Anett Kontaveit walked out of the players’ tunnel first, with barely a notice from the audience in Arthur Ashe Stadium, which was half full at the time. She made a small waving gesture, to no one in particular, and then went to her chair to prepare for her role as the villain in the biggest tennis spectacle of her life: the Serena Williams U.S. Open.
As Williams made her own appearance underneath thunderous applause just moments later, Kontaveit never looked up or glanced over. She just continued to put on her wrist bands, drink water and select her first racket.
She got up, walked onto the court first, knowing that for the vast majority of people in the building, she was there only to be the foil for the queen of tennis, there to lose.
“It was her moment,” Kontaveit said. “I was trying to do my own thing. Of course, this is totally about her and I was very aware of that.”
In the face of a tidal wave of support for Williams, Kontaveit played her role as the antihero as if fashioned from a script, playing well enough to raise the drama, but not well enough to win. Williams took the match, 7-6 (4), 2-6, 6-2, to advance to the third round, eliminating the worthy Estonian challenger and No. 2 seed from the U.S. Open.
But Kontaveit did not go out without conjuring some of the best tennis from Williams in years. She made some brilliant shots and penetrating serves, but Williams was better on the biggest points, to the delight of 29,959 spectators, a record crowd for a U.S. Open night session.
In team sports, athletes regularly encounter hostile environments of 30,000 fans or more. But standing alone in front of all that passion, energy and desire is something different, and Kontaveit informally awarded the audience an assist in the outcome.
“It was really hard,” Kontaveit said of the crowd, adding, “I knew it was coming. I guess you can’t learn from anyone else’s mistakes. Feeling it, it was something I never experienced before.”
The fans not only cheered when Williams won a point; they yelled encouragement to their heroine throughout the match, shouting, “We love you, Serena,” and “Come on, Serena,” including at critical moments on Kontaveit’s service toss, which is against audience decorum. Several times the chair umpire had to take the fans to task and ask for quiet as Kontaveit waited.
“They were not rooting against me,” Kontaveit said. “They just wanted Serena to win so bad. I don’t think it’s a personal attack against me or anything. It’s fair. She deserves this.”
When the match was over and the players had shaken hands at the net, Kontaveit quickly gathered up her rackets and within moments was back in the locker room, sorting out her feelings after playing one of her best matches of the summer, only to lose to a crowd favorite.
Kontaveit knew what was coming well beforehand. She understood she would be facing a substantial onslaught of support in favor of her opponent, and claimed it would relieve her of all expectations and pressure.
The precedent had been set on Monday during Williams’s declarative first-round straight-sets win over Danka Kovinic of Montenegro. The crowd for that match was so loud, and in such a celebratory mood, that Kovinic said she could not hear the ball coming off the strings of the rackets, an important signifier of how the ball might move after it lands.
Kovinic, ranked No. 80, spoke of actually being swept up in the moment herself, dazzled by the celebrities in attendance that night. For Kontaveit, it was more about the competition, and she was not as carefree afterward.
Although she has earned the No. 2 ranking, she has had a difficult summer, losing three of her last four matches on hardcourts entering the U.S. Open. She said she contracted Covid-19 in April and had difficulty regaining her strength. Her one singles title this year came in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February, but she also made it to the finals in Doha, Qatar, later that month.
Kontaveit reached the fourth round of the U.S. Open in her first try in 2015, but since then has not been immune to getting knocked out in the first or second round of a major. It has now happened 16 times in the 27 majors she has entered since that run. Her best result at a major is reaching the quarterfinal stage at the 2020 Australian Open, where she lost to Simona Halep.
She does have some experience of going deep into the tournament at the U.S. Open. As a junior in 2012 she reached the final, losing to Samantha Crawford.
This year, players have commented that the courts at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center are faster than normal, a factor that would tend to enhance the playing style of both Williams and Kontaveit, since each relies on power. Kontaveit indicated she was all for it.
After an early exit from the Western and Southern Open outside Cincinnati, she arrived early in New York and practiced on the same courts. The difference was that then, there was virtually no one in the stadium watching. On Wednesday, the entire tennis world was tuned in.
As Kontaveit said on Monday, “I’m not sure if I’ll ever experience something like this again.”
The next player to experience it will be Ajla Tomljanovic, from Australia, who beat Evgeniya Rodina in three sets on Court 7 at roughly the same time that Williams and Kontaveit were playing. Even from over there, Tomljanovic could hear the noise pulsating from Ashe, the same din that she will be facing in person on Friday night.
“I’m like, Court 7 isn’t that close,” Tomljanovic said. “I kept thinking, ‘Oh, my God, that’s annoying me and I’m not even playing against her.’”
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