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I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. It’s like an advent calendar, only I keep the chocolate.
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Venus Williams [USA]Born: 17 June 1980
Career: 1994-present
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2002)
Peak Elo rating: 2,454 (1st place, 2002)
Major singles titles: 7
Total singles titles: 49
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One thing I’ve learned in the last few weeks is that Venus Williams is underrated. For almost all of the last ten additions I’ve revealed on this list, someone has piped up to question whether Venus really belongs ahead of… Court? Sampras? Connolly? Budge?
Let me answer with a hypothetical. Don Budge had a brother named Lloyd. Lloyd was six years older, a solid local player who later became a teaching pro and even wrote two books about the game. He helped get Don started, though it wasn’t long before the younger Budge was clearly the brother to watch.
Now, imagine that instead of six years older, Lloyd was fifteen months younger. And that Lloyd turned out to be, very possibly, the greatest player in the history of the men’s game. Hold Don Budge’s own abilities constant–how many majors would he have won then?
I don’t know the answer to that question, beyond “fewer than he actually did.” We do know that Venus Williams, faced with the gift and the challenge of a even greater younger sibling, won seven slams, five at Wimbledon alone. She accomplished that even though Serena won her first major, at the 1999 US Open, before Venus picked up one of her own.
In addition to Venus’s major titles, she reached nine more finals, seven of which she lost to her sister. At three other slams, she lost to Serena before the final, then watched her sibling go on to win the whole thing.
And it’s not just Serena. Even beyond the outrageously athletic, hyper-competitive sisters from Compton, the women’s field around the turn of the 21st century was unusually strong. Measured by Elo rating, Venus figured in three of the five strongest matches of the last one hundred years.* The top-ranked of all was the all-Williams final at the 2003 Australian Open. The sister-act championship match at the 2002 US Open ranks fourth, while Venus’s semi-final against Martina Hingis at the 2001 Australian comes in fifth.
* Each match is scored according to the pre-match Elo rating of the weaker of the two competitors. It’s a measure of the level of competition, nothing to do with how the match turned out.
Of the top 25 strongest matches by this metric, eight featured Venus. She won three. Only Hingis and Steffi Graf appear on the list more frequently.
The elder Williams said in 2017, after losing one last major final to her sister, “People relate to the champion. They also relate to the person who didn’t win because we all have those moments in our life.” Venus’s long run as the second-best player in her family makes her a bit easier to identify with. But it sometimes misled us into forgetting her status among the all-time greats.
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Venus had a short window before Serena reached her all-galaxy peak in 2002.
In 1999, she lost to Hingis at the US Open, then watched Serena bring home the first of the family’s major trophies. She lost to her sister for the first time a few weeks later at the Grand Slam Cup in Munich. Sagging motivation and tendinitis in both wrists kept her off the courts for months, well into 2000.
When she came back, though, her big-serve-and-backhand combination was unstoppable. She secured her first slam title at Wimbledon, knocking out top seed Hingis in the quarters, Serena in a psychologically taxing semi-final, and Lindsay Davenport in a comparably straightforward final.
Venus ran her winning streak to 35 matches. She won four straight tournaments in the United States, beating Davenport twice–including the US Open final–Monica Seles twice, and Hingis in the Flushing semis. Hingis was one of only a half-dozen women to push her to three sets during the streak. After the US Open came the Sydney Olympics. Venus was equally strong in both hemispheres. She dispatched Seles and Elena Dementieva for a singles gold medal and added the first of three career doubles golds with Serena.
Because she only played a partial season, Venus ended the year on the WTA computer ranked third, the same place she finished in 1999. Hingis, with her steadier performance and pile of titles, stood atop the table with more than 6,000 points, 1,000 ahead of Davenport and more than 2,000 beyond Williams. But it was tough to argue with Sports Illustrated that Venus stood “alone as the best player in women’s tennis.”
2001 was nearly as good. Venus defended her titles at both Wimbledon and the US Open. The crowd at the All-England Club got behind the undersized Justine Henin in the final, but by then, Williams was accustomed to indifferent crowds. Henin took the second set, but Venus delivered a 6-0 third-set spanking to cap her title run. In New York, she didn’t drop a single set, overpowering Kim Clijsters, Jennifer Capriati, and Serena in succession.
