2 Weeks in New York: Behind the Scenes of Serena Williams' Pursuit of a Grand Slam

The path to a Grand Slam had been weed-whacked of obstacles, and Serena Williams, maybe the greatest women's tennis player in history having her greatest season, needed to do nothing more than win two matches against two aging Italian players ranked outside the top 20.

But then she got out of the car Friday in front of Arthur Ashe Stadium three hours before her semifinal match against unseeded Roberta Vinci, ranked 43rd in the world. Patrick Mouratoglou, Williams' coach, saw the end on her face.

The roughly 20,000 ticket holders and millions following along on screens around the world might have seen it when Williams, erratic and exasperated, nearly crashed into the pit of photographers chasing a ball she could not reach, on her way to blowing a two-game lead in the third set.

And Williams herself saw it, but from a distance out the back window of a black Chevrolet SUV that whisked her away from it all, leaving everyone behind to make sense of one of the biggest upsets in sports history.

It was the unforeseen culmination of two weeks of unprecedented attention on Williams, toughened by a lifetime of it. By winning the U.S. Open, Williams, two weeks short of her 34th birthday, would be the first player since 1988 to capture all four tennis majors in one year, a rare and seductive feat known as the Grand Slam.

Through six matches, she played down the relevance. She and Mouratoglou went to linguistic lengths to dampen expectations, to portray the Grand Slam as a risk-free pursuit, unable to tarnish her legacy. The risk, as she won match after match, was blowing the opportunity.

It is exactly what happened. It was two weeks in coming.

"It's going to be very important to have perspective," Mouratoglou told The New York Times before the tournament. "She has to be conscious of everything she's achieved, all the records she has. This is not that important. I understand for the press it is, but for her it shouldn't be. If you give it too much importance, it's like you play with a bag of 20 kilos on your back. That is not going to work."

With no great rival on the court, no Evert to her Navratilova, no Nadal to her Federer, Williams was left competing with historical abstract. She had 21 major singles championships, one short of Steffi Graf's record for the Open era, starting in 1968. Since winning the 2014 U.S. Open, Williams had won the 2015 Australian Open, the French Open and Wimbledon, alliteratively called the Serena Slam back when she completed it the first time 12 years ago.

Before this year's tournament started, she had a 28-match winning streak in majors. She was 48-2 in all tournaments in 2015. She was better than ever, and certainly better than everyone else. Tracking her disciplined schedule off the court and her fearless talent on it for two weeks, it was nearly impossible to imagine how it could all go wrong. Everything was going right.

Williams won her opening match, in breezy and bizarre fashion, when her opponent, Vitalia Diatchenko of Russia, quit with a heel injury after losing the first eight games.

Williams waved goodbye to the adoring crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium, charmed reporters during the postmatch news conference and slipped into a waiting Mercedes for a ride back to her suite at the St. Regis hotel in Midtown Manhattan. It was nearly 10 p.m.

But she was the first one on Practice Court 1 the next morning, long before the gates to the public opened or her would-be competitors mustered the energy. With her miniature Yorkie, Chip, skittering at her feet, she carried onto the court her bulky racket bag and little of the glamour that was on display the night before.

The U.S. Open, especially, is suited for Williams, part of a rare class of American athletes recognized by a single name. It is part fashion week and part corporate carnival, wrapped around a two-week sporting event. Spectators mingle at the American Express Fan Experience and the Emirates Airlines exhibit. They shop in Nike, Wilson and Ralph Lauren stores.

The courts are line with brand names, from Heineken to Mount Sinai Health System, IBM to Citizen watches. (The Times is a sponsor, too.) Even the nets are festooned with logos for Mercedes-Benz or Chase Bank, another Williams sponsor.

During the week, to her 5.3 million Twitter followers, Williams plugged Wilson, Gatorade, Nike and Beats by Dre headphones, which she wore around her neck when she took the court.

Such endorsements will earn Williams $13 million this year, according to Forbes' latest rankings, more than she has made in prize money. While it pales to the likes of Roger Federer ($58 million, tops among all athletes), Rafael Nadal ($31 million) and Novak Djokovic ($28 million), the only woman with more was Maria Sharapova, who has $23 million in endorsements and a 2-18 career record against Williams.

