Williams inspired by late sister
Australian Open champion Serena Williams claimed the memory of her oldest sister inspired her to success over hot favourite Maria Sharapova in the final at Melbourne Park.
The American, ranked 81 going into the tournament, dispatched the new world number one 6-1 6-2 in just over an hour and said her focus was unflinching in the final.
“Right from ’Play’ I was driven,” she said.
“I’ve been watching some matches and I was just feeling really good about going out there. I woke up, I just felt different. I felt like: ’I feel good. I feel happy. I feel confident. I’m not nervous’. And you know, at the end of the day I’ve done well.”
Williams, the first unseeded player to win the Australian Open title in 29 years, said she was desperate to secure victory to honour her sister Yetunde Price, who was shot dead in Compton in September 2003.
“Every day I write notes for my match. My note (for the final) was just ’Yetunde’. That was all my notes. That’s it,” she said.
“Usually I write: ’Look at the ball, move forward, do this, do that’. I just had one word. Every changeover I looked at it and I just thought about how happy she would have been, how much she always supported me.
“I just thought about what an amazing sister she was to me. I just said: ’Serena, this has to be motivating. This has to be more than enough to motivate me’ and I think it was.”
Despite surpassing even her own expectations on the way to lifting the Australian Open trophy for the third time, Williams believes it will be hard to maintain her form, given the nature of women’s tennis at the moment.
“Sharapova is probably going to go home right now and train on some things and she’s going to never want this to happen again – as I wouldn’t either,” she said.
“Whether it was 7-5, 7-5, if she had lost, she would still go home and train, as I would as well.
“I’m going to do the same thing because I know someone whose name is not Sharapova, like some other ’ova,’ and they’re 12 years old in Russia – or wherever they’re from – and they are playing hard to get ready for me. That’s what I’m going to go train for.”
Sharapova, meanwhile, attributed her surprising demise in the final to an inability to return Williams’ powerful serves.
“I think it started in the second game when I was 40-15 and I give her that game,” she said.
“From then on, when she was serving pretty big and pretty consistent and it was tough to break her.
“She played some good tennis. We didn’t really have a lot of long rallies. It was just a good serve percentage, which I definitely did not have, which I said was going to be important, and the return.
“I thought she just served too good.”
