Seena Williams Determined to Make Another Win

It was on her 20th birthday that Serena Williams told herself to shape up and make the most of her talent. The decision she made that day - September 26, 2001 - was to reshape the hierarchy of women's tennis.

"Things took a turn in my life," she mused the other day. "I said, 'I'm going to get serious about my tennis. I can be the best. I can be No1.' I had been on that route, but I got misguided somewhere along the line."

Had there been a specific catalyst for her decision?

"Yes, there was something, but I won't let you in on it. It's personal."

There is no secret, however, about the steps she took in order to unlock the potential that her father had seen half a dozen years earlier, when he predicted that she would one day take over from her older sister Venus at the top of the world rankings.

"I had to become more serious, to stop making so many mistakes on the court and to study a little harder off the court," she said. "Just small changes can make the world of a difference."

At 17 Serena had won the US Open, beating the former champion and world No1, Martina Hingis, in the final. Fifteen months younger than Venus, she became the first of the sisters to win a grand slam tournament. But then followed almost two years without another major success, while Venus won Wimbledon twice and ascended to the top of the world rankings.

Nick Bolletieri watched the change occur, during Serena's frequent visits to his tennis centre in Bradenton, Florida, a 150-mile drive from the house the sisters then shared in Palm Beach Gardens.

"Something clicked," the coach said this week. "She told herself, 'I'm tired of finishing second, third, fourth. It's time I stepped up to the plate and became a champion.' And no matter what anyone says, when you have two siblings who're that good, it's tough for one of them to focus on herself individually. I think that was somewhat of a hindrance to her in the past."

More solid and compact than her long-limbed sister, and three inches shorter, Serena worked not just on technique but on her strength and power as she prepared for the 2002 season. After an ankle injury forced her to miss the Australian Open, she re-emerged as an altogether more formidable competitor.

In February she beat Hingis, the world No5, and then Jennifer Capriati, the No2, to win a tournament in Scottsdale, Arizona. "For me it was a big win because I was really, really ill," she remembered. "I get the flu every year right around that time and I was still able to win it. I hadn't played all year and I was still able to beat the top players. Then I went on to win Miami."

There she vanquished Hingis and Capriati again, those quarter-final and final victories sandwiching the first of the season's four victories over her sister. The other three matches in which she beat Venus were the finals of the remaining grand slam tournaments, the French, Wimbledon and the US, in which she did not concede a single set. Halfway through Wimbledon she was promoted to the No1 ranking for the first time.

"The difference is that she's concentrating on her shot selection and on cutting down on the unforced errors," Bolletieri said, reflecting on the technical changes she made last winter. "She'd be playing unbelievably well but then all of a sudden she'd make an unnecessary error. Her shot selection has improved unbelievably."

Whatever her critics may say, glancing in mingled envy and disapproval at the muscle definition in her calves and the power of her torso as it strains against the shiny, clinging fabric of the startling black dress she wore at Flushing Meadows last year, she is not a machine. As she prepares to serve, she might bounce the ball once. Or twice. Or sometimes four, five, even six times. Serena has a groove, but it was not cut by the computerised lathe of modern tennis coaching. Like her sister, she invents her own rhythms; but while Venus swoops and dives around the court like a huge exotic bird, Serena hurtles to meet the ball with a primal force that can make a stadium shudder.

Everybody's human

Last year the groove was deep enough to take her to the brink of what golfers call the "Tiger Slam", and which she, without undue modesty, refers to as the "Serena Slam" - in other words, all four major tournaments in a row. On Monday in Melbourne she will begin her attempt to collect the set.

"It's going to be tough," she said, "specially going Down Under and playing in that heat. Plus I think that Venus is really going to try to win that event, so we'll see."

Her rivals take comfort from her unexpected defeat by Kim Clijsters in the WTA championships in California at the end of last season. "Everybody's human, and out there anything can happen," Elena Bovina, the promising Russian player, said last month. "We saw that she's not out of reach. Kim proved to everybody that you can do it. She's the first girl, after Martina [Hingis] did it two years ago, that beat the two sisters in a row. You do that and you win the championship. Definitely Serena is going to Australia as the favourite, but, you know, nothing's impossible."

Serena bristled at a suggestion that defeat at Clijsters' hands had constituted a reality check. "No, it didn't. I'd played so much tennis by then that I was gone. Physically I felt like a 98-year-old woman with a hip replacement. I don't even know how I was able to play that tournament. I was just happy to have even gotten that far. It's going to go against my permanent record, and that's kind of sad for me because I had a good record against her before. But she's a good player. I'm always having to look out for her, most definitely."

In Melbourne last week she met Clijsters again and delivered what she no doubt considered a correction to the historical record. The score, an exact reversal of the original 7-5, 6-3 result, looked almost as if it had been devised for its symbolic value.

Yet even as she glances down on the world from the No1's vantage point, Serena remains the little sister. When they played doubles together at a tournament in Dublin before Christmas, Venus could be seen adjusting Serena's headband and straightening the shoulder of her T-shirt. Every now and then Serena glanced at her, as if for guidance.

Accustomed to being "family", they find old habits hard to break. Venus looks out for Serena, as she has done since they went on the tour together. And that, as their father noticed before any of us had heard their names, is what gives Serena a competitive advantage when they face each other.

She demonstrated her growing independence by buying an apartment in Los Angeles before Christmas, paying$1.4m (£900,000) for a two-bedroom pad in a high-rise condo with a pool, a gym, a concierge, valet parking and extensive security systems. She will use it as a base from which to pursue her acting career, having made an appearance last year playing a school teacher in a television series called My Wife and Kids.

Venus, meanwhile, has launched her own interior decoration company in Florida and continues to study fashion design at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. Many feel that she will be the first to quit professional tennis, although when she protested in Dublin that "I'm only 22 - I have a few years left," it was tempting to recall that her father, who has not got many things wrong, said in the mid-1990s that he wanted his daughters out of tennis and moving on to other areas of endeavour by the time they were 23.

By that measure, Serena has a couple of seasons in which to confirm her dominance. "I haven't reached a peak yet," she told me. "Not at all. There's a lot of stuff I can do better and that I hope to do better."

Bolletieri was more precise. "We've worked on her serve," he said. "That's been a big thing. We spent a lot of time on that before she left for Australia. Mechanically, she has a much better serve than her sister. Venus opens up and serves with her arms. Serena serves with her lower body and her legs. And she's developed a good slice and a drop shot.

"She's also going to be spending a lot more time up at the net. The reason she's been overhitting from the baseline is because when someone has retrieved one of her shots, she'd just try to hit it back even harder. But she's more comfortable at the net now.

"She's very confident, and she's become a real perfectionist. She spent two or three days here, but she wasn't satisfied, so she came back and spent another two or three days with me. She becomes very angry when she makes a mistake. Right now, she feels that she shouldn't be missing anything. This year I believe she's going to be competing against herself."