Williams Confounds Critics to Claim Third Title

This was resurrection. Venus Williams's tennis obituarists had been preparing their scripts before these championships, but here she was confounding them all as she beat the world's number one, Lindsay Davenport, 4-6 7-6 (7-4) 9-7 in an outstanding match, at two hours 45 minutes the longest women's final in history, to begin her third reign as Wimbledon champion.

No wonder 25-year-old celebrated so joyously, her delight at winning her first grand slam for four years enhanced by the fact that she and her much-criticised sister have now won two of the three slams played this year, Serena having triumphed in Australia last January, also beating Davenport. This, though, was Venus's day and hers alone as she became, at 14, the lowest seed to win the women's title.

She flung her arms to theovercast heavens when another pounding forehand sealed victory and later she clung to the most distinctive trophy in tennis, the appropriately named Venus Rosewater Dish, so possessively you feared it might melt. The cheque for £600,000 must have felt good, too.

If yesterday's win - Williams's thirteenth in 27 meetings with Davenport - didn't quite come out of the blue, it certainly came as a major surprise. In the past year, she has won only one title, a relatively insignificant one in Istanbul six weeks ago, and at the French Open in May lost horribly to the 15-year-old Bulgarian Sesil Karatantcheva.

A succession of injuries had taken their toll. Some observers wondered whether the older of the Williams sisters might lose interest in tennis and take up a career in fashion design, which is something she loves. Clues to her continuing commitment did exist, though, not least her decision to keep on playing without a sponsor after a multi-million-dollar deal with Reebok ran out last year.

It wasn't really until last Thursday's semi-final against the defending champion, Maria Sharapova, that Williams produced the sort of performance that suggested she might be capable of winning her first grand slam since the 2001 US Open and her fifth in all.

She exposed the depths to which the overweight Serena's game have sunk by thrashing her sister's unlikely conqueror, Jill Craybas, in the fourth round and subdued the erratic Mary Pierce in the quarter-finals. But it was the performance against Sharapova, in which she suddenly summoned the form of four years ago - perfectly timed drives screaming deep into the corners - that persuaded those most in need of persuasion that in her fifth Wimbledon final in six years she could add to her 2000 and 2001 titles.

Davenport and Williams could hardly be more different. Davenport is an understated, girl-next-door type whose gold medal from the 1996 Olympics ended up in her mum's sock draw. 'It's hard to find the right place for it. I'm not really big about having trophies out,' she said. She finds promotional work tedious and prefers casual wear to anything too dressy, the kind of designer outfits that Venus and Serena wore recently to a White House bash. At that bash, Venus sat at the Bloomberg News table and hobnobbed with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, even challenging Rice to a game of tennis when she said she liked playing. All very un-Davenportish.

The difference is evident in the way they play, Davenport unloading her shots as if she were carrying out some workaday chore, Williams dispatching hers with grand sweeps of the arm and dramatic sound effects.

Davenport's unfussy hitting dominated the early exchanges as Williams took time to settle. In fact, in these early stages, Williams appeared unusually nervous and two double faults followed by two backhand errors handed Davenport a break in the third game. When Davenport, dominating with the power and control of her groundstrokes, broke again to lead 5-2, she seemed on a fast track to victory.

Although Williams would indeed drop that first set, she suddenly summoned the first glimpse of the sort of form that would transform this into an outstanding contest. She broke Davenport to love and then held her own serve to love, the combination of accuracy and weight of shot at last achieving the standard it reached against Sharapova.

Serving for the opening set for the second time, Davenport clinched it this time, holding to 15 when Williams could only help a big serve into the net with her forehand.

Both players went through crises in the second set. The rising tension was reflected in Davenport having a rare run-in with an official, when she accused chair umpire Gerry Armstrong of not having the guts to overrule cyclops, which judges the service line. Somehow both managed to hold serve until the eleventh game when Williams slipped at break point and Davenport fired a winner into open court. But serving for the match, Davenport succumbed to brave attacking play by Williams, who then went on to snatch the tie-break 7-4.

In the decider, Davenport had to leave the court for treatment on a lower back strain after the seventh game, and from there on was always fighting a losing battle.

While the well of talent in the women's game may be deepening, it still does not go as far down as the men's. The only two results that came close to being major upsets - Justine Henine-Hardenne's first-round loss against the Greek Eleni Daniilidou and Serena Williams' defeat by Craybas - both had significant subtexts. Henin-Hardenne is still not fully recovered from the virus that laid her low in 2004, while Serena is facing a fitness crisis, which is plain to see from the added pounds she is now carrying.

In fact, after Venus Williams' unexpectedly good showing, Serena's unexpectedly poor one was the most noteworthy story coming out of the women's game at these championships. 'Serena is in the worst condition of her life,' said her father, Richard. 'She's in worse shape than me.'

The unanswered question is whether Serena is out of shape because a recurring ankle injury has prevented her putting in the training she should have done or because she no longer has the yearning for tennis she once did. It would be a pity if the latter were the case, because she has added so much to the women's game.

Ominously, though, Richard Williams says tennis is no longer the most important thing in his daughters' lives and list five things that take precedence: God, family, education, business and feeling good about themselves.