But now it was morning on an otherwise empty practice court. Gone was the makeup and the designer outfit, the teased hair in a Nike headband, the headphones and the custom Audemars Piguet watch that sparkled on her left wrist, atop a small bandage to keep it from rubbing her skin raw.

There were no cheers or encouragements, just the sound of jets taking off from La Guardia Airport. They flew so close and noisily overhead that Williams occasionally stopped and tilted her gaze upward.

Williams carries calm and grace that surprise those accustomed to her on-court highlights of strength and ferocity. She is a different person when she holds a racket.

'Good ball, Meeka'

As with every time she took the practice court, several men waited. There was Mouratoglou, a 45-year-old Frenchman who took on coaching Williams in 2012 and helped her to the best three-year stretch of her career. The two have been linked romantically, and he greeted her daily with a smile and a hug.

There was Robbye Poole, 30, a childhood friend of John Isner's and an all-American player at Mississippi who joined Serena's team in March when she split with Sascha Bajin. He cared for Williams' rackets, ferrying them to and from the tournament site, getting them restrung and taping the grips carefully in white with about eight spiraling revolutions. ("She likes it like that," he said. "Still a little cushion to it, but doesn't make it too bulky.")

There was Mackie Shilstone, 64, a slight, silver-haired trainer from New Orleans who has overseen Williams' workout regimen for several years, traveling with her before and during most major tournaments.

And there was Zane Haupt, a heavyset Australian in a perpetually untucked Oxford. He and Williams met nearly a decade ago, and he served as a sort of logistics coordinator for the tennis side of Williams' camp. On the court, he toted a racket and chased balls. When it was time to go, he carried bags and called for the car and sat next to Williams to and from her hotel.

There were no family members around. Williams was soon hammering balls across the net with a sort of grunting wheeze - uhhhhh - and her clingy green top was quickly darkened with sweat. Poole sent her shots back with the consistency of a wall.

"Good ball, Meeka," he said, using a variation of her middle name, Jameka, that family members have called her since she was a young girl.

Mouratoglou stood to her right, watching from the corner of the baseline. He sometimes approached Williams and whispered to her, often in French, which she speaks proficiently, but he never barked criticism or shouted instruction. Williams set the pace of the practice. It was brisk and metronomic.

When she wanted to work on her forehand, she wiggled her racket like a wand, and Poole sent lasers to her right side. When she needed a rest, she silently walked to a shaded bench next to the fence and sat down.

She sipped from a water bottle and put a dollop of lotion into the palm of one hand. Her hands were virtually callus-free, and her nails impeccably manicured and painted a muted pink. She glistened in sweat but was not out of breath. She stared straight ahead, upright and thoughtful, like someone on a park bench without a phone to occupy time.

She turned and looked past her right hip at her dog, asleep on its side atop its black leather carrier. He could have fit inside a tennis ball can.

"Tired?" Williams asked.

She grew up in front of us, a feisty little sister to Venus. The two were subjects of a New York Times article in 1990, when Venus was 10 and Serena was 8. And here Serena Williams was, 25 years and 21 major singles championships later, expected to do more.

Cameras and expectations greeted her in New York. The women's final sold out before the tournament began, the first time that it did so before the men's final.

When the draw was released three Thursdays ago, analysts quickly dissected her path to the final, 18 days and seven matches away. A tennis analytics site set Williams' chances of winning the tournament at 39 percent.

It quickly felt low. By the time Williams took the court the next evening for her opening match, No. 3 Sharapova had withdrawn and No. 7 Ana Ivanovic, No. 8 Karolina Pliskova and No. 10 Carla Suarez Navarro had lost. Williams was the lone top-10 player in her half of the draw. On the other side, No. 6 Lucie Safarova (a French Open finalist) lost in the first round and No. 4 Caroline Wozniacki (a U.S. Open finalist last year) was out in the second.

She admitted that the Grand Slam slipped into her thoughts, even during matches.

"Of course it's there," she said after the third round. "I'm not a robot or anything."

If there was a worry about her chances, it was because the most dominant season in a generation was pocked by ragged three-set victories, including nine at the year's first three majors. When Graf won the Grand Slam in 1988, she lost a total of two sets in the four majors - in the finals at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

But three-setters did not concern Mouratoglou. He judged Williams by fire, not score. He figured no player could equal Williams' talent and tenacity over three sets, and he was almost always right.

