Serena Williams, Roberta Vinci, the U.S. Open and the tennis upset of the century

FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — It is the tennis match that no one wants to talk about. Not Serena Williams, the greatest tennis player of the modern era, who has metamorphosed into a titan of business. Not Patrick Mouratoglou, her longtime coach, who likes to talk about anything — especially if it involves tennis and his time with her.

Williams, 43, accomplished everything in her tennis career. She won 23 Grand Slam singles titles and an Olympic gold medal, with 73 singles titles in all. She spent more than 300 weeks as world No. 1, including 186 in a row.

Everything, but for the thing that awaited her a decade ago, in September 2015. She arrived in New York for the U.S. Open on the doorstep of the sport’s crown jewel: the Calendar Grand Slam of winning all four major titles in a single year. She had held all four twice before, including during that summer of 2015, when she had become a force of nature at 33 despite a patchwork of injuries, but now she was seven wins away from just about the only thing another woman had done that she had not. Steffi Graf, who was finishing her career as Williams was starting hers, did it in 1988, adding an Olympic singles gold medal to make it a Golden Slam.

As Williams moved through the draw, she won her first five matches for the loss of just two sets. She secured a win over her sister, Venus, as nervy as those matches ever were. Some of her other rivals fell away in her wake, including two-time Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitová, who at the time was the last woman not named Serena Williams to win a Grand Slam. By the time Williams took the court for her semifinal, world No. 2 Simona Halep had fallen to Flavia Pennetta, the No. 26 seed.

For Williams, it was time to make quick work of another Italian, Roberta Vinci. She was a year younger than Williams, moving toward the back end of a solid career but winless in four tries against her opponent. She had no expectation of getting a favorable result; she had won five Grand Slam doubles titles, but was in the 40s of the WTA Tour rankings.

Vinci, 42, is just about the only person directly involved who does want to talk about this verboten match. She works for Italy’s vaunted tennis federation from her base in Milan, helping to develop younger players. She tried her hand at padel for a little while, and occasionally does television commentary.

“Up until that point, it had been a good career, some great matches, some sweet days in Fed Cup and, definitely, more trophies in doubles than in singles,” Vinci wrote in an email.

Vinci was everything Williams was not. She built her game around touch rather than power. She could wander streets outside Italy in reasonable anonymity, whereas Williams was one of the world’s most famous athletes, a true first-namer.

Playing Williams had always been “complicated” for her, she said. So much power and pace. So little time to think. If Williams was on, she was complicated for everyone, and the best thing to do was probably just to stay out of her way to avoid injury.

But Vinci’s modest career record hid an aptitude for big matches that meant something to her, even though none of them had loomed so large in the tennis zeitgeist as this one. She played 15 singles finals in her career and won 10, including five of the six that went to three sets. In a Grand Slam career defined by first-week exits, she had reached two quarterfinals in New York.

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Vinci felt that she had a “special bond” with the city. A lot of players find the city and the U.S. Open too hectic and crowded. It feels like a hard place to do their job, with something like a two-hour commute back and forth and all the hubbub of Manhattan. Vinci liked all of it, the atmosphere of the city, the energy of Flushing Meadows. Most of all, and unlike a lot of Italians reared on red clay, she loved the fast American hard courts and how they let her marionette baseliners into disarray.

While Williams arrived in pursuit of history, Vinci did so on the back of making the quarterfinals at the Canadian Open and winning four matches in New Haven, Ct. just ahead of the U.S. Open. She felt fit. Two of her first three matches went to three sets, but she prevailed and then she caught a break. Eugenie Bouchard, the world No. 25 and a Wimbledon finalist, withdrew ahead of their fourth-round match. A quarterfinal win over the unseeded Kristina Mladenovic of France set up her semifinal with Williams.

The match got pushed back a day, because of rain. This was before Arthur Ashe Stadium had a roof, with replays of U.S. Open classics, like Jimmy Connors’ 1991 thriller with Aaron Krickstein, beamed up during weather delays. Vinci was unbothered by it all. She remembers feeling calm, both on the day that never was and on the morning of the match. Williams was the best. She was going for the Calendar Slam. Vinci? She had nothing to lose.