Once again, Williams turned in a nearly perfect season that the computer couldn’t quite understand. Her 46-5 won-loss record emphasized her dominance when she chose to compete, even if she was careful not to overplay. While she rose to second place in the rankings after taking the Miami title in April, she fell back to third in July, and she once again ended her season in that unsatisfying position.
My historical Elo ratings give a better indication of where Venus stood relative to the pack. By awarding points based on quality of opponents, the formula is well-suited to capture the degree to which she–and soon, her sister–conquered the field.
A Venus backhand in 2001. “She’s all arms and legs,” said Anna Kournikova. “She was always a step faster than me.”
According to Elo, Venus first achieved the number one ranking in September 2000, just before the Olympics. It was crowded at the top; she held on for just four weeks. She regained the position in April 2001, holding on this time for 57 of the next 59 weeks. She even added four more weeks in August 2002, when her sister was in the middle of her “Serena Slam” of four consecutive major titles.
The official record book will tell you that Venus was the best player in the world for a mere eleven weeks. That puts her at 25th on the all-time list, between Ana Ivanović and Karolína Plíšková. Elo does a better job capturing her reign at the apex of the game. Venus held the top Elo spot for 65 weeks, an impressive figure even without considering what Serena had to accomplish to seize the prime ranking position for herself.
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The prominence of the Williams sisters for the first few years of the century is difficult to overstate. They were the story in tennis. Everyone from Arthur Ashe to John McEnroe had predicted that the next generation of American stars would come from the inner city. Straight outta Compton, here they were.
On the other hand, it was trickier to get to know Venus or Serena as an individual. You could search the papers for a sentence starting with “she,” but aside from match descriptions, it was always “they.”
The two women were so unlike anyone else in the sport that treating them as a single unit came naturally. They learned to play outside of the traditional academy-and-junior-tournaments curriculum, aside from a spell early on at Rick Macci’s camp in Florida. They were astonishingly self-assured, and they seemed content to operate as a traveling family unit, rarely mixing with the rest of the tour.
They were both big, strong, and powerful, too. That in itself wasn’t unique. “Big babe” tennis was nearly a decade old, and Davenport was taller than either Williams sister. But it still set them apart. And, of course, their size wasn’t the only physical attribute that stood out.
“I’m tall, I’m black: Everything’s different about me,” Venus said during the 1997 US Open. “Just face the facts.”
When pressed to compare the sisters, analysts would point out that Venus had the bigger first serve, perhaps the better backhand. She moved better, especially when it came down to raw speed–she was undefeated as a pre-teen track star. Serena had the edge on the second serve and the forehand, two areas that stuck out as the older sister’s weak spots.
Davenport thought that on court, Serena was “meaner.” Venus would develop into the brainier, quieter one of the two. Both women resisted the pull of a full-time tournament schedule and often spurned the six-figure exhibition offers that came their way. Due to both different priorities and worse luck with injuries, Venus took longer absences.
But in 2002, Venus entered enough events to amass 71 match results–62 of them victories. She won seven tournaments, including final-round victories over Henin (three of them!), Davenport, Clijsters, and Jelena Dokic. She was typically untouchable in the run-up to the US Open, grabbing 19 matches in a row between the Wimbledon and US Open finals.
She might have been playing the best tennis of her career. Elo believes that the peak came in September 2002. She cleared a rating of 2,450, one of only six women to do so in the Open era. Unfortunately, Serena was even better. The US Open was the third straight major at which the younger Williams defeated her sister for the title. They’d make it four a few months later in Australia.
At Wimbledon in 2003, Venus would reach yet another slam final, an achievement that S.L. Price described as “as close to heroic as tennis gets.” She aggravated a stomach injury in the third game of her semi-final with Clijsters. Her pain was evident every time she served. Serena, who helped calm her down during a rain delay, said after the match, “She’s tougher than I ever thought she was.” Venus pulled through in three sets.
Serena awaited in the final, their fifth meeting in the span of six majors. This one went three sets, too, but like their last four championship-round battles, the younger woman took the crown.
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The next all-Williams meeting was much longer in coming. While Venus was recovering from her abdominal injury, her sister Yetunde was murdered. Both Venus and Serena struggled to regain their bearings on tour, and father Richard–who, as always, refused to read from the standard tennis-dad script–encouraged Venus to retire.
