Tude," or its longer form, attitude, has probably been associated with one tennis player more than any other, Serena Williams.
Now, the woman behind the fearsome on-court persona has come into clearer focus with the publication this week of her new book, On The Line, co-written with Dan Paisner.
After her third-round 6-3, 7-5 victory yesterday over Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez at the U.S. Open, Williams appeared at her media conference wearing a T-shirt with "Can't spell dynasty without nasty" written on the front.
In the book, Williams, who turns 28 in three weeks, helps flesh out the icy competitor who once screamed an f-word expletive at a startled Emelie Loit in the heat of battle at the 2003 Australian Open and who, at this year's French Open, believed Martinez Sanchez should have owned up to a shot hitting her forearm (not her racquet), saying to her at the ensuing change-over, "I'm going to get you in the locker room for that."
Williams writes, "You need a wild streak ... a kind of irrational killer instinct. You need to put it out that you're reckless and unpredictable."
Culled partly from journals she kept, Williams said the book is "mostly about when I was No. 1 and fell to 100 and something, and then got back to No. 1. It's motivational."
Maybe her most surprising revelation is that she went through a stage when she was "deeply and utterly depressed," a stage she eventually got out of through daily therapy sessions. For weeks, she didn't speak to her mother Oracene or her sister Venus, this all transpiring after her half-sister Yetunde had been murdered in 2003 and her ranking dropped to No. 139.
"I wasn't honest with myself about how I was feeling," she writes.
She described the happy resolution as "a weird and wonderful thing." About her tennis, she writes, "I came to it by default [through her father Richard]and it took reaching for it here when I was down and desperate and miserable for me to fully embrace the game."
In subsequent years, she has won five of her 10 Grand Slam titles, including the Australian Open and Wimbledon this year. She had a similar rebirth in 2002, after the break-up of her relationship with Washington Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington. Referring to Arrington only as "So-and-So," she writes, "this guy tore my heart in half. Then he ripped those pieces and stepped on them and backed his car up over them. And the worst part was he left me thinking it was me."
Her response led to the best run of her career - four Grand Slam titles in a row between the French Open in 2002 and the Australian Open in 2003. "I decided tennis would be my salvation," she writes. "I wanted So-and-So to regret how he treated me. I wanted him to see me everywhere."
The most intriguing reading in On The Line may be Williams's account of the infamous incident in Indian Wells, Calif., in 2001, that resulted in her and Venus boycotting the event the past eight years.
It all happened because Venus withdrew, often reported as being five minutes before the match, with an injury from her semi-final with Serena. Spectators were angry they did not get to see the match and took it out on Serena when she played the final against Kim Clijsters two days later.
Serena claims that in the locker room right before the semi-final, Venus said to her, "I don't know why they're not making some kind of announcement. I told them I couldn't play two hours ago."
Serena won the final 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 but recalled walking on the court and "people started booing. They were loud, mean, aggressive. I looked up and all I could see was a sea of rich people - mostly older, mostly white - booing lustily, like some kind of lynch mob. I wanted to cry, but I didn't want to give these people the satisfaction. I could still hear shouts of Nigger."
Williams added, "If Chris Evert had to withdraw from a semi against her sister Jeanne, nobody would have booed Jeanne the next day. Nobody would have booed some blonde, blue-eyed girl."
Yesterday, on a more current matter, she said about her "Can't spell dynasty without nasty" T-shirt, "I may have had one dynasty in my career ... in the early 2000s."
Bringing it up to the present day, she added, "I'm not too shabby now either."