For the first time in more than three-and-a-half years, the top-ranked player in women's tennis is not named Serena Williams. The long-standing No. 1, who held that ranking for 186 weeks, hampered by a knee injury, lost in the US Open semifinals Thursday night to 10th-ranked Karolina Pliskova. And with it, she also lost her shot to break Steffi Graf's record for consecutive weeks atop the rankings.
Until we get the opportunity to watch Williams play in another major -- which won't be until the Australian Open in January 2017 -- all conversation around her will invariably involve some sort of assessment of her career and legacy, attempting to put into historical context one of the greatest athletes we've ever seen.
The key word there is "athlete," not "women's tennis player." As Williams herself said after her third-round victory last Saturday, "I'm a female, and I'm an athlete. And I'm an athlete first."
Too often the coverage of Williams qualifies her as one of, if not the greatest, female athletes of all time -- something we're just as guilty of here at espnW. It's certainly important to acknowledge Williams's womanhood. Her femininity has constantly been denied due to that toxic mix of sexism and racism known as misogynoir -- her hair, her body, her demeanor and even her sartorial choices are endlessly scrutinized, while both her strength and her sexuality have been used against her.
But the focus on Williams's gender when evaluating her athletic career usually isn't about humanizing or empowering her. Most likely, it's said with a wink and a nod to separate her from the men.
The subtext is, "Yeah, she's the GOAT, but at a girl's game." Framing it in this way does more than merely undermine her success. It spares people from needing to consider her among legendary male athletes without comparing her to them.
A common tactic in disparaging women's sports is to argue that female players wouldn't be able to beat men in one-on-one competition. This, of course, entirely misses the point: Williams is in the category of all-time greats who similarly dominated their field. Nobody's going around asking if Mariano Rivera would beat Muhammad Ali in the ring.
The need to uphold male athletes as the standard-bearers is often excused away by some lazy argument about quality of competition, but it's really about the inability to see sports as something other than just for men. In a column for VICE, Rick Paulas argues that those looking for a woman to beat a man within the same sports are overlooking the fact that most of the major sports were designed to suit "male" skill sets:
"Sports currently fall into two categories: male sports, and females playing sports designed for me. ... So, instead of the winner of a sport contest being determined by skills that women excel in (an extremely small sample based on my own experiences: flexibility, agility, nimbleness, intelligence, an insane pain threshold, investment strategies, teamwork, just f---ing living longer), they were geared towards categories like 'I can push you further' and 'I can jump higher than you can jump.'"
I tend to cringe when ascribing such specific attributes to broad gender groups, and I disagree with the implication that if women can't run or swim or serve as fast (Williams can, by the way), that makes women's sports inherently less worthy. But the idea that sports were designed exclusively with men in mind continues to segregate sports as a space that's not meant for women.
And the tactic used to justify that is the straw man of direct comparison. A male athlete is simply an athlete, the natural order of things, while a female athlete is an anomaly -- and a supposedly inferior one, at that. It's this thinking that continues to stand in the way of equal pay for women players while holding back the confidence, support and investment needed to help women's sports continue to grow.
It doesn't help that those covering sports, including tennis, continue to be overwhelmingly men. According to FiveThirtyEight's Carl Bialik, men comprise 73 percent of journalists covering the US Open this year. That's how you get a reporter telling Andy Murray he's the first tennis player to win two Olympic gold medals, and Murray having to remind him that "Venus and Serena have won four each."
While this might be an extreme example, it goes to show how separating men and women athletes in our minds can serve to erase female players entirely from our consciousness.
But women athletes aren't going away, and it's up to those of us in the media to continue to nag people into acknowledging their existence and worth. It might be a blatantly self-serving move, but Nike's new campaign declaring Williams the "greatest athlete ever" is meaningful for both contextual and material reasons. The hesitance of major companies to see marketing value in female players has been a major barrier to the growth of women's sports, and here you have one of the biggest sponsors in sports declaring the supremacy of an athlete who happens to be a woman.
At the end of the day, if you've somehow managed to forget one of the greatest athletic careers we've ever seen, the only person who missed out is you. Rio and Flushing notwithstanding, Serena's numbers speak for themselves, and the utter electricity with which she lights up the court is undeniable. And she hasn't just been an incredible boon to the profile of women's sports; she has managed to keep tennis relevant in the U.S. during years of futility by American men. It's not a far cry to imagine a young boy at the Williams sisters' Los Angeles tennis academy dreaming of one day becoming Serena. We should all be so lucky.