Shining in the present

The questions were coming, the dreaded questions, and Venus Williams knew it. An early warning was the announcer at the recent Rogers Cup in Toronto, who for some reason felt compelled to introduce Williams as “37 years young.” And then a reporter broached the subject more directly, asking, “Do you ever just get tired of people always kind of pointing out your age?”

Williams leaned her chin on her hand and sighed.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, that started happening, like, 10 years ago, minimum, or more, since I was 25 or so.”

Williams, always polite, has given versions of this answer before. This time, in her gentle voice, she reminded her inquisitors that age doesn’t matter, and why would it, when she is ranked ninth in the world, and still has so much to offer?

“These things I know, that I’m quite strong and I’m quite capable,” she said. “So that’s all I need.”

Williams, who turned 37 in June, has won seven major singles titles, including five at Wimbledon and two at the US Open, which begins on Monday in New York. She has reached two major finals this year — at the Australian Open and at Wimbledon — and is having her best season in years. She can’t explain why, or at least she won’t explain why.

“There are a lot of explanations,” she said. “But I all I can say is that I’m grateful.”

I am grateful, too. Not just for her resurgence, but for her presence. This season has been a reminder of how much richer the sport of tennis is with her sparkling inside it.

Williams is obviously much closer to the end of her career than the beginning. How close, only she knows. So it’s natural to wonder if this tournament or that one will be her last hurrah, or if this might be the last time you see her at the US Open, rocketing balls as fiery as comets into the opposite court. It’s appropriate to feel nostalgic. But it’s also another chance to forget all that, a time to just soak in her grace and her power once again, to marvel at her 120-plus-mph serves and her lithe and long-limbed elegance. It’s a time to salute her exemplary sportsmanship, her qualifying-tournament ego in a Grand Slam body.

The inevitable reflections, appreciations and odes written about her in the coming weeks may point out how amazing it is for Williams to still be so good when her opponents are mostly so young. Maybe they will compare her to the 36-year-old Roger Federer, who has been getting this look-at-the-old-person-play treatment for a couple of years, or to Rafael Nadal, who, at 31, has too become a veteran, creaky joints and all.

Soon Venus’ younger sister Serena, 35, will begin to hear this when-will-she-retire talk, when she returns from having her first child. But here’s a way for players to navigate the tricky path of daring to age while the world watches: They should study Venus. So it somehow feels wrong in this moment, now that Venus Williams is back at the top of her game — a Grand Slam finalist again, a top-10 player, a successful businesswoman who quietly earned a college degree and is working on her master’s — to focus on her age or suggest that this should be her final chapter.

If there is one tennis player who could understand the burden of competing as a remarkable champion whose age has become the story, it’s another woman who made it to the Wimbledon final at 37. That’s Martina Navratilova, whose last major final came in 1994, only months before she retired from singles competition. So earlier this month, I called her, tracking her down in a Moscow hair salon.

Navratilova, 60, sees a lot of similarities between herself and Williams, but she also said that the primary ones have nothing to do with age. They have to do with how each survived, and thrived, in a lifetime of scrutiny.

“You could see that she doesn’t validate herself as a human being based on if she wins or loses, and I think neither did I,” Navratilova said. “You just don’t go around thinking of yourself as a winner, or better than anyone else.”

In June, Williams was involved in a serious car crash in Florida. A 78-year-old passenger in the other car later died from his injuries. Initially, police ruled Williams was at fault in the crash. Then, right in the middle of Wimbledon, they said maybe she wasn’t. An investigation is ongoing, and Williams was sued by the man’s family for wrongful death.

The weight of it all might have crushed a lesser athlete, a lesser person, and if Williams crumbled, it would have been forgivable. And, yes, Williams did break down during a Wimbledon news conference when asked about the crash.

But she then responded by playing better, focusing more. She made the Wimbledon final, and — as many people reminded her — was the oldest woman to do so in 23 years.

“I don’t know how she does it,” Caroline Wozniacki said, adding that Williams amazed her more and more each day.

When it comes to the way Williams responds to stress, it’s not so much the psychological part of it that has impressed Navratilova the most. It’s the physical part. Navratilova explained how, in 2010, she tried to play tennis the day after doctors told her she had breast cancer. Even though she had completed a backbreaking workout the day before, the mere news of her diagnosis, Navratilova said, had weakened her body. She needed to take a break every five minutes, a brief respite, a sip of water.

“It was a revelation of just how much stress takes out of you physically,” she said. “No matter how mentally strong you are, stress can affect a body 1 percent or 50 percent, you just never know. How Venus has handled the stress physically, through all the news of the car accident, is astonishing.”

The constant questions about Williams’ age merely add to that tension. If a player loses a set at 25, Navratilova said, “it’s because you just didn’t play well.”

“But if you have that loss at 35, it’s because you are old and tired.”

Maybe that is why Williams always seems so guarded when she answers questions about her play, or her personal life, or her suddenly conspicuous proximity to 40. How is she handling the heat and pounding of the hardcourt season after such a long year, especially as she manages an autoimmune disease whose symptoms can include two decidedly unhelpful conditions for a professional tennis player: joint pain and prolonged fatigue? “I worry about my opponents across the net,” she said. “That’s who I feel for.”

How does she deal with anxiety when things go wrong? “I’m really all about doing something, everything I can, about a situation to rectify it,” she said. “And if I cannot, then I don’t worry about it.”

What motivates her to keep playing after all these years? “I love the game,” she said. “It’s very simple.”

Navratilova joked that she has an idea for making Williams’ life even simpler. She suggested Williams prerecord answers to the most common questions about her age. When those questions inevitably arrive, Williams can just hold up her iPad, press play and sit back.

But there’s a good chance Williams, an introvert by nature, is already tuning out those questions. She doesn’t waste her time on negativity.

Just as she has done for so very long now, Venus Williams is just waiting, saving her energy, clearing her mind. Ready for the next match, the next opponent, the next ball. The next challenge she expects to overcome.