set.
As her mother, father and sister all stood in the grandstands to cheer, the four-time Wimbledon champ humbly took the time to thank them all for their inspiration in a tourney where she nearly lost in the opening round.
Then, Williams did something that reminded us why she’s grown bigger than tennis.
Too many pro athletes appreciate little about the past of the games that have made them rich, with scant knowledge of history that extends only as far as whatever program might have been playing last week on “ESPN Classic” while they fell asleep at a hotel.
Fifty years ago, Althea Gibson cracked a racial barrier as imposing as anything faced by Jackie Robinson in baseball when she became the first black to win at Wimbledon.
Gibson was rewarded with a trophy in 1957, but no money for her feat.
Which made the $1.4 million prize that Williams took home all the more historically significant.
Before Venus shook up tennis history, she memorized every detail of it.
In a strongly worded criticism Williams penned last year for a London newspaper on the eve of Wimbledon, she accused the tourney of being on the wrong side of progress.
“I believe that athletes – especially female athletes in the world’s leading sport for women – should serve as role models,” Williams wrote in The Times of London. “The message I like to convey to women and girls across the globe is that there is no glass ceiling.”
After she finally broke through, Williams was wise and generous enough to salute the female tennis player who probably scored more points in America’s athletic battle of the sexes than Peggy Fleming, Mia Hamm and the authors of Title IX combined.
Billie Jean King was among the audience at Centre Court. When Williams had the microphone during the awards ceremony, she made certain everyone remembered King’s impact on the sports that make women famous.
“I wouldn’t be here without you,” Williams told King.
This is one sisterhood that’s thicker than blood.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