Sports Illustrated concurred that the sisters could say goodbye to the sport, “heads held high.” But even as she broadened her off-court interests and muddled through a forgettable 2004 campaign, Venus stuck with it.
The first half of 2005 wasn’t much better, at least compared to the lofty heights of her form just a few years earlier. But at Wimbledon, as the 14th seed, she came back to life on her most favorable surface. Venus defeated Mary Pierce and Maria Sharapova to reach the final, then gutted out a nearly three-hour final against Davenport. She saved a match point before triumphing, 9-7 in the third set.
No woman seeded so low had ever won a Wimbledon title–for the time being, anyway. Williams missed most of the 2006 season with a wrist injury. By the time she was back at the All-England Club in 2007, her ranking had fallen out of the top 30. The Wimbledon seeding formula bumped her up to the almost-as-anonymous position of 23rd. She nearly lost in both the first and third rounds, but once she got her bearings, the old Venus was in evidence. She straight-setted Sharapova, Ivanović, Svetlana Kuznetsova, and Marion Bartoli in succession to claim her fourth Wimbledon title–double Serena’s count at the tournament up to that point.
The 2007 title was particularly satisfying. Venus’s successes–as well as her struggles and absences–had turned her into a clubhouse leader. The player that rivals had once disparaged as aloof turned out to be warm, ready to help.
She became the public face of the campaign to force Wimbledon into offering equal prize money for women when she wrote a letter to the London Times in 2006. Like Alice Marble’s 1950 missive in support of Althea Gibson, it was the critical final push to force an old-fashioned organization to catch up with the times. British Prime Minster Tony Blair was one of many public figures to support the cause.
Roger Federer earned £700,000 for his 2007 men’s singles title. For the first time, the women’s champion received the same amount. It was only fitting that Venus Williams was the name on the check.
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Venus added her fifth Wimbledon title in 2008, beating Serena in a major final for the first time in seven years. The sisters met in the same round the following year, and the result was reversed.
By June 2010, the elder Williams had climbed all the way back to second place in the WTA rankings. Once again, the sisters held the top two spots. Venus blinked first, losing in the Wimbledon quarter-finals. Still, she closed her age-30 season ranked fifth in the world, her best year-end finish since 2002.
She wouldn’t return to a major final until 2017. She was diagnosed in 2011 with Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that left her unsure from one day to the next if she’d be able to compete. Her career highlights became fewer and further between, but what they lost in frequency they gained in historical stature.
In 2012, Venus and Serena won both the Wimbledon doubles title and the Olympic gold. (Two years earlier, they reached the number one doubles ranking. If I had Elo ratings for women’s doubles, this is where I’d tell you that they’d actually been the top team for a decade.) She returned to the singles top ten in 2015. She won another Wimbledon doubles crown with Serena in 2016, and at the Olympics that year, she teamed with Rajeev Ram to win a mixed doubles silver. The only other tennis player with five Olympic medals is Kitty McKane Godfree, who collected her last hardware in 1924.
Then, in 2017, Venus was suddenly the best 37-year-old in women’s tennis since Martina Navratilova. She reached the Australian Open final, where she met Serena for the 27th time. Williams also came within one victory of the crown at Wimbledon–her ninth final at the Championships–where she fell to Garbiñe Muguruza. Muguruza was 13 years younger than the runner-up, and Venus’s victim in the third round, Naomi Osaka, was born one month after the veteran’s first grand slam final in 1997.
Five years later, the elder Williams is still an active player on tour. She contested her 90th grand slam at Wimbledon in 2021–that’s one record that even Serena can’t match–and she entered the US Open this year. It’s hard to imagine yet another return to title-winning form, but I’m not sure I could bring myself to bet against her if she turned up healthy at Wimbledon next year.
At this point, though, the results no longer matter. Venus is a symbol as much as a contender. She had the guts to say, all the way back in 1994, “I think I can change the game.” For nearly three decades, she has set a compelling example for aspiring athletes of all backgrounds. She has fought for often-apathetic colleagues, and she has transcended physical limitations that would send other women into retirement. 14-year-old Venus proved herself right, even if she had no way of knowing what awaited her.