Since her loss to Roberta Vinci, a shocking but vaguely inevitable defeat in the U.S. Open semifinals and a loss that snapped her chance of a Grand Slam two sets short of immortality, Serena Williams has been in a bit of a funk.
Said funk is all relative given Serena's lofty standards but still provides reason for concern. After the world No. 1 took the rest of 2015 off with an "injury," which was code for "wanting to decompress after a summer full of intense sporting pressure and take selfies at Heat games," she returned in dominant fashion at the Australian Open, where she rolled through her first six matches without dropping a set and won eight of those 12 sets by a score of 6-2 or better. Then she played a tight match in the final to lose to Angelique Kerber and put off her pursuit of Steffi Graf's 22 major championships for a few months, at least.
Since then Serena has played two tournaments, the first of which played out much like Melbourne did. Serena didn't drop a set before getting to the final, where she lost to Victoria Azarenka, the former No. 1 who had Serena on the ropes multiple times in Grand Slams last year but never could deliver the knockout punch.
In Miami, the world No. 1 went three sets in her opening match against No. 56 Christina McHale and then, in Monday's fourth round, won a tight opening tiebreak against former major champ Svetlana Kuznetsova before getting steamrolled in the next two sets, 6-1, 6-2. That's just the second time since 2009 that Serena has won three or fewer games in two losing sets. It's been a slump only Maria Sharapova could love, if she didn't have her own set of problems to deal with.
So what's up? Well, first it's crucial to state that the sky isn't falling. A Grand Slam final, a final at one of the biggest non-major tournaments of the year and then a round-of-16 loss to a crafty veteran is hardly reason to flip open the safety and hit the panic button. But this is Serena Williams. She doesn't go winless through April or lose in the fourth round of Miami. (It was her earliest exit there since 2000. Since then, she'd won eight of her 12 starts, with one final and three quarterfinal defeats.)
Interestingly, Serena's losses this year have come to players ranked No. 6, No. 15 and No. 19. Ordinarily you'd say "oh, well that's to be expected -- at least she's losing to good opponents." But the weird, counterintuitive thing about Serena is that she has more trouble with the mediocre than the accomplished. Since her tennisance began after a first-round loss at the 2012 French Open that coincided with the arrival of Patrick Mouratoglou in her coaching box, here are some Serena stats, prior to this so-called funk:
1. She had 16 losses (we're not counting walkovers). That's from Wimbledon in 2012 through the Australian Open final. Try to wrap your head around that.
2. Of those 16 losses, nine (56 percent) were to players ranked No. 20 or below.
3. Her record against top-10 players was 56-6.
4. In her past nine matches, Serena has three losses to players ranked higher than No. 20. That's the same amount of similar losses she had in her previous 101 matches.
5. In that time, Serena has never lost four tournaments in a row. The last time it happened was two months before that Virginie Razzano match in Paris, the one that kickstarted Serena into one of the great runs in sports history. (That went from the 2011 U.S. Open -- the hindrance match against Sam Stosur -- through 2012-opening defeats at Brisbane, the Australian Open and Miami.)
With only cursory checking, it's safe to say that no other woman has come close to winning one in four tournaments over the past four years. And Serena's ratio is far higher than that, once again proving merely that Serena is having trouble clearing a bar of her own raising.
Her final with Kerber in Melbourne came in a match that was horrible by Serena's lofty standards. Her footwork had the movement of Luca Brasi's. She couldn't toss the ball reliably on her serve. She missed easy shots by so much you would have thought she was a Kansas point guard playing Villanova. Her winner-to-UE (unforced error) ratio was about even (Kerber's was about 2/1). It was just an off-day for Serena.
She's had two more since. There's slight concern because those losses were at big tournaments, not tune-ups, but how much should there be?
First you have to ask what you're concerned about. Is it sluggishness? Injury? (Roger Federer skipped Miami when he wasn't 100 percent. But Miami is Serena's home tourney. Would she have done the same?) Has she lost her edge? (Though she's still as tenacious as ever on the court, she's been more accepting of losing. Remember the smiles in Melbourne and goofing off with Victoria Azarenka at Indian Wells? Maybe that's a different, healthier mindset. Or she doesn't hate losing as much as she used to, which would have a definite psychological effect on your play.) Is it the lasting memory of her defeat to Vinci? Is being 34 years old in a sport full of women in the early to late 20s finally catching up to her?
Given how easily she rolled through Melbourne (she lost nine games total to Aga Radwanska and Sharapova) before her stinker in the final, I don't think it's any of those, except maybe a post-Kerber slump rather than a post-Vinci one. (And, frankly, though Serena clearly would have preferred to win the Aussie Open, you got the sense of relief that she wouldn't have four months of Grand Slam pressure before the French began.) If that's the case, then let's call it luck finally catching up to her. Multiple times last year, Serena was within a point or two or completely losing grasp of one of her 27 Grand Slam matches. Each time she gutted her way to victory. The good times couldn't keep going forever.
Can the good times get started again, though? Sure, Serena is going to win her 22nd Slam and inevitably pass Graf one of these days, but will she ever be as dominant as she was over those four years? Logic dictates no -- you'd bet against it -- but logic has never been a good barometer in forecasting the career of Serena Williams.
