Serena Williams is the greatest female tennis player in the world – but not for the reasons that most of the media focuses on. Coverage of her ascent tends to emphasize her body over her genius. This minimizes her greatness. It is Serena’s mental strength that is her biggest weapon, not her body.

The pinnacle of athleticism in tennis is having both physical strength and mental tenacity. In singles, the player works alone, no opportunities to obtain counsel from coaches, no teammates to take up the slack. Almost every commentator, coach and player I’ve heard speak about tennis emphasizes the importance of the mental game, sometimes above the physical game, when it comes to professional tennis. Focusing on Serena Williams’s body minimizes her greatness.

The way that Serena Williams has mastered the physical and mental aspects of tennis is what makes her the greatest player of all time. Sure, she can serve at speeds of a high velocity. But she also can choose from a diverse variety of serves — and at critical times in her game. This leads many experts to call her serve the best ever in women’s tennis. But it’s not just her serve. Williams has a superb all-court game. She balances power with precision, aggression with a soft touch. Her evolved game includes not just power shots, but slices, short volleys and lobs, each employed at exactly the right time. She is known for her emotional outbreaks, but she channels that emotion into hitting the perfect shot.



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I have been a fan of tennis since the 1990s, around the time that Serena and Venus emerged on the professional tour. In spite of having a body that many would say was made for basketball, I’ve never been very good at or interested in sports. But, as a teenager, I was drawn to tennis because I felt it involved more than just brute strength. It required mental agility and finesse as well. Watching the Williams sisters thrive in and change the game of women’s tennis, as well as many other players of color, helped hold my interest in the sport for the last 20 years.

That’s why, as a psychologist and huge tennis fan, I can’t help be troubled by the massive amount of attention the media and society at large has placed on Serena’s body. There was what the New York Times’ public editor called the paper’s “double fault” in their reporting of how she perceives and handles body image, and their controversial article juxtaposing Serena’s ascension and the problem of black excellence. Vogue and New York Magazine also published sartorial photo essays featuring her body, and beauty, sharply exposed.



These pieces are complemented by stories like the one that describe her as being “built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens”. When comments about Serena’s body are perceived as negative and racist they are fraught with corrections about the beauty and power of her body. Her mind doesn’t enter the discourse; instead it is just a battle over her body.

There have been plenty of white American female tennis players with physical features that are pretty extraordinary, given the historical and stereotypical conceptions of the female tennis player’s physical form. The Women’s Tennis Association records the height and weight of all professional women tennis players on the tour. Height-wise, she’s tall compared to your average American woman. But Serena is shorter than Capriati, Davenport and Venus – the most recent American Grand Slam Champions outside of Serena – and weighs less than all three, as well as the average American adult woman.



As a social scientist, I think of race, gender and bodies as socially constructed – their meanings are based on what we make of them, not merely some objective reality. The emphasis on Serena Williams’ black body is just another way of acknowledging the power of racial divides in our society. We, as members of society, have created and sustained ideas about black bodies.



There is a harsh but real history of treating black bodies as animal specimens. Popular culture continues to exaggerate and fetishize black body parts: lips, butts, hair, skin, genitals. We listen to music about these parts (take, for example, Destiny’s Child’s Bootylicious and Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda), we spend money to enhance or minimize these parts, we gauge our self-worth based on these parts, and others’ ideas about them.

As Serena Williams continues to pursue and define the pinnacle of women’s tennis, let’s remember that she is more than simply a body. To do so only replicates the racist tradition of emphasizing the difference of black bodies and minimizing the strength of black minds. It is Serena Williams’ game, and the mental prowess that undergirds it, that makes her our greatest American athlete.

