Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka will make history at the U.S. Open on Thursday night as the first mothers to face off in a Grand Slam semifinal. It’s only the latest show of force from tennis’s most formidable mothers: A total of nine moms made the 2020 tournament’s main draw, and three of them—Williams, Azarenka, and Tsvetana Pironkova—played in this week’s crowd-less quarterfinals.
Thursday night’s landmark “mother versus mother” match is rife with high-stakes subtext: Both the American Williams and the Belarusian Azarenka are Grand Slam champions and former world number ones who are striving for their first major titles since having children. Williams last won the Australian Open in 2017 while in the early days of pregnancy with her daughter, Alexis Olympia, who was born later that year. The tennis icon documented the grueling process of returning to the sport post-baby in her 2018 HBO docuseries Being Serena, including the demands on her postpartum body after nearly dying of a pulmonary embolism after childbirth, the pressure to stop breastfeeding to focus on training, and the wrenching process of leaving an infant to go back to work. Azarenka had her son, Leo, in 2016, and due to a custody battle with his father, was forced to miss several tournament starts through 2017. Like Williams, her last Grand Slam win was at the Australian Open, back in 2013.
Adding yet another off-court dynamic: Williams and Azarenka—known as “Vika”—are friends. “I truly love her; she’s a really good friend,” Williams said at their last face-off, last year’s BNP Paribas Open (a.k.a Indian Wells). “She’s a fellow mom and a former number one, just like me.” Williams won their last match but noted that her bond with Azarenka adds another dimension to the competition: “It’s hard to play someone you’re so close with but it’s also really invigorating and cool.” After her quarterfinals win over the number-16 seed Elise Mertens on Wednesday, Azarenka said she was relishing the chance to take on her friend—a crowd favorite in New York—once again. “I love playing against Serena,” she told reporters. “We always played on big stages. There were a lot of big fights. She’s one of the players who pushes me to the limit, who makes me better. I’m excited for that.”
The match is poised to be emotional not just for Williams and Azarenka, but for fans following their struggles as a magnified version of their own: This one is for every mother clawing her way back to her career post-baby, for every woman muddling through the childcare setback of the pandemic. After sharing her struggles so openly, Williams’s goal of winning her first major as a mother has started to feel intensely personal for fans. The two mothers on the court may be uniquely equipped to thrive under all of the pressure swirling around the match. “I always feel like I’m not perfect unless I’m perfect. That’s not a fun way to live your career and live your life,” Williams told reporters. “It doesn’t matter if I lose 20 points in a row now. I just feel like, ‘It’s okay, it’s fine, I’m here, and I’m happy. I get to play tennis after all these years.’”
Mothers have, of course, won Grand Slam tournaments in the past. Australian Margaret Smith Court won the last three of her 24 Grand Slam singles titles as a mother, and her countrywoman Evonne Goolagong Cawley won Wimbledon in 1980, three years after childbirth. More recently, the Belgian player Kim Clijsters returned from childbirth and retirement to win the U.S. Open in 2009 and 2010, and then the Australian Open in 2011. (Her own attempt at an another comeback ended with a first-round loss at this year’s Open.)
While Arthur Ashe Stadium has been largely empty these past two weeks because of coronavirus restrictions, Williams’s biggest fan, three-year-old Alexis Olympia, has been cheering her on throughout the Open, having been spotted in the stands in a tiny mask. After watching Williams win Saturday’s match against Sloane Stephens, when she came back from a set down, Williams said of her daughter, “I hope she saw her mama fighting.”