LONDON -- We're on the cusp of something new in women's tennis: the era of the Grand Slam-winning supermom.
When she isn't striking a bare-bellied pose for the cover of Vanity Fair, Serena Williams is currently on leave from the tour, prepping for the birth of her first child.
At Wimbledon, meanwhile, we've just witnessed the return of two-time Slam titlist Victoria Azarenka, who in the spring of 2016 seemed poised to challenge Serena for world supremacy before her own pregnancy led her to a yearlong departure from the pro tour. After a rocky, rough-hewn first set Monday evening at the All England Club, Azarenka swept out the rust to beat American upstart CiCi Bellis by a score of 3-6, 6-2, 6-1. Should she continue to unspool the confident power she flashed in the last two sets of that first-round match, this could be quite a fortnight for the 27-year-old Belarusian.
No matter what happens in London now, this much is sure: Never in its modern history has tennis seen two of its top players leave the game back-to-back for motherhood. And rarely have new moms made the kind of full-bore tennis comeback that Azarenka commenced Monday and Williams is expected to begin next year. A sign of things to come? Hopefully. For most women, in most walks of life, gone are the days when a baby means either the end of a career or a life full of truncated professional expectations. Now it's all about leaning in, finding a way to balance child and life while also excelling at work.
Tennis, it's about time.
"I just think that it's not as scary as people think sometimes," Azarenka told reporters after Monday's victory. "It's a conscious decision that you have to make to give yourself that break and be able to work hard and start really, physically, a little bit from zero. But I do believe that if you're very passionate about what you do and what you love to do, that you can do that."
The top men's players have often had families as their careers wound forward. Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe are two from days gone by. These days, Novak Djokovic has a toddler son, and his wife is expecting. Roger Federer has two sets of twins. The men play, never really taking any significant time off; their wives and support teams cocoon the children with care. But for the women, the physical and emotional demands of motherhood, along with the months out of competition while pregnant, have almost always been too much of a hurdle to overcome.
"The guys have luxury to never stop their career, and for girls, it's tougher, but I think it's possible," Azarenka said. "Even before me, we had players do this, like Kim Clijsters and a lot of girls who are maybe less ranked, so their story isn't as big. One of my biggest inspirations was [Olympic gold medal-winning beach volleyball player] Kerri Walsh, who came back after three kids and still playing for gold.
"Nothing is impossible," she added with a smile. "For women, that's definitely true."
With just a few exceptions, top professional players have shied from becoming mothers if they wanted to keep playing. That was certainly the case in Chris Evert's day. "It's a daunting and intimidating scenario, thinking of taking a year off to have a child," said Evert, now an analyst for ESPN.
As it happened, Evert was upset in the 1980 Wimbledon final by Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who had a 3-year-old daughter at the time. That win made Goolagong Cawley one of the few to return to the game's peak as a mother. Along with Margaret Court, she and Clijsters are the only players in the post-1968, pro-tennis era to win Grand Slams after giving birth.
Azarenka and Williams make Evert marvel. You can see it in her eyes as she speaks of them. When she had her first child -- a son, Alex -- she wasn't far removed from retirement. She told me that she had been entertaining the notion of returning to play a couple of months of World Team Tennis.
"But then, the moment I laid eyes on my son, everything went out the window. All of my emotions, I just wanted to be with him." Suddenly, she couldn't imagine going back to the grind -- not even for a two-month stint that feels a lot more free and easy than the pro tour.
But Azarenka didn't return to work just because she could. She wants more Slams. "I don't want to come back and play just to have fun," she said in the days leading to her first Grand Slam appearance since the 2016 French Open. "I want to come back and make sure I get to the top level."
When Azarenka found out last summer that she and her boyfriend were to become parents, she didn't give retirement a glance. This even though she could have walked away and led a fine and charmed life, kid in tow, with $28 million in career prize money and two Australian Open titles in the bank. Instead, she simply skipped Wimbledon and the rest of the tour calendar. She gave birth to a boy, Leo, last December in Los Angeles. For a while, she returned with Leo to her native Minsk and, with the help of a new coach, set about training as hard as ever for her comeback.
Azarenka emerged from struggling Belarus, which has almost no history of producing top tennis players, to become world No. 1 in 2012. The kind of moxie needed to do that is telling. She has never backed down, never really let her focus or intensity waver. Williams will tell you that. The American owns an 18-4 head-to-head advantage against Azarenka, but many of those matches have been toe-to-toe brawls that could have gone either way.
Talking about the tests that come with raising an infant while reaching for the top of a sport that requires seemingly ceaseless global travel, Azarenka is typically forthright.
"It's like a 180 in your mentality, your daily activities," she said, speaking to the assembled press before the tournament. "It's not about me anymore, which in tennis is a little bit tricky. Being in an individual sport, you have to be a little more selfish. So it's a little bit of a mind trick that I have to do to feel OK with taking some time for myself, not feeling guilty that I don't spend my every free second with my son.
"But it also gives me a real good balance when I am done with my practice or my matches. I'm able to shut off from tennis, just lose myself with my son, which was actually a pretty hard thing to do before."
Yes, she has the benefit of a supportive boyfriend, former college hockey player and golf pro Bill McKeague. Yes, her mother -- Ala, on the mend after a difficult battle with cancer -- is a steady presence. There's usually a nanny in tow. But as is so often the case in early motherhood, keeping the right kind of day-to-day equilibrium and staying healthy are always tough. Azarenka came down with the chicken pox not long before her first tournament back, a Spanish grass-court event in which she lost badly in her second match. One wonders whether the hard demands of motherhood might have briefly left her more susceptible than usual to illness.
Still, Azarenka quickly bounced back from the illness, entering Wimbledon weeks ahead of the comeback schedule that had her returning during the North American hardcourt swing. She claimed that she was only getting better as a player: smarter, craftier, backed by a new coach, Michael Joyce, the former journeyman pro who was long a mainstay in Maria Sharapova's camp. After months of grinding practice and gym work, she looks light and lean. "Fitter than ever," Azarenka pronounced herself before adding that the real art is translating out-of-competition training to tournament matches.
"I think I'm on the right path to play to bringing all those components together," she said. "And try to play better than I ever was before."
Evert knows this generation is changing the conversation, on and off the court.
"Working moms are totally normal [now]," she said. "There are so many role models all around. Moms don't give it a second thought, and I can see that taking place on the tour more in the future. If Serena and Victoria make it back and are successful, they could be real role models for that whole way of life. Women are playing better and better into their mid-30s now, which makes the window for having a child after the tour slim. So, these days, why not?"
Why not, indeed.
Let the supermom era in tennis begin.