NEW YORK -- Serena Williams has faced plenty of distractions in this run-up to the US Open. On Monday at Flushing Meadows, she faced an unexpected one when she found herself practicing on a court next to the one occupied by her counterpart in overwhelming awesomeness, Roger Federer.
It wasn't that the fans clustered in the newly constructed and wildly popular viewing galleries at the practice courts were showering all their attention on Federer, either.
On the contrary, It's was more that Williams herself couldn't keep her eyes from drifting over to his court, watching.
"Yeah, it was [distracting], because I'm always looking over," she said in her postmatch news conference, after she won her first-round match again Vitalia Diatchenko, 6-0, 2-0 (ret.) in 30 minutes. "What is he doing?"
She paused and began to parody her own actions and thoughts: "[I was] giving him the side eye. 'OK, maybe I should do that. I should do that.' Oh, he's taking a break now. OK, cool.'"
Williams smiled and went on: "No, it's super distracting. I totally look at him. I mean -- he's Roger.
"Like watching his returns: 'OK, so he is moving forward on that. Interesting.'"
It isn't just Federer's excellence that Williams finds so mesmerizing, either. The 17-time Grand Slam singles champion also shares another quality with his female counterpart, who has even more of those precious Grand Slam titles (21). Both of them are contemporary, with-it figures, albeit in different ways. Yet both of them are decidedly old-school when it comes to their preferences in tennis.
While Williams has had a few memorable lapses of temper in her career, she has largely been an excellent, even-tempered sport. Like Federer, she doesn't overly rely on Hawkeye, the electronic line-calling system she helped bring into being -- after the 2004 US Open in which she was conspicuously victimized by bad calls.
Williams also has no use for the on-court coaching rule that the WTA has been using for some years now. She volunteered that mid-match interviews of the kind Coco Vandeweghe granted Monday will be of great interest to some viewers, and some players might like doing them. But she clings to her romance of tennis as the sport of lone-wolf problem-solvers. The last refuge of the great individualist athlete.
"That's kind of the integrity of tennis when you think about it," she said. "It's just you on the court. It's not a reporter. It's not a coach. It's just you in that moment. I kind of love that. It's the only sport where you have that."
She describes herself as a "vintage" player, someone old-school. But how did she become so fiercely old-school, given her interests and tastes?
"That's a good question," she said. "I think maybe it just comes from just growing up and just watching so much tennis, just enjoying, like, you know, Steffi [Graf] and Monica [Seles] -- that era where it was just them."
She added, "They were such mental players. You know, just looking at that and just being so influenced by that. Thinking one day I'm going to be there. I never thought, 'One day I'm going to be there with my coach' or with anything else -- although I think Hawkeye is a great thing."
Federer would understand. But maybe not the Hawkeye part.