MELBOURNE, Australia — Serena Williams is now prepared to confess what led to her stumbling about the grass in a bizarre and brief doubles match at Wimbledon last year.
“I have a stopping issue,” she said in an interview Sunday. “I don’t have a quit button. You just can’t press control-alt-quit with me. The window will stay open. I do not know when to quit. Look, here I am still playing, and I’m 33.”
Here she is, and off she goes: heading to Argentina shortly after winning the Australian Open for her 19th Grand Slam singles title.
Although Williams said with a chuckle that she has ordered family and people in her support team to rein her in for her own good, she still deemed it best to board an overnight flight out of Melbourne on Monday morning for Los Angele, where she will do a few hours of work for her charity before boarding another overnight flight.
Destination: Buenos Aires, where she intends to play in a second-division Fed Cup match for the United States against Argentina on Saturday and Sunday. If so, she will be part of a powerhouse team that is expected to include her sister Venus, Varvara Lepchenko and the emerging 19-year-old star Madison Keys, now up to 20th in the rankings after reaching the Australian Open semifinals.
This is hardly all for the glory of Fed Cup, even though Williams says she enjoys playing for her country and is looking forward to the experience. She needs to play in the International Tennis Federation’s annual team competition to be eligible for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
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“He took a lot of command,” she said. “And he said, ‘I should have said something at Wimbledon,’ and you’re not going to play.’”
She said she and Venus also pulled out of the doubles tournament in Melbourne partly because of her back issues and in part to preserve their chances of doing well in singles. Mission accomplished, with Venus reaching the quarterfinals at a Grand Slam event for the first time since 2010.
They played in their first Australian Open in 1998, and 17 years later they were still in Melbourne together. Would Serena still be doing this if Venus were not still doing it, too?
“She influences me so much it would be kind of hard to be somewhere without Venus,” she said. “That’s a really good question. I don’t want to have to answer that. I’m scared. I hope she doesn’t end on me. I doubt it. I know she wants to get to Rio, too.”
Clearly they both do, as this whirlwind trip to Argentina for a second-tier team tennis match makes clear.
Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting
