The arrival of Serena and Venus accelerated the spread of power hitting throughout the women’s game. Monica Seles and Lindsay Davenport had started the ball rolling, but this type of aggressive hitting had not been seen before.
The former world number six Chanda Rubin recalls a match she played with Serena in Los Angeles in 2002.
“She hit a shot and it was the hardest forehand I had seen go by me,” she says.
“I didn’t even have a chance to react and move to it, and I had played Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Lindsay Davenport and Jennifer Capriati.
“This was just pure power. And from zero to 60. That visual never left me, even though I won that match.”
Williams also possesses arguably the greatest serve of all time. It offers power, placement, rhythm and accuracy, and is harder to read than War and Peace.
As both a woman and a woman of colour, Williams’ achievements and attitude have made a dizzying impact on so many others.
“Before Serena came along, there was not really an icon of the sport that looked like me,” Coco Gauff said in New York last week.
“So growing up I never thought that I was different because the number one player in the world was somebody who looked like me.
“Sometimes being a woman, a black woman in the world, you kind of settle for less. She never settled for less.”
Do not forget the Grand Slam title won in Melbourne while eight weeks pregnant, and the four Grand Slam finals she subsequently reached as a mother in her late 30s. Do not forget the postnatal depression, and the two pulmonary embolisms which endangered her life.
Williams knows only too well that black women are much more likely to die in childbirth and addressed the matter in a BBC interview in 2018.
“Doctors aren’t listening to us, just to be quite frank,” she told me.
“There’s some things we are genetically pre-disposed to, that some people aren’t. So knowing that going in, or some doctors not caring as much for us, is heartbreaking.”
Williams has spoken out with increasing confidence on sensitive issues as her career has progressed. She chose 2015 to return to Indian Wells, where 14 years previously she had experienced an “undercurrent of racism” before the singles final against Kim Clijsters.
She cited former South Africa president Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom as having a significant bearing on her decision to return.
“I’m looking forward to stepping out and letting the whole world know that it doesn’t matter what you faced – you can just come out and be strong and say I’m still going to be the best person that I can be,” she said in California that March.
Serena Williams is, of course, no modern-day saint. Arthur Ashe Stadium has witnessed her six US Open titles, but also some venomous behaviour towards officials, for which she showed little contrition.
But I think she is the most remarkable athlete of the last 40 years.
The pain she feels at having to leave the stage will be shared by many in all corners of the world.
