TORONTO — Serena Williams is looking up at the ceiling, trying to remember if she faced a break point in the match she just finished here at Aviva Centre.
The World No. 1, now in a grey Nike zip-up and with a large designer-looking purse hanging off the chair she’s sitting in, realizes she didn’t. Still, Williams doesn’t think she played well. She’s not even smiling.
But the fact is, the 33-year-old just semi-clinically rolled over Germany’s Andrea Petkovic, 6-3, 6-2, in a match that took an hour, in which she recorded nine aces and just one double fault and won 88 per cent of her first-serve points.
You really wouldn’t know it: “I still think I have a tremendous amount of improvement to do off the ground and everywhere else,” she said. And “I just felt off, you know?” And: “Gotta be more positive out there again. I just felt a little negative.”
In case you didn’t know it, the best female tennis player on the planet is a bit of a perfectionist. Nine aces? “Could have had 10,” Williams says. “Always try for better.”
It’s not until a few more stats are relayed to her that the 33-year-old, owner of 21 Grand Slam titles, a two-time-defending champion here at the Rogers Cup, decides maybe it wasn’t as bad as she thought.
“Those are great stats,” Williams said, actually looking a bit shocked, eyebrows up. “I usually don’t have those stats. You know, I just didn’t—did it look that clean?”
Yeah, sort of.
Watching this third-round match, you wondered after the first game—Petrovic didn’t win a point, and Williams closed that opening game with an ace—if this baby was going to last about 30 minutes and end with double donuts. Petrovic has won just one set against Williams in their now five meetings.
Often, Williams came off as clinical. She pummelled two straight aces in the third game of the opening set. After the first ace, clocked at 196 km/h, she quickly turned to get another ball, then fired one 179 km/h. No smile, all business, as the crowd roared.
But Williams did show signs of rust on the hard court. She’s been battling an elbow injury, she’s taken some time off, and she misfired quite a few times. When she did, she waved her arms, bent her knees and gestured at her racquet while she talked to it.
If you’d just been watching Williams’ body language, you’d have guessed this match wasn’t going her way. She even talked to her racquet after points she won, though she can’t remember how the conversation went. “I guess it listened to me, because apparently [it] did really well,” she said, smiling. “No, I just felt like I kept hitting the frames and I wasn’t really going for a lot of shots. I didn’t really go for winners. I didn’t really feel like I played my game.”
This, after she dusted the world’s No. 16 seed. This, after she crushed cross-court winners at sharp angles that had this crowd going wild.
And they love her, the crowd here. There is a different tone to a Serena Williams match, different from the crowd that cheered for hometown favourite Eugenie Bouchard, who pleaded “C’mon Genie!” as they watched her lose her opener.
Fans say “oooh!” when Williams nails a winner. They stand and they clap. As Williams is interviewed on-court, post game, they’re standing and listening. They’re rushing to a corner to get her autograph as she leaves.
And she plays to the crowd beautifully: “Playing in front of this crowd is always amazing,” a smiling Williams said, as they cheered.
She’s incredibly likeable off the court. That image of Williams as the take-no-prisoners, harsh and intimidating figure in women’s tennis? She blows it out of the water, post-match. She’s asked about Petkovic and says she can’t help but smile when she sees her. “I really like that girl, she’s so nice, Andrea’s so sweet,” Williams says. “She’s one of the people when you see them in the locker room you’re just happy to see them come in.”
Yes, she sometimes looks bored, sitting here, fielding questions. That’s fair: She just recorded her 726th career win.
Post-match, after she told the crowd here she’d worked up quite the sweat, and smiled, and got them all cheering for her again, the World No. 1 walked off the court to the appropriate lyrics of ‘All I do is win, win, win no matter what.’
Petkovic, too, walked off the court, smiling and waving. Why frown when you’ve been beaten by the woman who’s probably the best there’s ever been?
Though you’d have a hard time convincing Serena Williams of that on Thursday night. Nine aces? She could’ve had 10.