It was a second-round match, against the qualifier Kiki Bertens of the Netherlands, that concerned him. It took place on a muggy afternoon. Most of the upper deck was empty.

Williams lost more points in the first four minutes against Bertens than she lost in the eight games of her first match, then had her serve broken in the third game. Fans shifted in their seats. The sideline opposite the chair umpire was lined with photographers, and 27 of them aimed at Williams. Three were turned toward Bertens.

In troubling times, Williams usually becomes more demonstrative. Her grunts, short-voweled emissions, grow longer and louder. She punctuates winning points with a spectrum of outbursts, from a high-pitched "aaaa!" to a shot-punctuating "Come on!" to a full-throated, closed-eye scream before her face and body quickly settle back to a state of calm grace. Her emotions bring an echo of response from the audience, as if waiting for Williams' permission to cheer.

Bertens served for the first set, leading, 5-4. Her nerves caught up to the moment, and she sandwiched a double fault between unforced errors. A loose forehand lost the game, and Williams bent into an S and uncorked a scream.

Williams survived her own shaky serve and captured the first-set tiebreaker by winning seven of the last eight points after losing the first four. She rested in her chair, draped with a U.S. Open towel that differed slightly from the one given to every other player. "Serena Williams 2014 U.S. Open Champion" was stitched on both ends.

She stood, quickly dispatched Bertens in the second set and responded without a visible tinge of joy.

Fifteen minutes later, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, she was on the practice court with Mouratoglou, working mostly on serves. A smattering of surprised fans saw something rare - the world's best player, having just won a U.S. Open match in straight sets, practicing for another 55 minutes and scooping up her own tennis balls. Williams stacked them onto her racket like meatballs in a frying pan and dumped them into  a carrying bag, only to pound them across the net again, one at a time.

Mouratoglou said Williams seemed perfectly prepared for the match, but it is impossible to ever tell until the match begins.

"I know her perfectly," he said. "I know exactly how she is. But I have to see her on the tennis court. Off the tennis court you can always fake. On the tennis court you cannot."

Heading to Work

Black cars and limousines were double-parked in front of the St. Regis on East 55th Street, near the corner of Fifth Avenue. It was Tuesday afternoon, the day after Labor Day, and Serena and Venus Williams were hours from playing each other in the quarterfinals. A silver Mercedes GL450, part of a fleet of courtesy cars used to transport players to and from Queens, was called to the front and parked at the curb.

The St. Regis is a place of white marble floors, brass doors, crystal chandeliers, painted frescoes and heavy curtains. Uniformed bellmen inside wear flat-topped caps. A chicken-club sandwich at the lobby bar costs $33. A looping jazz soundtrack is tucked behind the din of conversation.

Family members stayed at a different hotel, keeping their distance, ready when called upon.

"She texts me and is like: 'What are you doing? Can you come over?'" their sister Isha Price said.

Groups were small and visits were short, usually taking place on the afternoons between matches.

"I just say hello, and then I go," Oracene Price, their mother, said. "It's like they're focused so much. I don't want to interfere with that. They're grown women."

Serena Williams spent much of her time watching Netflix and crime-show episodes she downloaded from the Investigation Discovery network. She watched some tennis. In past years, when she got stir crazy, Williams has summoned a dinner or a karaoke outing, and Isha Price found a place and gathered the family. That did not happen this time.

"She pretty much has down to a science what works for her," Price said. "She really likes to be in her own space, be quiet."

On Labor Day, though, Williams finally ventured out. Paparazzi spotted her having evening tea at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village with Kim Kardashian.

The next afternoon, at 3:33 p.m., Williams followed Haupt out of the cool lobby and into the thick, 95-degree air of Midtown Manhattan. One of the two small leather bags slung over her shoulder contained Chip.

She slowed only to sign an autograph for a young girl who had been waiting nearly an hour. A couple of photographers backpedaled while snapping pictures as she walked toward the car and slid into a rear seat. Haupt put her Wilson tennis bag, her MCM handbag and her green Whole Foods bag, containing her dinner, into the back, then climbed in next to her.

In 30 seconds she was gone, and in 54 minutes of late-afternoon traffic she was at the tournament, headed to the practice court. The sidewalk in front of the St. Regis settled back into routine instantly, as if nothing happened.

