JUST IN: STOP Comparing HER To ME — Serena Williams' BLUNT Statement About COCO Gauff

[00:00:00]Somebody asked Coco Gauff a question about me again this week and I watched her answer it for what must be the 400th time in her career and something in me finally snapped. Not at her, at the question.

[00:00:14]She has been on this tour since she was 15 years old. She has won two Grand Slam titles. She has just played the best fortnight of her life at Wimbledon and grown adults with press credentials are still asking her to explain her relationship to a woman who stopped playing full-time before she was old enough to vote. Stop comparing her to me. I mean that as a request and I am fairly close to meaning it as an instruction.

[00:00:44]The comparison was never a compliment.

[00:00:48]That is the part nobody examines and it sounds like one. Everybody says it warmly, everybody smiles when they say it and underneath the warmth is a sentence that means she is a version of somebody else, not the original, a continuation. And when you hand a young woman that framing at 15 and repeat it every single week for 7 years, you are not celebrating her. You are quietly telling her that her ceiling is somebody else's career.

[00:01:20]I know what it is to be measured against a name.

[00:01:24]When my sister and I came up, the reference points were always somebody who came before and the sport had a short list of women and it was comfortable comparing us to and the short list was chosen for reasons that had very little to do with tennis. We were not the next anyone. We were the first us and it took years and a great many trophies before people stopped preaching for the comparison and I remember exactly how tiring it was and I have watched Coco carry the same tiredness in press rooms since she was a child. She is never once complained about it publicly, not one time, and I have looked every version of that question, and there have been hundreds, gets answered with grace, with warmth about me, with a deflection back to her own work. And that is a kind of discipline that people do not credit her for because they cannot see in it.

[00:02:26]Handling a question well makes it look like the question was easy.

[00:02:31]Um there is a version of this that people will read as me distancing myself from her, and that is the opposite of what is happening. I would put my name next to hers any day. What I will not do is let my name function as her ceiling.

[00:02:46]And there is a real difference between admiring somebody and being used as the measuring stick that permanently reduces her. Uh the comparison also does not survive 5 minutes of actual analysis, which is the part that annoys me most as somebody who watches tennis for a living now. Our games are not alike. I won matches by taking your time away, serve uh first strike over. Um my whole career was built on removing the possibility of a rally, and if the rally happened, uh I hit through you until something broke. Coco wins by refusing to let the point end. She defends until your best shot comes back one more time than you can psychologically handle.

[00:03:32]Um and then she turns the whole thing around from a position where most players are just trying to survive, and her movement is, you know, the weapon, you know, mine was the first ball. Those are opposite solutions to the same problem, and if you put a tape of my matches next to a tape of hers with the names removed, nobody in this sport would connect them.

[00:03:54]The comparison exists for reasons that have nothing to do with how either of us plays tennis, and everybody in this room knows exactly what those reasons are, and I am not going to spend my afternoon spelling it out for people who already understand her perfectly well. Her forehand is the thing they use against her.

[00:04:14]Uh that is the other pattern I have watched with a fairly cold anger for a few years now. It gets discussed as a flaw permanently as though the shot were a character defect rather than a technical variable. Every player alive has a shot that needs work. Mine did.

[00:04:32]Everyone's does. Nobody spent a decade describing another woman's second serve as her defining feature.

[00:04:40]What actually happened is that she rebuilt a Grand Slam winning forehand in public under a microscope while continuing to compete at the top of the sport. And I do not think most people understand how close to impossible that is. You cannot rebuild a stroke and win at the same time.

[00:05:01]Uh the rebuilt version is worse before it is better, and that is just how motor learning works. And every week it is worse. You lose matches you should win and read 3,000 comments explaining that you were always overrated. Um she did it anyway. She kept the reconstruction going through losses that would have made most players quietly revert to the old technique.

[00:05:25]That decision, the willingness to be worse in public in order to be better later, is the single most impressive thing I have seen from a young player in 10 years, and it never gets mentioned because the story people prefer is that she has a weak forehand and a famous predecessor.

[00:05:45]Wimbledon this year is where all of this became impossible for me to keep quiet about. She had not won a match on grass in two years, not one. That surface had been telling her no for her entire career while she collected majors everywhere else. And this summer she made the semi-final and every single match on the way there went three sets, five of them, three of them from a set down, five consecutive matches at a Grand Slam where she had to spend everything and then find more.

