Williams sisters test life without tennis

“Oh, definitely, I’m not going away,” said Venus, who turned 23 in June. “I’m not retiring before 33. I’ve thought about it already. I’m not giving up my great job. I like it. I’m fortunate. I’m blessed, and I love being out there.”

For now and perhaps quite a few weeks more, she and Serena are on forced vacations, recovering from injuries as their customary foils and rivals go about their sweaty business in Flushing Meadows. While top-seeded Kim Clijsters was preparing for her second-round match on Wednesday, which she won, 6-1, 6-1, and while Roger Federer and Lindsay Davenport were preparing for matches later in the day, which they won, the Williams sisters were in Midtown Manhattan, making the rounds of television programs and giving separate interviews to a small group of reporters in the 22nd-floor suite of a hotel.

The Williamses have talked little in public of late, and there was much to talk about, which meant that once again at this through-the-looking-glass Open, the nonparticipants generated more buzz than the participants. If it was not the retiring Pete Sampras on Monday, it was the recuperating Williamses on Wednesday, and it was not lost on the sisters, who have grown accustomed to complaints that their string of all-in-the-family Grand Slam finals was hurting the game. Now that they are not playing at all, they hear that it’s hurting the game, too.

“You can’t win either way with us,” Serena said. “I think obviously Venus and I bring a huge aspect to tennis, but I still think there’s a lot left in it as well without us. But without us, it is a little dry. I would be dishonest if I said it wasn’t, but at the same time it would be dishonest to say there is no fun watching the tennis. Not everyone loves me. People like other people.”

Venus, who withdrew from the Open on Friday, is still recovering from a badly strained stomach muscle that first forced her to retire from the final of a tournament in Warsaw, Poland, in early May and then slowed her progress at the French Open and at Wimbledon. “Maybe I shouldn’t have played the French Open and just taken more time to rest,” she said.

Serena, who has won five of the last six Grand Slam singles titles, underwent left knee surgery in Los Angeles on August 1 to repair a partial tear in the quadriceps tendon, but she arrived in the lobby of the Midtown hotel in high heels and with only a slight limp.

Asked if her doctor would approve of such footwear less than a month after surgery, she said, “I don’t know if he’d approve, but I only walked a few blocks, and they are not that high: only 3 inches.”

Serena has been playing with occasional knee pain for several seasons, but she said she reached a crisis point in July while preparing to leave home for a tournament in San Diego. “It was a sudden action that made it go out,” she said. It was not the sort of sudden movement that typically gets a tennis star in trouble. Instead of reaching for a wide forehand or an overhead, she was reaching down for a pair of earrings. “I was bending down,” she said. “And I was like, ‘OK, something is not right.”’

Serena, who has played only 11 events in the past year, would like to see reform of the ranking system, which counts a player’s best 17 results over 52 weeks. But even if the system remained untouched, Serena said she was confident that she would regain her former dominance. “And I’m going to be a much better player because I’m going to be mentally relaxed; I’m going to be stronger, and I’m going to be angry,” she said.

Angry? “I’m just going to take a different attitude: Take the Mike Tyson approach,” she said. (New York Times)