A second Mercedes courtesy car, a large van marked with the U.S. Open logo, pulled into the open spot. Venus Williams' hitting coach, David Witt, and two others stood on the sidewalk, one holding an orange Whole Foods bag.

At 3:55, Venus emerged from the hotel. There was nobody there to ask for an autograph or take a picture. The four got into the van and turned the corner on Fifth Avenue.

Venus and Serena had played each other professionally 26 times, 13 at the majors, and every one was intriguing to fans and tortuous to the sisters. There is little joy of one advancing in a tournament at the expense of the other. The questions come, as they have for 20 years, some version of "What is it like?"

Both said, as they have always said, that they treat their sister as they do any other opponent, but no one has ever believed that blood and tennis can be divided so cleanly.

Venus Williams, 35 and seven years removed from the last of her seven major titles, was having her best season since 2010. In 2011, she learned she has Sjogren's syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that causes joint pain, among other symptoms, and withdrew from that year's U.S. Open. Her stellar career never recovered. She arrived this year ranked and seeded 23rd, an on-court afterthought expected mostly to answer questions about her sister's quest.

But she won her first three matches, one over 12th-seeded Belinda Bencic, who had handed Serena one of her two losses in 2015, in Toronto in August.

The Williams sisters played back-to-back matches on Ashe in the afternoon of the tournament's middle Sunday. Their older sister Lyndrea Price, a Jehovah's Witness like much of the family, texted each a Bible verse, as she did before most matches.

"Be courageous, don't be afraid, because Jehovah is with you wherever you go," she wrote, paraphrasing Joshua 1:9.

Venus Williams breezed past 19-year-old qualifier Anett Kontaveit, 6-2, 6-1. The door from the court opened and a warm rush of air and sound carried Venus inside. Serena headed toward the court for her match with 20-year-old Madison Keys, seeded 19th, a potentially slippery rematch of the Australian Open semifinal.

Venus and Serena passed each other, shoulder to shoulder, without a word. As close as they were off the court, they treated each other without a glimmer of recognition at the tennis center.

Serena Williams soon dispatched Keys in straight sets.

"You hate that it has to happen at the stage that it's happening," Isha Price said. "But one thing about it, it means that they're playing really, really well - well enough to both get to the quarterfinals. And the positive is that you know one of them will be in the semis."

Serena Williams was 15-11 against Venus in their professional careers, and 8-5 at Grand Slams. (Among women, only Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert have met more times, 22, at majors during the Open era.) But she rarely beat her older sister when they were children.

"I'm playing, for me, the best player in the tournament, and that's never easy," Serena Williams said. "She's beaten me so many times. I've taken a lot of losses off her - more than anybody. She's a player that knows how to win, knows how to beat me, and knows my weaknesses better than anyone."

"It's like playing a mirror," she added.

The next morning, they arrived separately but practiced side by side, not unlike the days on the worn courts at the corner of Compton Boulevard and Lime Avenue, when Richard Williams worked with one girl on one court and Oracene worked with the other on another.

"Side by side, that's crazy," a man in the front row of the practice court bleachers whispered to a friend.

They did not look at one another. Serena Williams practiced for 2 hours 20 minutes, her longest session of the tournament. She started 30 minutes before Venus arrived and stayed 30 minutes after Venus left. She ran past her practice court time allotment, and slid over to take Venus' abandoned court when Andy Murray arrived.

Again, they did not acknowledge each other publicly. Afterward, at the St. Regis, they spent part of the afternoon with a teenage nephew, Jair, a son of their sister Yetunde, who was killed by a gang member in Compton in 2003.

On match day, after arriving in separate cars, they warmed up with two practice courts between them. Serena started first and ended first, their times intentionally staggered partly because they shared a physical therapist who provided prematch treatment.

Serena Williams spent most of the 90 minutes before the scheduled 7 p.m. start time in a small room next to the gym on the third floor. She had no contact with anyone in her family, which passed time on the couches in the second-floor players' lounge. Kardashian was there, with a grim-faced bodyguard lurking over her shoulder. Oracene Price was not; avoiding the spectacle and stress, she watched on television. (Richard Williams, who stepped away from guiding Serena's career when Mouratoglou took over at Wimbledon in 2012, did not attend the tournament.)

