Venus and Taylor and Shuai and Hailey | The American Spectator

If you imagined Chopin’s Polish March in the backbrains of Taylor Townsend and Shuai Zhang as they held their defensive line against Hailey Baptiste while heightening the tempo of their assault on Venus Williams, you might not be far off.  No way to know how familiar these young ladies are with Chopin’s music, but they are bright and articulate and you can see, or hear, the cavalry as it picks up speed, sabers coming out of scabbards as the trot turns to canter, sabers raised as canter turns to gallop, and either they will sweep through the waiting infantry or they will shatter against it.

Mind, this is a inapt comparison, as I keep telling myself and keep rationalizing anyway. It was a fascinating match, the quarterfinal ladies’ doubles — women’s, in American usage — and the question was: is Venus up to it? She is one of the all time immortals (to use a baseball term), repeat title holder in doubles at the greatest tournaments, Olympic gold winner, and this is without counting her c.v. in singles.

She has come out of a year and a half retirement during which she dealt with health issues and, she told the assembled press, never stopped working out to stay in condition. She is forty-five and forty-five is not twenty-two or -three, nor is it even thirty-five, which are more or less what the three others on the court are. You will say so what, make comparisons to Tom Brady, and the answer she gave, this is what she loves to do, this is what she owes the sport and the fans, because this is what champions do, they go out and do it, like Achiles coming out of his sulk to take down Hector, forgive the inapt comparison again.

The Polish March: there is also the matter of mood. In the final at Wimbledon just weeks ago, it occurred to me the music might be Chopin, seeing how the American hope, Amanda Anisimova, froze in the face of a real Pole who may well have had one of the Marches on her mind as she wiped the grass with zooming forehands that turned white chalk to flecks of snow and stunning serves that knocked Amanda back. The Nocturnes would have been in Amanda’s head, and in Iga Swiatek’s the heroic Marches.

Tennis is tennis, music is music: yet the question remains, how do we make use of them, together or separately, to keep the world a place of civility, honor, virtue? That is the question, and there is no small cultural weight in the possibly apocryphal remark of the Duke of Wellington about Eton and Waterloo, and it is perhaps given more, not less, meaning by the fact that most of his troops could not have been Etonians.

As it happens, one of the interesting things about that doubles match is that it was not, technically speaking, the triumphant return to the tour that the tennis press seems to have decided should be the consensus assessment of Miss Williams’ performances at the Washington Open, aka Mubadala Citi Open D.C.

Sure it was a triumph: it is simply wonderful and inspiring to see the tall lithe aristocratic daughter of the model of the striving, determined, dreaming American that is Richard Williams again on the courts, hitting un-returnable serves and shooting impeccable unreachable winners.  But there are only so many of those she can hit; then she is vulnerable.

Following solid wins over Peyton Stearns (half her age), and, with Miss Baptiste, Clervie Ngounoue and Eugenie Bouchard in the singles and doubles first rounds, you could see she stood with unflappable poise in the intense heat — a poor scheduling choice, be it said in passing, no one had ever seen the John Harris Grandstand so tightly packed — and fought bravely against a determined and court-smart Magdalena Frech, this time, properly, in the much larger Stadium, mixing her pace and places to induce errors and bring on exhaustion.

Like Miss Swiatek, Miss Frech must have grown up with Chopin’s music, all Polish children do. Unlike Miss Anisimova in London, she did not let herself be intimidated either by the legend on the other side of the court or by a partisan, raucous crowd.

Unlike Miss Townsend too, one may venture. For the other fact that the tennis press seems to have chosen to collectively overlook is that in that second doubles match, it was clearly Miss Zhang who held the winning side’s joint nerve.  Miss Townsend was making uncharacteristic errors on her mighty volleys and returns of serve: she proved this by using these exact tools, plus her own serve, to crush Sofia Kenin (2020 Australian Open winner) in her next singles match; indeed she hit twelve aces, a record at the tournament so far and unusual by any measure. Miss Zhang held the fort — and directed the offense, which was preponderantly directed at Miss Williams, and specifically at her backhand. She was not making those great powerful returns of yore from that side.

It is not impossible Taylor was intimidated; here was tennis royalty, whom she, Taylor, like many others of her generation, credits, quite fairly, with making her want to pick up a racquet because here was someone “who looks like me,” who showed what happiness and success it might bring her.  Which it has, and Miss Williams herself takes pride in her mentoring role.  It was a close match, two sets each then the deciding ten-point tie-break.  With Hailey Baptiste playing formidable attacking tennis, it could have gone the other way had not Shuai Zhang stayed calm and upbeat even, or especially, after lost points. Her hard low shot to Venus, returned softly to a Taylor ready at the net to kill it, that ended the match.

Taylor Townsend meets the small and mighty Canadian dynamo, Leyla Fernandez, this afternoon on that same hot crowded John Harris Grandstand, then rejoins Shuai for an evening match against another pair of bright young things, Elena Rybakina and Emma Raducanu. These are all charming and lovely athletes with a wide variety of playing styles whose share a healthy respect for the sport and the champions who make its history.

In spite of the lousy scheduling, the owners and organizers of the tournament, not to mention the hard-working ball boys and girls, plus the media with all their shortcomings, merit the thanks of a grateful Washington, and so does Speaker Mike Johnson for getting the stuffed suits and gas bags out of town where their abuse of the Republic cannot distract from what should be, perchance still is, however small, however precarious, a triumph of civilization.

READ MORE from Roger Kaplan:

Venus the Great

Racquets at Washington’s Rock Creek Park