A queen mother signs off

Serena Williams once won the Australian Open when she was 35 years old and two months pregnant. If the question remained, that answered it.

The question is "Who is the greatest female athlete of all time?"

The subsidiary question ("Who is the greatest female tennis player of all time?") she answered some time ago.

As she announces she is "evolving away from tennis" after the U.S. Open -- Serena-speak for retirement -- she is not only the queen of a domain she and her sister altered forever, she is in a sense its queen mother, too. This is not so much a commentary on her age (40), understand; it's an acknowledgment of how much that altered terrain owes to her. 

When she and Venus showed up from the public courts of Compton two decades and change ago, women's tennis was whiter than the proverbial picket fence.  It was Steffi Graf and Martina Hingis and Monica Seles, the lineal descendants of Chrissie and Martina and Billie Jean. The only woman of color who'd ever made a significant mark in all the game's long history was Althea Gibson, and she'd made that mark 40 years before.

Venus and Serena, two black women from demonstrably plebeian roots, therefore must have seemed like visitors from another planet. Shamefully, they were treated as such on occasion by the country club doyennes who were used to their champions being less ... well, colorful.

But then Venus won Wimbledon five times and Serena won and won and won, and little girls who looked like them began to notice. And two decades later, look at what they've wrought.

Over there on the metaphorical court one is Coco Gauff, an American black woman and 18-year-old prodigy. On courts two and three and four are Madison Keys and Taylor Townsend and Sloane Stephens. On other courts in other places are other young girls of color, none of whom might have picked up a tennis racquet had it not been for Serena Williams.

She is, after all, the greatest of all time, with 23 Grand Slam singles titles and a stretch of unmatched dominance that carried well into her 30s -- another altering of the terrain, because once upon a time the top women's players rarely played much beyond their 30th birthdays, and certainly weren't winning Grand Slam titles or reaching their finals by then.

Serena played in three straight Grand Slam finals when she was 37 years old. And after she'd had a baby and battled through subsequent blood clots that could have killed her. Who does that?

Who, besides the queen, that is. And the queen mother.