Welcome to Tennis Elbow, a new column that will look back on the week that was in the world of tennis. This week, Charles Blouin-Gascon recaps the special 2013 seasons of Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams.
The 2013 season was good to us tennis fans.
It was good to us, because two players who will live on as no worse than, likely, the fifth best players of their respective sport; two players, yes, had their signature season.
At 32 years of age, Serena Williams had arguably the best season of her illustrious career—even though the same could probably be said of a few other seasons as well. The younger of the two Williams sisters won 78 of 82 matches played, captured 11 titles (including Roland Garros and the U.S. Open) as well as over $12 million in prize money.
Serena was the dominant force that she’s seemingly always been and was the odds-on favourite for just about every event she entered, with very few minor hiccups (i.e. losses against Sabine Lisicki at Wimbledon and Sloane Stephens in Australia). In the middle of the season, after she had won the French Open, I surprised myself telling a friend that I thought she could run the table and capture the in-season Slam—even though, you know, she had lost in Melbourne already. It was that kind of season for Serena Williams.
(Some may argue that it should ways be that kind of season for her, if she could only have focused strictly on the sport for her entire career. I disagree and think that’s looking at it backwards—it’s because she hasn’t made tennis her entire reason for being that she can still excel at this age.)
Meanwhile, Rafael Nadal’s excellence this year, if we’re being completely honest, was completely unexpected. Oh, we knew that he would compete with and rival the best, because this is all he always does. But after seven months away from the sport, how could we foresee this? How could we anticipate this kind of season, one where he won 75 of 83 matches, 10 titles (including Roland Garros and the U.S. Open) and over $12 million in prize money?
We couldn’t, and if you say that you did then you’re lying.
We couldn’t anticipate this, not even when he kept winning those clay-court (read: minor) tournaments at the beginning of the season. It’s only when he captured the BNP Paribas Open title, I would say, that I realized that the 27-year-old was back. He was fine, healthy, and showed everyone that revenge is a dish best served dusty and under the Parisian sun when he defeated Novak Djokovic in the de factor Roland Garros final. That match, possibly the best of the season on the men’s side, was a return of the pendulum for Nadal after his gut-wrenching loss in 2012 in Melbourne at the hands of this same man.
(Speaking of Novak here, it’s a testament to the kind of season he’s enjoyed too that despite Nadal’s brilliance, Djokovic finished only 770 points behind him. While Nadal was the No. 1 player on the ATP World Tour this season, the Serb was really just a 1a. Their season series ended at 3-3, and let’s give the split decision to the Spaniard for his ending the year as the No. 1-ranked player. That all said, the race between him and Djokovic was closer than most realize.)
When their playing days are over and we write the career obituaries of Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams, two great champions, their excellence in 2013 will come no later than the second or third sentence. That’s how good they were this year. And that’s how lucky we were to see it all.
Follow Charles Blouin-Gascon on Twitter @RealCBG