Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

As Serena Williams Plays Her Final Matches, a Generation Is Inspired

Women across the country have seen their own lives reflected in the triumphs and trials of the tennis superstar. Cue the swell of emotion.

· NY Times

On Wednesday, Brittany Packnett Cunningham, 37, a racial equality activist, podcast host and a new mother, stayed up late to watch Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion, play her second-round match.

Ms. Cunningham’s husband watched too, as did her father-in-law. Even her eight-month-old son didn’t seem interested in sleep that night.

“We were all at the edge of our seats,” she said. “Every time she scored, we cheered, and every time she made a face or a grimace, we would talk to the TV and try to encourage her like she could hear us.”

“It felt like we were watching our sister,” she said.

Over the past week, during what will likely be Williams’ final U.S. Open, social media has been awash with emotion and camaraderie from women who feel as though it’s a family member or a close friend who is stepping back from tennis. A generation of people who started their careers around the time that Williams did saw their own lives reflected in her triumphs and trials. And when Williams, 40, announced in Vogue that she planned to “evolve away from tennis” and focus on growing her family, it became yet another moment that resonated across racial and socioeconomic lines.

“We’ve kind of gone through a lot of the milestones of life together,” said Elizabeth Burden, 44, who works at the International Finance Corporation and who took a 5 a.m. train from Washington D.C. to New York to watch the U.S. Open on Wednesday. “I think a lot of women my age have this sense of shared achievement.”

Serena Williams’s Farewell to Tennis

The U.S. Open could be the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.

‘She brings the culture to the floor’

Women, and particularly women of color, in Williams’ generation and older have spent much of their lives dealing with being “the first and only” in many situations, just like Williams did, said Merlisa Lawrence Corbett, author of the biography “Serena Williams: Tennis Champion, Sports Legend and Cultural Heroine.”

“I was the only Black woman in my A.P. English class and the only Black woman in computer math in the 80s,” Corbett, 50, said. “So we were operating in this space where they would only take one of you and, if you mess up, nobody behind you gets a shot.”

Williams has so fully dominated the sport that when young women of color enter tennis today it’s not particularly newsworthy, Corbett said — and that has been inspiring to watch, especially because such diversity is still rare outside of tennis, from the top ranks of the corporate world to the fields of science and technology. “She’s the last of the ‘first and only’ — she’s just cleared the path for them,” Corbett said.

The fact that Williams remained unabashedly herself in the face of immense pressure and scrutiny is also a source of pride for many women who themselves felt like outsiders. “I say this as a super WASP-y person but also as a gay person who doesn’t fit inside the society that she came from — to watch Serena just blow apart this incredibly white, WASP-y sport filled me with so much glee,” Ms. Burden said.

Williams’ frustration on the court, her hair styles and eye-catching outfits, her dancing and fist-pumping were all once unheard-of in tennis, Ms. Corbett said, and Williams’ decision to never turn down the volume has been widely admired.

It is in large part why Scheherazade Tillet, a photographer and co-founder of the art-focused nonprofit A Long Walk Home, became a lifelong Williams fan. “There’s this sense of identification — she’s from Compton, from a Black community, she plays the music, she dances, she brings the culture to the floor with her twirls and her Crip walks,” Tillet, 40, said. “So even if you’re not a huge tennis fan, you become one.”

In the post-match interview on Wednesday, when Williams was asked how she had pulled out another win, she said she no longer had anything to prove. That confidence struck Brandeis Marshall, 44, founder and chief executive of DataedX Group, a data analytics firm.

“Every Black woman 40 and over is NAVIGATING THEIR WORK LIFE WITH NOTHING TO PROVE,” Dr. Marshall said in a post on Twitter.

“I have a lot of affection for the fact that she’s doing it in the way that she’s doing it, unapologetically,” Dr. Marshall added in an interview with The New York Times. “There’s a certain point, at this age, when people start to discount you — and that happens no matter what industry.”

‘My Serena catsuit month’

The tennis star noted in her Vogue essay that if she were a man, she would not have to make the impossible choice between career and parenting. “Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had the opportunity,” she said, in acknowledgment of the biological and social ceilings that American women of childbearing age often face.

Williams’ C-section and near-fatal pulmonary embolism in 2017 brought into sharp focus the high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity among Black mothers, an issue that worsened during the pandemic.

“It is quite something to realize that even with all of my education, even with all of Serena’s accomplishments, we still statistically end up in these situations,” said Ms. Cunningham, whose son was born premature, weighing just over one pound, and had to spend the first four months of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Ms. Cunningham said that Williams’ ability to persevere after her difficult delivery kept her going when she too was faced with debilitating pain after a C-section. “That was my Serena catsuit month,” Ms. Cunningham said, referring to the outfit that Williams wore during the 2018 French Open, a year after giving birth to her daughter, which Williams said helped keep her “blood circulation going” and prevent clots. The French Tennis Federation saw the outfit as a violation of the sport’s dress codes, quickly turning the catsuit into a symbol of rebellion.

Ms. Burden, who watched a 2018 documentary about Williams in which she spoke openly about having to give up breastfeeding in order to compete again, related to the challenges Williams faced in balancing the demands of new motherhood with her career. As a mother, she said, she “completely understood that sense of being ripped down the middle.”

“You are always going to be torn when making these fundamental choices,” she said. “I felt like I really saw myself in that struggle.”