Well, I'm appalled, wink-wink.
A professional athlete (one on the downslope of her career, no less) admitting she doesn't really like the thing that made her famous, and also rich? What a stunning admission! What an astounding lack of appreciation for all those hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of work, those millions upon millions of forehands, the sweat and the boredom and, like the cherry on top of the sundae, painful and chronic injury besides!
Who wouldn't want that?
I'll tell you who: More people than you think.
I listen to Serena Williams, see, and I hear echoes of just about every hockey enforcer who ever laced on a pair of skates, because just about every one of them hates what he has to do to play the game he loves at the top level. I hear Andre Agassi, who, like Serena, came to see his gift for tennis as something of a curse as well. I hear John McEnroe, whose disdain for practice was as legendary as his wizardry with a racket ... and Andrea Jaeger, a child prodigy who eventually walked away from the tennis life to pursue a higher calling .... and Jennifer Capriati, who was anointed as the prodigy of them all at 13, and by 17 was hanging out with dopers in a textbook example of teenage rebellion, and a yearning for something like a normal existence.
Not by accident are all of those people tennis players, although there any number of sports out there that grab kids early and, if the kids are both lucky and cursed, sets them on a path that steals their childhood in exchange for fame and fortune for which they may or may not be suited.
And so I'm not shocked at all when Serena says she doesn't really love tennis, or athletic pursuits in general. I'm sure it's true. I'm sure it's true of more fortune-kissed athletes than we'll ever know, pushed by either their own talent or monster stage parents (paging Mary Pierce .... Todd Marinovich ..... Sean O'Hair .... on and on) into a life for which they never asked but for which they were uniquely suited.
Serena doesn't love tennis, despite her 13 Grand Slam titles? Despite her stratospheric tax bracket?
Not shocked by that. Not shocked by that at all.
