Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Venus Williams lost in three sets to Jie Zheng of China, 6-3, 2-6, 7-6 (5), Wednesday night at Louis Armstrong Stadium.
Maybe Venus Williams has been trying to tell us something with her braided purple hair this week, 16 years after she first appeared on the Arthur Ashe Stadium court with colorful beads flowing and a fascinated world watching. Could she be subliminally tying a ribbon around her storied tennis career?
"I've had a tough set of circumstances to work through this year, especially this year, last year and the year before," she said, combining a smile with a sigh.
The years have flown by like the blur her forehand can still be when she has enough energy to crank it up. But Williams, 33, has struggled with an autoimmune disease that saps her strength and a chronic back injury that compels us to approach her every United States Open match as if it could be her last.
She went out of this year's tournament after missing an easy volley at 5-5 in a third-set tiebreaker and losing a 3-hour, 2-minute second-round match to Jie Zheng of China, 6-3, 2-6, 7-6 (5), on Wednesday night in the Louis Armstrong Stadium. She gave it the good fight, but early exits have become the norm. For now, possibly forever, Williams's best chance of getting back on Ashe may be with her sister, Serena, in the doubles draw.
Instead of dwelling on what comes next, it would seem timely to take a contextual look back to when she first showed herself in New York — and was just what Arthur Ashe would have ordered on the day the stadium named for him opened for business.
August 25, 1997. Williams played the second match, defeating Larisa Neiland of Latvia in three sets. At 17, she wasn't the only African-American woman on tour — Chanda Rubin, in fact, lost the first match played on Ashe.
But this was before Serena bounded onto the Grand Slam scene and when Venus alone was heralded as tennis's untapped resource, its socio-economic game-changer.
Her mother, Oracene, said that day that her daughter was not overly thrilled with the prospect of being cast as the great urban athlete crashing the coveted country club. Venus, she added, had even called Althea Gibson to ask for advice on how to avoid the inevitable onslaught of clichés.
"She's going to have to handle it," Oracene said, "because that's the way it's going to be."
That is how it has been as Venus — and Serena in her take-no-prisoners-entitled-kid-sister way — came to be the reflection of women's tennis for a decade and a half. In the process, it has become increasingly clear that they have helped to remake the racial composition of their sport at home in the way it was once hoped Tiger Woods would for golf.
These days, when people think about the future after the still-dominant Serena, it is typically a woman of color who is mentioned first. The talk is about Sloane Stephens, 20, and ranked No. 15; and Madison Keys, who lost in the first round but may have the most potential of all because of her (5 feet 11 inches) size and serve. And it will now be about Victoria Duval, a 17-year-old Haitian-American, who on Tuesday sent home the 2011 champion, Samantha Stosur.
Another African-American, 18-year-old Sachia Vickery, won her first match on Tuesday and later said she took up tennis after watching the Williams sisters when she was 5.
Preparing to step on a practice court on Wednesday morning, 17-year-old Taylor Townsend — who won the Australian Open junior girls' title and was a finalist at Wimbledon — said she, too, had grown up on Venus and Serena:
"It was great to see African-American people in the sport, especially when you found out that there was at one point only Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson," said Townsend, a lefty who was treated last year for a severe iron deficiency and is playing doubles this week. "I've been looking up to them for so long, and now the best thing is that they are still here so a young player like me can learn from them."
It's only fair warning that Serena may not always be in the giving mood — witness her middle school feuding after Stephens beat her this year at the Australian Open. Stephens reported that Serena stopped following her on Twitter.
That's Serena, who, at 31, is competing with the sport's all-timers now as much as she is with contemporary opponents. Venus is only 16 months older but has become tennis's grande dame. She would feel even older if she'd heard Townsend do the quick math when told that Venus had played the day Ashe opened.
"I was, like, 1," Townsend said.
She did recall watching Venus play Serena on television in one of those made-for-Williams Saturday night finals, in 2001 or 2002 — "the greatest match I ever watched."
Of course it was. It was a spectacle that convinced her — a black girl in Atlanta — that tennis was a potential career choice.
Asked about her historical role, Venus said, "It makes me motivated to do more and also makes me happy that, you know, a whole new set of people and demographics all over the world are being introduced to this game."
Given a chance, she didn't go much further with the theme. It's a complicated subject, just as it was in 1997. Tennis remains a sport that demands daunting financial investment, and Richard Williams's home schooling of his daughters remains an anomalous story for the ages.
When Taylor Townsend and the others first tuned in, what they saw was the height of an amazing sisters' rivalry that would later become one-sided as Serena surged and Venus's Grand Slam trophy count stopped at seven. But the measure of Venus's career must also include the young girls whose childhood visions of her no doubt compare to how she recalled Ashe — whom she had met once — on that unforgettable day in 1997.
"Tall, graceful," she said. Right to the end.
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