INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — A decade on, it’s not the tension they remember most. It’s not the fear that after 14 years of anger and hurt, after all the attempts at rapprochement between the BNP Paribas Open tournament organizers and Serena Williams that never seemed to go anywhere, that one person among the 16,000 in the main stadium of the Indian Wells Tennis Garden might wreck it all once again.
They don’t remember the tension because they tried to ignore the possibility. Maybe if they thought only about the opposite, they could manifest it.
“Just a lot of anticipating how she would be received,” said Andrew Krasny, the tennis host, producer and close friend of Williams, who was in charge of announcing her return to that stadium after a 14-year boycott.
“I knew she would be received warmly and wonderfully and beautifully, but I knew that some people thought maybe it would be weird.”
They might, but tennis desperately needed it not to be. The sport needed one of its ugliest stories, one that started in 2001 in the same stadium where Williams and the organizers hoped it might end, to have an ending that was far different than the beginning.
A generation ago, Black stars were not woven into the fabric of the sport the way they are today; the greatest of them all wasn’t the greatest ever. Things are a little different now.
This is the era of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, of Iga Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka. It’s also the era of Coco Gauff — the highest paid female athlete — and of Naomi Osaka and Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe and Madison Keys and Gael Monfils and Arthur Fils. Not that long ago, none of them would have been allowed to play in America’s top tournaments or at its rarefied country clubs, and even when they were allowed, plenty ofpeople still didn’t want them to. It’s not a stretch to think some people like that are still out there today.
Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe were the pioneers who opened doors in the 1950s and 1960s, winning Grand Slam titles and breaking the color line at home and abroad. Serena and her sister Venus blasted those doors open as teenagers in the late 1990s.
