Andy Roddick and Serena Williams will be playing in the mixed doubles of the 2012 Australian Open, scheduled to start this month.
The younger of the Williams sisters posted on her Twitter page saying that she would indeed be partnering her friend, Andy Roddick in the upcoming Grand Slam event. They both announced last year that they would be practicing together for the 2012 London Olympics.
Serena hasn’t taken part in the mixed doubles event since 2008, when she played with Mardy Fish in the Hopman Cup. She won the Australian Open a total of five times and has won 13 Grand Slams in total, which make her an enviable partner and a formidable opponent. She used to play extensively in mixed doubles events, early in her career, with great success. She won the 1998 US Open and the Wimbledon playing with Max Mirnyi of Belarus.
Andy Roddick has been out of the mixed doubles scene for even longer than his partner. The last mixed doubles event he played in was in 2001 in Wimbledon. He has never played in a mixed doubles event outside of a Grand Slam tournament, so it will be interesting to watch him play the mixed doubles event.
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Women’s tennis has evolved a lot over the last few decades with grace and elegance being replaced by power tennis of hard backhands, volleys and a customary shriek to go with it and the one woman player most responsible for bringing this power tennis into the game is Serena Williams. Having been ranked as the top women tennis player in the world on five different occasions and with a bucket load of Grand Slam titles to her name, Williams is by far in a league of her own when it comes to the greatest women tennis players in the world of all time and has certain legends such as Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Chris Evert for company.
Serena and her sister Venus were groomed to be the best in the world of tennis by their father from a very young age and that effort paid off with both of them becoming world number 1 at some point or the other. Serena Williams has 27 major titles to her name, 13 of them being Grand Slam singles, 12 doubles titles, most of them won with Venus as her partner and also 2 mixed doubles titles as well. Williams’ skill lies in the simple fact that she is a very good baseline player and rarely ventures out of that comfort zone of hers, serving aces as if they were a piece of cake and bombarding her opponents with fierce ground stroke back hands and her powerful forehands accompanied by a strong shriek has been recorded as the second most powerful only behind Maria Sharapova.
The journey of Serena Williams as a professional tennis player began way back in the year 1995 when she was just 13 years old, participating in the Bell Challenge that was held in Quebec City. But in 1997, she began her steady climb to the top of the tennis world with scalps such as Monica Seles, Mary Pierce. All throughout the years 1999 to 2001, she fought a hard battle to reach the pinnacle of the tennis world that she had dreamed of doing and by the end of 2001; she had consolidated her position in the top 10 with a number of victories in singles tournaments and over opponents ranked higher than her, thereby earning more WTA ranking points.
During the 2002-2003 seasons, Serena Williams captured what is now known as the Serena-Slam, winning all the four major events within a year, thus becoming the only current player and only the fifth women player in the history of tennis to hold all the four major titles at one time. However, since the end of the 2006 season, injuries have constantly plagued the career of the younger Williams’ sister and for the first time in many years, she dropped out of the top 100 in 2010. But she made a comeback at Wimbledon in 2011 and did justice to her legendary status in the game despite losing in the early rounds. Williams has made a career for herself from scratch and won all that there is to be won and she is definitely on her way to greatness and immortality in the tennis world.
January 26, 2012 9:52 am | 