Legacy. It’s a word bigger than stats or trophy cases, a word saved for the top tier in sport, athletes we know by one name alone: Jordan. Sid. Tiger. Serena.
Our eagerness to debate everything related to sport means we throw it around in arguments, often without examining what it means. We define it through records broken or championships won, but that’s a mistake, a tendency that misses the true definition of the word.
Legacy isn’t something you attain. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: Legacy is what you leave behind. The only way to become a living legend is to affect change so quickly, you’re still around when we all start to see it.
Case and point: Serena Williams.
When she walked off the court after an exhilarating three-set loss to Australia’s Ajla Tomljanovic at the U.S. Open Friday, she left behind a generation of players who first saw themselves in tennis because they saw her — the likes of Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys, Taylor Townsend, Coco Gauff, Francoise Abanda and Asia Muhammad. She changed who got to play the game. Not just in terms of race or socioeconomic background but also size and stature, and attitude.
Women on tour are bigger and more powerful now, physically, socially and politically. The game is more demonstrative, it plays out in more vibrant colours.
Before Serena, female players were expected to be ladylike, the bad boys were meant only to exist on the men’s circuit. She took tennis from the country club and brought it to Compton and the catwalk. She brought it to the real world.
Maybe someone can claim they predicted she’d stand tall at fashion shows or drop low in music videos with Beyonce. I don’t think anyone foresaw the face of the sport creating instructional videos not on forehand technique but how to twerk. In her prime, she built her playing schedule around fashion weeks in September and February. She was the best in the sport while juggling side hustles that for most would’ve been full-time careers.
Some of her choices were controversial — crip walking on court at the London Olympics, for one — but ultimately they were all just her breathing some much needed personality and colour into a sport that for far too long limited itself to white uniforms, white players, white patrons, white umpires and white country clubs.
Serena redefined what it meant to be a female athlete. She is more than an athlete; she is a mogul. And her influence was never something that could be constrained to the court or catwalk or boardroom.
She used the press that flocked to her to spark conversations about gun violence in the place she grew up. It was a topic that hit all too close to home when her sister, Yetunde, was murdered in Compton right after the U.S. Open in 2003.
Of course, her advocacy also extended beyond her hometown. She called attention to the danger for Black people everywhere when they interact with the police. When secondary-market ticket prices for her matches became higher than they were for the men, she fought for pay equity, for purses and appearance fees to reflect the reality that watching women at the top of their game is as entertaining and compelling as watching men. She and her sister, Venus — and their combined 62 major victories — also proved that Black heroines could find widespread appeal in the same way heroes could.
When detractors came for what she wore or how she looked — in the pearl-clutching controversy over the cat suit she wore during the 2018 French Open, for example — Williams took on a culture of body shaming fuelled by a mixture of racism and sexism. She was always ready for the fight — on and off the court.
All of which is to say, the end of Williams’ playing career doesn’t mean we’ve reached the expiration date of her impact. As she said before Wimbledon: “The day I stop fighting for equality will be the day I’m in my grave.”
Legacy isn’t what you achieve or who you beat. Legacy is what you create for others.
Williams turned pro in 1995, and much of what she’s created is for players who weren’t alive when she started trailblazing. She redefined gender roles in sport and expanded conceptions of the working mother when her daughter, Olympia, became a fixture on tour while her husband, Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s co-founder and former executive chairman, took parental leave. How often before Williams was a woman’s choice about how best to feed her baby the subject of an athlete’s press conference?
As she points out in this September’s issue of Vogue magazine, the double standards female athletes have to navigate that men never have to consider aren’t fair. But nothing about Williams’ career was fair. Not the stereotypes, the racism, the misogyny, nor the pressure. Which makes all that she juggled that much more impressive.
Williams seemed like a superwoman, but her true power wasn’t her utter on-court dominance. It was forcing us to change our minds, to rethink our biases, by confronting realities.
A quote from the great Arthur Ashe sums her up best: “Champions are people who want to leave their sport better than they found it.”
So, when you remember Serena Williams, remember her not for her many championships but for who and what she championed. That’s her lasting legacy.
