In tennis, you win some and you lose some.
Some days the ball flies off your racket and you can’t miss. Some days, the ball keeps clanking off the frame.
After a career that has lasted 30-plus years and is still going, Venus Williams knows this better than most. After winning matches in singles and doubles in a near-perfect start to her first tournament in 16 months, Williams looked every bit of her 45 years on Thursday night at the Citi Open in Washington, D.C., as Magdalena Fręch of Poland beat her 6-2, 6-2 in the Round of 16.
Williams has lit up this tournament, and she started strong on Thursday, but after four games, she handed Fręch the first service break when Williams knocked a forehand into the net and then sent an easy, short forehand off the court as she charged to the net. She lost the next four games after that, struggling to land her serve consistently and to create any opportunities on her opponent’s, as Fręch played steady, big-margin tennis and let Williams do much of her work for her.
The loss came a day after Williams and Hailey Baptiste lost in the second round of the doubles, with Taylor Townsend and Zhang Shuai edging them in a match-deciding tiebreak.
Despite Thursday’s loss, this was a triumphant week for Williams, a seven-time Grand Slam champion who still has plenty of tennis in her hands, though she might have less in her legs. She struggled Thursday night whenever Fręch forced her to move to get to a shot. Still, she became the oldest woman to win a WTA Tour match since Martina Navratilova won one at 47 in 2004.
“Amazing,” Navratilova said of Williams in an interview Thursday. “I appreciate it so much because I know what it takes.”
Navratilova said winning a match after not playing one for 16 months — against the world No. 35 Peyton Stearns, no less — might be even more impressive than winning a match at 45.
Navratilova said she continued to play singles sporadically because she was still winning titles in doubles in her mid-40s, and the occasional singles match made her better in doubles. That may be part of Williams’ strategy because the Citi Open does not appear to be a one-off.
She has received a wild card into the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati, the main tuneup for the U.S. Open, and she has signed on to play mixed doubles at the U.S. Open with Reilly Opelka, if they can receive a wild card.
Williams is both different and the same as the player she once was. She is a big hitter who plays first strike tennis, with a serve that powers the rest of her game. However, she has simplified that service motion, and her groundstrokes are shorter than they once were.
When they are working, as they were against Stearns, they found open space all over the court. But they weren’t against Fręch, and Williams sprayed more than 30 unforced errors over 16 games.
Williams received a massive ovation as she left the court at the tennis center that Arthur Ashe, one of her heroes in tennis and life, helped build. Ashe was a trailblazer for Black tennis players, and Williams and her sister Serena have followed in his footsteps.
By all accounts on a sultry, thick Thursday night in the nation’s capital, where she huffed and puffed and fought until the final ball, saving a match point before Fręch finished it by getting one last forehand error from Williams, she’s not done blazing them yet.
When it was over, Williams sat on her courtside bench with a huge smile, raised her hands and soaked up the love. And then she was off … to what only she knows.
(Photo: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
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