Aging Is Democratic
It was a pretty surreal experience watching Serena Williams at the US Open this year. Given her announcement earlier this summer that she will be “evolving away” from tennis, there was a sense that every match could be her last, and so the crowds hung on every point with a kind of desperate energy. Even double faults by her opponents elicited cheers — a huge breach of normal tennis decorum.
But it wasn’t just the impoliteness that made it surprising – it was also strange to see fans rallying around Serena, a player who has attracted haters and controversy since she and her sister first emerged more than two decades ago. Some of this was just the normal process* by which polarizing Black athletes become universally beloved icons in their retirement, which I wrote about before.
*There’s an additional wrinkle to this process now, as a consequence of modern liberalism. Given the peculiar fixation on identity, there is now an impulse to browbeat people into celebrating prominent women of color, as some kind of counterreaction to social prejudices. So statements like, “Most of the anger directed at Serena Williams during her career is due to racism and sexism,” quickly get turned into, “To not love Serena Williams is misogynoir.” In addition to just being a really annoying way to engage with sports fans, this is also a great way to channel anger at structural or systemic oppression into failed, reactionary, individualistic solutions. It sucks!
But the OTHER, bigger thing going on is just that getting older has turned Williams into an underdog. The TV announcers kept joking that Serena Williams, the greatest tennis player of all-time, was technically an underdog in all of her matches. At nearly 41, and having hardly played this year until June, she looked uncharacteristically beatable. There were times when she looked like her normal, dominant self, but other stretches where she seemed rusty and overmatched. By the last set of her final match against Ajla Tomljanovic, she looked utterly spent, and seemed to need the crowd noise just to give her the energy to finish.
This is why Aging Superstar Chases One Last Win is such a common and universal sports story. (Baseball fans are watching it right now with Albert Pujols.) Watching stars like Serena fight against the inevitable triumph of time reminds us that the seemingly superhuman are human. And, frankly, it’s just relatable to watch someone not be able to do something they used to be able to do. We’ve all been there. Of course, the “something they used to be able to do” is usually not “win the US Open” or anything all that impressive – usually it’s something like, “stay up late drinking without feeling sick the next day” or “fall asleep on an airplane.” But whether or not you are an elite athlete, time and aging come for everyone, and sports are some of the only places we acknowledge this.
It is such a cliche to call American society “youth-obsessed” that I’m almost tempted to disagree on contrarian grounds – but it is obviously true. It’s not so much that old people are erased in our society, but that the process of aging is erased. That is, old people are allowed positions of prominence, but only on the condition that they not remind us about the normal aging process. Can you believe how good Jennifer Lopez looks for 53? Maybe youth really CAN be eternal… The leaders of the two major American political parties are both septuagenarians who have done all kinds of unnatural things to their hair and teeth in an effort to make people forget, for just a moment, how old they actually are.
This is because modern American capitalism is incredibly hostile to people who actually age. Rather than change that, people who can afford to simply wage desperate wars against the aging process. At the extreme ends, this takes on an absurd quality, like tech startups that try to harvest young people’s blood. But more often it just takes the form of your more garden-variety beauty regimens, cosmetic surgeries, and obscene diet and workout routines. A society that is so anti-egalitarian cannot handle something like death, which truly equalizes everyone.
Because no matter what you do, you will get older. Even the billionaires who seem to age backwards will, eventually, die. If time comes for even Serena Williams, then what hope do the rest of us have? And watching her try to pull out one last set is one of the few places where we can ever really acknowledge that fact…