Twenty-year-old Naomi Osaka won her first Grand Slam title,
defeating her idol, Serena Williams, in a bizarre and memorable U.S.
Open final that descended into spectacle when Williams angrily protested
several penalties she was issued.
Osaka was in firm control of
the match—a generational showdown between an emerging star and perhaps
the game’s greatest champion—when Williams spiraled into a series of
confrontations with the match’s umpire.
Sports Perspective
At U.S. Open, power of Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka is overshadowed by an umpire’s power play
Naomi Osaka became Japan’s
first Grand Slam singles champion after she defeated Serena Williams in a
controversial U.S. Open final on Sept. 8.
(Reuters)
Chair
umpire Carlos Ramos managed to rob not one but two players in the
women’s U.S. Open final. Nobody has ever seen anything like it: An
umpire so wrecked a big occasion that both players, Naomi Osaka and
Serena Williams alike, wound up distraught with tears streaming down
their faces during the trophy presentation and an incensed crowd
screamed boos at the court. Ramos took what began as a minor infraction
and turned it into one of the nastiest and most emotional controversies
in the history of tennis, all because he couldn’t take a woman speaking
sharply to him.
Williams abused her racket, but
Ramos did something far uglier: He abused his authority. Champions get
heated — it’s their nature to burn. All good umpires in every sport
understand that the heart of their job is to help temper the moment, to
turn the dial down, not up, and to be quiet stewards of the event rather
than to let their own temper play a role in determining the outcome.
Instead, Ramos made himself the chief player in the women’s final. He
marred Osaka’s first Grand Slam title and one of Williams’s last bids
for all-time greatness. Over what? A tone of voice. Male players have
sworn and cursed at the top of their lungs, hurled and blasted their
equipment into shards, and never been penalized as Williams was in the
second set of the U.S. Open final.
“I
just feel like the fact that I have to go through this is just an
example for the next person that has emotions and that want to express
themselves and wants to be a strong woman,” she said afterward.
It
was pure pettiness from Ramos that started the ugly cascade in the
first place, when he issued a warning over “coaching,” as if a signal
from Patrick Mouratoglou in the grandstand has ever been the difference
in a Serena Williams match. It was a technicality that could be called
on any player in any match on any occasion and ludicrous in view of the
power-on-power match that was taking place on the court between Williams
and the 20-year-old Osaka. It was one more added stressor for Williams,
still trying to come back from her maternity leave and fighting to
regain her fitness and resume her pursuit of Margaret Court’s record of
24 Grand Slam singles titles. “I don’t cheat,” she told Ramos hotly.
When
Williams, still seething, busted her racket over losing a crucial game,
Ramos docked her a point. Breaking equipment is a violation, and
because Ramos already had hit her with the coaching violation, it was a
second offense and so ratcheted up the penalty.
Serena
Williams of the USA argues with chair umpire Carlos Ramos during the
U.S. Open final Saturday night. (Robert Deutsch/Usa Today Sports)
The
controversy should have ended there. At that moment, it was up to Ramos
to de-escalate the situation, to stop inserting himself into the match
and to let things play out on the court. In front of him were two
players in a sweltering state, who were giving their everything, while
he sat at a lordly height above them. Below him, Williams vented, “You
stole a point from me. You’re a thief.”
There
was absolutely nothing worthy of penalizing in the statement. It was
pure vapor release. She said it in a tone of wrath, but it was
compressed and controlled. All Ramos had to do was to continue to sit
coolly above it, and Williams would have channeled herself back into the
match. But he couldn’t take it. He wasn’t going to let a woman talk to
him that way. A man, sure. Ramos has put up with worse from a man. At
the French Open in 2017, Ramos leveled Rafael Nadal with a ticky-tacky
penalty over a time delay, and Nadal told him he would see to it that
Ramos never refereed one of his matches again.
But
he wasn’t going to take it from a woman pointing a finger at him and
speaking in a tone of aggression. So he gave Williams that third
violation for “verbal abuse” and a whole game penalty, and now it was
5-3, and we will never know whether young Osaka really won the 2018 U.S.
Open or had it handed to her by a man who was going to make Serena
Williams feel his power. It was an offense far worse than any that
Williams committed. Chris Evert spoke for the entire crowd and
television audience when she said, “I’ve been in tennis a long time, and
I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Competitive
rage has long been Williams’s fuel, and it’s a situational personality.
The whole world knows that about her, and so does Ramos. She has had
instances where she ranted and deserved to be disciplined, but she has
outlived all that. She has become a player of directed passion, done the
admirable work of learning self-command and grown into one of the more
courteous and generous champions in the game. If you doubted that, all
you had to do was watch how she got a hold of herself once the match was
over and how hard she tried to make it about Osaka.
Williams
understood that she was the only person in the stadium who had the
power to make that incensed crowd stop booing. And she did it
beautifully. “Let’s make this the best moment we can,” she said.
The
tumultuous emotions at the end of the match were complex and deep.
Osaka didn’t want to be given anything and wept over the spoil. Williams
was sickened by what had been taken from her and also palpably ill over
her part in depriving a great new young player of her moment. The crowd
was livid on behalf of both.
Ramos had rescued
his ego and, in the act, taken something from Williams and Osaka that
they can never get back. Perhaps the most important job of all for an
umpire is to respect the ephemeral nature of the competitors and the
contest. Osaka can never, ever recover this moment. It’s gone. Williams
can never, ever recover this night. It’s gone. And so Williams was
entirely right in calling him a “thief.”
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