INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — A decade on, it’s not the tension they remember most. It’s not the fear that after 14 years of anger and hurt, after all the attempts at rapprochement between the BNP Paribas Open tournament organizers and Serena Williams that never seemed to go anywhere, that one person among the 16,000 in the main stadium of the Indian Wells Tennis Garden might wreck it all once again.
They don’t remember the tension because they tried to ignore the possibility. Maybe if they thought only about the opposite, they could manifest it.