In her pre-match chats with her coach, they spoke little of Williams and her records and what was on the line. What was the point? There was no real way to combat her, other than for Vinci to be the best version of herself and hope it would be good enough. Even that was difficult.

“I always tried to have a positive attitude throughout the match, but of course at some point I thought it was quite impossible to beat her,” she said.

Through the first set, it was, as Williams cruised to a 6-2 lead, feasting on Vinci’s off-speed balls as she so often did with underpowered players. Vinci said that while they were sitting down between sets, she didn’t waste time worrying about the score.

“I just thought about continuing to fight and always giving my best,” she said. “I felt calm and relaxed, even though the match was an uphill path.”

The scoreboard was against Vinci, but Williams had a much heavier pressure on her shoulders. The meaning of an otherwise routine semifinal win, something she had done on just under half her appearances at majors, appeared to weigh on her. Her demeanor was not that of a legendary champion. She looked consumed by the occasion.  She pushed into the court on Vinci’s vulnerable second serve, trying to dispatch it. But she couldn’t do it with the same efficiency she had in the first set.

As Williams faltered, too often stuck between the service line and the baseline and struggling to move in and out of shots, Vinci hung in and attacked. Suddenly, she was floating all across the court, coming in to finish points at the net, ending one long back-and-forth, court-crossing exchange with a punch of the ball into the blue space.

On the changeover between sets, Williams sat on her chair and snapped her racket on the ground. Losing a set was careless. That was fatal.

“When she broke her racket, I realized that I was causing Serena some concern and nervousness,” Vinci said. “That was probably a first turning point of the match.”

Still, Williams had been money in three-set matches in Grand Slams during the previous year. Eleven had gone the distance and she had won them all. Vinci had that three-set record of her own from finals, but Williams was a new proposition. She had won three-setters when she was by rights too sick to play.

She duly broke Vinci at her first chance to get a 2-0 lead, but quickly gave the break back.

And then, with Williams serving at 3-3, Vinci saved a game point by covering every inch of the court, out-hustling and out-shooting Williams. The great champion flicked a forehand pass that arced away from Vinci’s reach, but she stuck a forehand volley short in the court. After the second bounce, she looked up at the crowd and called for cheers with her arms, asking for some recognition in this encounter with a protagonist of one.

“What about me???!!!”

“I actually started to believe it in the middle of the third set, when every game was quite competitive and she was always cheering herself on,” Vinci said. “She was feeling the match and all the tension of the moment.”

A couple of games earlier, with 90 minutes on the clock, Vinci had lobbed an onrushing Williams and drawn a short ball to drive down into the back fence. On the next point, Williams picked up a ball and banged a first serve down the T that Vinci could only drag into the net. Williams celebrated as if she had saved three championship points in the match she wanted to play after this one, trying to will the energy back into her game and her body.

From her moment of celebration, Vinci let her touch game take over, especially her slice backhand, which stayed low, preventing Williams from driving it back over the net. As Williams faded out even further, paralyzed both by a number of injuries that would later see her end her season early and by the magnitude of what was happening, Vinci thrived.

“These ‘old time’ shots made the difference against other power players,” Vinci said. On this day, they made the difference against the most powerful one of all.

When Williams sent a forehand long, she had the break. She pumped her fist and headed for the finish line. Williams walked to the side with her eyes staring at the ground. On match point, Vinci moved Williams from one corner to the other then moved in for a final half-volley drop shot into the open court.

That was it. Vinci had beaten Williams and history, 2-6, 6-4, 6-4, in the biggest upset in Grand Slam history, considering what was at stake.

“Today is my day, sorry guys,” she told the crowd.

The match is never far from Vinci’s mind. “An epic,” she called it. It often appears on Supertennis, the Italian network, especially during the U.S. Open, and Vinci invariably rewatches it.

“It is always special to relive all those emotions,” said Vinci of the match that everyone wants to talk about, now as they did then. Except one person.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to Serena after the match.”