Serena Williams helped the nation fall in love with strong, confident women | Opinion
with the stunning arrival on the world stage of 17-year-old Serena Williams.
What a time in America that was, from July 10, 1999, until Sept. 11, 1999, when the nation realized it was falling in love with what it had created: strong, confident, muscular, unstoppable young women.
Chastain’s winning penalty kick at the Women’s World Cup before 90,185 in the Rose Bowl and 40 million more on television ended a nearly month-long celebration of American female athletes who were dressed like guys, in baggy soccer shirts and shorts. And when Chastain whipped her jersey over her head — because that’s what male soccer players did, so why not? — she revealed a set of six-pack abs that truly shocked some of the people (men) I heard from that day.
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Meanwhile, Venus Williams had a younger sister who was coming on fast. While Venus was tall at 6-1, Serena had a different build: a much more solid and muscular 5-9.
“When I was growing up, what was celebrated was different,” Serena told British Vogue two years ago. “Venus looked more like what is really acceptable: she has incredibly long legs, she’s really, really thin. I didn’t see people on TV that looked like me, who were thick. There wasn’t positive body image. It was a different age.”
There had been muscular women in tennis before Serena; Martina Navratilova immediately comes to mind for revolutionizing a new kind of no-frills fitness and power that made her one of the best to ever play the game. But Serena looked and was different: she was bigger, and of course she was Black, meaning the horrors of racism would never leave her.
When young Serena won that first U.S. Open in 1999 by defeating practically every big name in the sport, it was logical to wonder how she ever would be truly accepted by American sports fans, most of them white, most of them male.
Now, look at what is going on this week in New York. It’s hard to imagine any athlete who is more appreciated — any person, really — than Serena. This is a remarkable plot twist in the story of American sports, how we in the United States and around the world have come to revere a woman built like Serena.
“How amazing that my body has been able to give me the career that I’ve had, and I’m really thankful for it,” she said in that 2020 interview. “I only wish I had been thankful sooner.”
The natural inclination is for all of us to wish it had happened years earlier, but I think that would have been impossible. It took Serena, and the women’s soccer team, to show us who we are and what we want for our nation’s daughters. Someone had to wake up a country. They sure did.