[00:06:19]Then in the semi-final she was one point from the final, match point on her on her serve, a forehand volley into an open court. She missed it. Karolina hit an extraordinary shot on the following point and won the match. And the internet did what the internet does. And by the time I woke up the word being used everywhere was choke. That word is a lie and I'm going to be very direct about it because I have missed shots like that one. Everybody who has ever competed has missed shots like that one.

[00:06:54]I have missed easier balls than that with more on the line. And so has every champion in the history of the sport.

[00:07:01]And the difference is that when I missed them people said Serena had an off day.

[00:07:07]And when she misses one people say something about her character.

[00:07:12]A choke is a collapse. A choke is a player who cannot find the court, whose arm stops working, who loses six straight games because the moment has swallowed her. She lost one point. She missed one volley in a three-hour match on a day when she was playing her fifth consecutive three-set match in eight days in 90-degree heat. The tiebreak went 12 to 10. Her opponent, who has come back from an injury that nearly ended her, hit a forehand lob on the line at nine all with her entire career on the shot. That is not a choke.

[00:07:51]That is two people at the absolute limit of what human beings can do with a tennis racket. Um and one of them was slightly braver on one point. And the comparison to me makes all of that worse. And here is the mechanism because I do not think people see it. So, when you are permanently measured against somebody who won 23, then every single thing you do is failure by arithmetic. Two Grand Slams is not two Grand Slams anymore. It is 21 short. A semi-final is not a career best result on a surface that has resisted you for years. It is not the final. The comparison converts every genuine achievement into a shortfall automatically forever. There is no version of her career where the comparison lets her win. And I do not want my name doing that to her. Uh that is really the whole reason I am sitting here.

[00:08:51]Uh my career is finished being written and I am at peace with all of it and I have exactly no need for a young woman's results to be filtered through mine so that mine keep looking impressive. By contrast, whatever I did is already done. It does not require her to fall short. The thing I would want people to understand about her, if they could only keep one, is the mental architecture.

[00:09:18]She has been famous since she was 15, 15. She learned to be a professional athlete and a public figure and an adult simultaneously in front of everybody with every mistake preserved permanently. And she has come through that with her sense of who she is completely intact.

[00:09:40]I got to make my worst mistakes before the internet remembered everything. She has not had that. There is not a single unphotographed year in her adult life.

[00:09:51]That she is not damaged by it is remarkable. That she is thoughtful and generous and still willing to be publicly ambitious after growing up inside that machine is to me more impressive than the two trophies.

[00:10:06]Watch what she does with her platform, too, because it tells you who she actually is more than any match does.

[00:10:12]She has spoken up about things that carry genuine professional cost at all just when most players are being coached to say uh nothing that could complicate a sponsorship. Nobody made her do that.

[00:10:27]Uh there is no version of a tennis career where taking public positions is the easy option, and she has done it repeatedly in a sport that has historically preferred its women quiet and grateful.

[00:10:40]Um I did some of that, too, later once I was established enough to survive it.

[00:10:45]She started before she had that protection. So, that is not a comparison. That is a straightforward observation about courage. And it is the reason I get genuinely irritated when people discuss her as though she were a promising junior with a famous shadow rather than one of the more serious people in this sport. She loses well, too, and I mean that as the highest compliment available in this sport. Um I have watched her come off court after defeats that should flatten a person and turn up at the next tournament 4 days later playing better, treating the loss as information rather than injury. That is rare, and it cannot be coached. Most players carry a bad loss for weeks.

[00:11:32]She metabolizes it. A player who converts every defeat into improvement never actually goes backwards. And a player who never goes backwards will eventually arrive everywhere she is trying to go. So, the honest prediction, and people can hold me to it, she is going to win Wimbledon. Not because she is owed it. This sport owes nobody anything, and it taught me that repeatedly. Because the only thing standing between her and that title was grass. And this summer, she solved grass five three-set matches deep and got to within a single volley of the final.

[00:12:08]The problem is already solved. The result is a formality that has not happened yet. And when it does, I would like the coverage to manage it without my name in the first paragraph. Coco, if you ever read this, you do not owe me a comparison, and you never did. You are not carrying my torch. You lit your own a long time ago, and you have been carrying it since you were 15, while people kept insisting it was mine.

[00:12:37]Everything you have built is yours. The two majors, the the forehand you rebuilt in front of the whole world, the fortnight on grass where you refused to lose easily even once. Nobody handed you any of it, and nobody can take it back.

[00:12:53]Um the next generation is not going to be compared to me. They're going to be compared to you. Um that transfer has already happened, and most people have not noticed yet. And the day the sport catches up is the day this ridiculous question finally stops being asked. Stop comparing her to me. She has been better than the comparison for years.