The sisters took the court, Venus first to warm applause, Serena to a more robust ovation. The crowds at the U.S. Open, like much else in New York City, are not as rollicking as promoters have people believe. Many big matches are played in front of mostly empty bleachers. Silence is requested during points, which means some of the most exciting highlights are created to a soundtrack of the 7 train rumbling on nearby tracks. Extraordinary points are received with roars, which quickly fade for the next point to be played.

The crowd included Oprah Winfrey two rows above the baseline (cheered wildly when shown on the stadium's big screens), Donald Trump in a suite next to the broadcast booth (booed heartily), sunglasses-wearing Anna Wintour in Serena Williams' three-row, 15-seat box (met mostly with murmurs.)

Mouratoglou was in his usual seat in the second row, next to Poole and in front of Haupt. Shilstone sat next to Poole. Williams' agent, Jill Smoller, was in the front row. Family members who typically sat in the players' box watched elsewhere, not wanting to choose sides.

It was entertaining, well-played tennis, worthy of a final but without gut-twisting tension. The two took turns breaking the other early in each set - Serena in the first, Venus in the second and Serena in the second game of the third to extinguish suspense.

It was the result that made the most people happy - three sets, Venus looking ready to contend again, and Serena moving forward toward history. The sisters never looked at each other except from the safe distance of opposing baselines. But when it ended, Serena a 6-2, 1-6, 6-3 victor, Venus wrapped her arms around her little sister across the net and smiled. Serena looked nothing but relieved.

The days and routine clicked by, the number of tennis players and entourages milling around the players' lounge and the private courtyard outside of Ashe Stadium dwindling as contenders were dismissed. But weather threw off the schedule.

The women's semifinals were planned for Thursday night. At about 3:15, they were called off and postponed until Friday. The Mercedes courtesy car that waited for Williams outside the St. Regis was sent away, empty. Fifteen minutes later, Williams and Haupt slid into an unmarked black SUV headed to practice on indoor courts on Randalls Island, just across the Harlem River from Upper Manhattan. Mouratoglou, Poole and Shilstone met her there.

The same group convened Friday morning. Mouratoglou did not like the look on Williams' face.

"Yesterday she was not like this at all," he said. "It was just today. You know, players don't wake up the same way every day. They're humans, so today was not a good day, clearly. I saw it the first second I saw her this morning."

A 25-1 favorite

The first semifinal was a breezy upset that might have served as a warning to Williams. Flavia Pennetta, 33 and seeded 26th, beat No. 2 Simona Halep, 6-1, 6-3. Williams needed only to get past Vinci, whom she had beaten in straight sets all four times they had played, including on the Toronto hardcourts in August. Williams was a 25-to-1 favorite.

To complete the Grand Slam, Williams would not have to play anyone seeded higher than 19th.

But she was broken in her first service game. She rebounded to capture the first set, 6-2, but her play was uneven and without its usual spirit. She fell behind in the second set, but few could imagine that she could lose the match. She was a cat with a toy.

Venus sat in the second row of the players' box, behind her mother, next to Lyndrea. Serena tried to lift her play by punctuating her shots with louder grunts, as if urging her body to show the same spunk. But Vinci made few mistakes, and long rallies favored the Italian's precision and patience. When Vinci won the second set, Williams calmly walked to her chair, sat down, smashed her racket against the ground and tossed its battered frame behind her.

She had a 2-0 lead in the third, and the tennis world felt back on its axis, if shakily so. But she continued a habit of blowing game points and break points. Mouratoglou nervously ran his fingers through his hair and gave her subtle fist pumps when she glanced his way. The crowd tittered with nervousness, emotionally divided between an astounding upset and a historic quest.

Vinci served for the match at 5-4, and won all four points. She soaked in the cheers as Williams grabbed her bag and her warm-up jacket and walked quickly off the court with a few parade-like waves.

"I told you guys I don't feel pressure," Williams said, curtly, in a news conference that lasted less than four minutes. "I never felt pressure. I don't know. I never felt that pressure to win here. I said that from the beginning."

Venus carried her sister's tennis bag down the hallway. Oracene Price left without a word, only a shrug. Serena Williams walked out of the building without stopping, her only word a "sorry" to a friend. She walked out the gate and got into a car. And for the first time, she rode alone.

© 2015 New York Times News Service