Serena Williams is arguably the best woman to ever play professional tennis and she is a role model for many of the game’s current top players.
The younger of the two Williams sisters won 23 Grand Slam titles in singles competition and a further 14 playing doubles with her sister, Venus.
Simona Halep believes tennis has changed since Williams stopped playing and as far as the women’s game goes, Serena was always a box office viewing.
Given the powerful nature of her ability, much was often made over how Williams would get on if she was actually a player on the ATP Tour instead of the WTA.
Williams did enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition game with Roger Federer during her career, playing a Hopman Cup mixed doubles game and losing alongside Frances Tiafoe.
Williams herself made an intriguing claim when discussing how she would perform if she ever played against Andy Murray.
What Serena Williams said the score would be if she ever played Andy Murray
Williams was under no illusions about how she would perform against Murray had she ever been given the chance to come up against the Great Britain star.
She told The Letterman Show, as per Vox: “If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes.
“The men are a lot faster, they serve harder, they hit harder… it’s a completely different game.”
Williams was probably being modest and given her power perhaps she might hold her own against some of the men who are lower down the rankings.
However, the whole discussion is pretty pointless given that it’s completely theoretical and there will never be a situation where a female plays singles action against men.
Controversial John McEnroe comment about Serena Williams
As a player, McEnroe was never backwards in coming forwards and he’s taken that mantra into his role as a pundit across a number of different platforms.
When hearing that Lulu-Garcia Navarro had called Williams the best player in the world, he took offence to that and believed she should be called the best female player in the world instead.
The conversation from Vox went as follows:
McEnroe: “Oh! Uh, she’s not, you mean, the player in the world, period?”
Garcia-Navarro: “Yeah, the best tennis player in the world. You know, why say female player?”
McEnroe: “Well, because if she was in, if she played the men’s circuit, she’d be, like, 700 in the world.”
Garcia-Navarro: “You think so?”
McEnroe: “Yeah. That doesn’t mean I don’t think Serena is an incredible player. I do, but the reality of what would happen would be I think something that perhaps it’d be a little higher, perhaps it’d be a little lower. And on a given day, Serena could beat some players. I believe because she’s so incredibly strong mentally that she could overcome some situations where players would choke ‘cause she’s been in it so many times, so many situations at Wimbledon, the US Open, etc. But if she had to just play the circuit — the men’s circuit — that would be an entirely different story.”
McEnroe probably has a point regarding Williams playing on the male tour regardless of how unpopular it proved at the time in 2017.
Williams was a class act but as she rightly says, the men’s game is just different and it’s hard to imagine that she’d have won titles – or come remotely close – had she played against men.
The American is undoubtedly the greatest women in the modern era of female tennis and that is a mantle that nobody will take away from her anytime soon.
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