Serena’s Legacy: A Visual Journey
I’ve been a fan of Serena Williams since I first saw her play in the ‘90s. Using data explorations and visualizations, I set out to examine her legacy.
23 Grand Slam singles titles. 20+ years on the tour at or near the top of the game. Serena Williams could retire today, one Grand Slam shy of Margaret Court’s record, and still be mentioned in any reasonable discussion of the best athletes of all time. And yet she shows no signs of walking away.
It’s tempting to throw the number “23” up on this blog and cheekily end it there. But the truth of Serena’s dominance, longevity, and impact on the sport runs deeper than any single datapoint.
Serena’s Impact Crater
To explore Serena’s legacy, I first mapped out her 23 Grand Slam (Major) titles over time. The visual is impressive on its own, but after seeing the space Serena’s occupied for decades, a question presented itself: Could I measure Serena’s impact not by how much she’s won, but by the women she’s suppressed or supplanted along the way? What would the tennis landscape look like without her? To entertain this hypothetical, I took every victory Serena had in a Major final and gave it to the finalist instead.
Granted, it’s impossible to say who would have won those Majors in Serena’s absence. This exercise can’t reveal, for instance, if a player had the misfortune of routinely being on Serena’s side of the draw and losing to her before the final.
That said, the results do tell us quite a bit about the finalists who fell to Serena. Serena’s hypothetical absence from the tour does not reveal a drastically-different landscape, with one key exception. Her sister Venus would be sitting on 14 Major titles (doubling her current total), while only two other women see their total increase by more than one Major.
What does this say about Serena’s opponents? Did Serena’s 23 Majors come amidst high-quality parity and depth, or has Serena played during an era where few women (outside of her sister) can reliably step up to challenge her reign? Or is it both?
A Timeline of Accomplishment
In an effort to better understand the correlation between Serena’s success and the quality of her opponents, let’s examine her career against 12 of the top performers of the past 20 years.
The women who most closely mirror Serena’s consistency of performance are players that are no longer on tour; Lindsay Davenport, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, and Martina Hingis. Today’s players are more prone to peaks and valleys in Major competition.
As for Serena’s legacy, there are three key takeaways from this visual: (1) Serena’s success in Majors spans over twenty years, (2) she hasn’t experienced the prolonged dips in results that plague her peers, and (3) Serena’s successes and failures don’t seem terribly dependent on her competition.
Whether it’s battling against the women of the 90s that filled the void left by Steffi Graf and Monica Seles or the current crop of women all fighting to dethrone the 23-time Major winner, Serena stays consistently at or near the top.
Pencil Her Into the Semis
To further that point, let’s gain a better understanding of those 12 players, and Serena, by comparing their average result in each Major.
Of the top 5 women on this list, only Serena is still active on tour (though Kim Clijsters just announced she will return to tennis in 2020). The next-highest active player, Maria Sharapova, averages well over a round less than Serena. Simona Halep, winner of this year’s Wimbledon, advances 2.46 rounds fewer than Serena, on average.
But this does not mean Serena’s top competition is weaker than the players she faced earlier in her career. Observationally, the talent today on the Tour is deeper than ever, with women outside of the top 100 routinely upsetting seeded players. Halep, Sharapova, Kerber, Kvitová, and Azarenka face high-quality talent earlier in tournaments than players did 20 years ago, and it’s not hard to extrapolate that their numbers are down in large part due to parity rather than a lack of ability or consistency.
But Serena faces these opponents too. To nearly average a semifinal appearance at Majors given the depth of the tour is a staggering feat.
So what drives Serena’s numbers this high? Is it strictly a matter of her 23 Major wins holding that number up, or is something else at play?
The Results are In
To answer that question, I’ve sorted each Major result into the 8 possible outcomes (from a first round loss to a final win).
It’s impossible to overlook the weight of Serena’s 23 Major victories. Less glaring but perhaps more relevant to Serena’s dominance, however, is that she rarely ever gets eliminated prior to the third round. One of those losses was her first ever appearance at a Major, losing to her sister Venus in the second round of the Australian Open.
To play in 73 Majors and only miss the third round three times, and to fail to advance to the final sixteen a mere twelve times? Nobody else on tour over the span of her career comes close to Serena’s consistency of performance in Majors.
This quantitative exercise paints Serena as an athlete whose success is rarely dictated by her opponents. She’s played over two decades, watched true champions come and go, and yet she perseveres at a high level. She may well win more Majors and build on her already-unbelievable resume.
But regardless of what comes next for Serena, her legacy won’t be a numbers game. It occurred to me over the course of this exercise as I researched the turnover that’s peppered her reign: The real legacy she leaves behind when she finally decides to put down her racket expands well beyond tennis, and it’s one that won’t finish being written, ever.
Serena played her first WTA tour match on October 28th, 1995. She won her first Major title in 1999 at the US Open, becoming the first Black woman since Althea Gibson in 1958 to win a Major. With all due respect to the contributions of players like Zina Garrison, Chanda Rubin, and Mashona Washington, Black women in tennis haven’t been able to permeate the social consciousness and make an inclusionary dent in the tennis landscape quite like the Williams sisters.
Serena and Venus Williams have a shared legacy; one of making tennis more accessible— more possible—for generations of young people who see themselves reflected on the court.
At the end of 2018, six of the thirteen American women in the top 100 were African American. Outside of Serena and her sister Venus, Sloane Stephens is the oldest in that contingent. Sloane was 6 when Serena won her first major. A large number of minority women on the WTA Tour today are in their teens or early twenties, and grew up watching Serena and Venus play.
“They were on when I was just starting.”
Little girls picked up a tennis racket because they saw Serena or Venus on television.
“I thought I could be them one day.”
Diversity entered into spaces that are traditionally white.
“…these two Black girls that wore beads in their hair…”
Conversations continue in country club settings and in front of televisions worldwide, inspiring belief, eliminating barriers of possibility, and challenging preconceived notions of what heroes look like.
“It was just so weird to see someone who looked like me.”
The Williams sisters changed more than just tennis. They inspired, and often led, conversations on race, gender equity, and possibility.
“It could be me too…”
They refused to bend to the traditions of tennis, but rather asked tennis to evolve to accommodate them as they were.
“If I believe in myself…”
And in persevering and persisting, the Williams Sisters paved the way for generations to come.
Carl Broaddus is a graphic designer, avid tennis fan, insatiably-curious person, and a proud uncle in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s looking for a full-time opportunity as an Art Director or Creative Director or tennis superstar. See his full design portfolio at carlbroaddus.com.
