It was Daniel Kahneman, with the American psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, who recognized that, in what and how we remember, there tends to be a cognitive bias at work. When we recollect and judge an experience—a medical procedure, a vacation, a love affair—we’re liable to overemphasize its final moments. Last impressions, good or bad, can deeply color, or discolor, our memories.
But is this true of how we remember great athletes? Maybe not. If Muhammad Ali mattered a lot to you, was that relationship altered in any way by his last fight, against . . . Trevor Berbick? To be a fan of any athlete is to know the ending and to begin processing it before it arrives. The narrative is fixed and unwavering. In the beginning, we are transfixed by an athlete’s promise; at the end, unless it is unusually abrupt, we endure her or his decline and warmly wave goodbye. Athletes diminish professionally at an earlier age than most of us, and even the greatest among them tend to falter and fail on big stages in the glare of fame before calling it quits. It’s doubtful that these final moments, long anticipated if nonetheless wistful when they arrive, figure much at all in how we recall the legends we become attached to and end up caring about in ways that can seem unreasonable—even, at times, to ourselves.
Serena Williams lost on Friday night, in a third-round match at the U.S. Open—the earliest she’d been knocked out of the tournament since 1998, when she was sixteen years old. She lost the last six games of the match. At times during those games, she looked every bit the player who will be turning forty-one in a few weeks. She watched balls heading to the corners without moving her feet. She breathed deeply through her mouth. Now and again, the expression on her face was of someone straining to keep an upwelling of emotions in check. The last ball she hit was a forehand into the net, and it was likely the last ball she will ever hit on the women’s tour—she announced, in August, that she was “evolving away from tennis,” and the understanding was that the U.S. Open was where she would mark the end. That forehand into the net, those moments when she seemed spent and flat-footed, those last games she didn’t win: none of that is likely to mark the end for those who cared about Serena Williams.
