Woods, as Williams is regarded as the GOAT (greatest of all time) in his sport, cheered him from the stands at Flushing Meadows, which is expected to be his final tournament.
Perhaps more than any other athlete, the winner of 15 Golf Majors can relate to Williams as she wrestles with the idea of impending retirement while trying for another shot at Grand Slam glory.
In a career spent defying the odds, Woods has turned the comeback into an art form. In April, he made perhaps his biggest comeback when he returned to competition at the Masters just 14 months after a car accident in which doctors were considering the possibility of amputating his right leg.
“He’s one of the reasons I’m here, one of the main reasons I’m still playing,” Williams said after a 7-6(4) 2-6 6-2 win over Kontaveit. “So we talked a lot. He was really trying to motivate me.
“There are some people, but we were like, well, we can do this together, you know?”
The game’s two greats are both chasing history, Woods hunting down Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 Majors and Williams, one Grand Slam shy of equaling Margaret Court’s mark of 24.
Both records seem out of reach, although Williams enters the third round with her victory over Kontaveit and a chance to write a story about the end of her career.
Woods has already shown that anything is possible when he ended an 11-year major title drought to claim a fifth Green Jacket at the 2019 Masters. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” said Williams, who earlier this month indicated his intention to retire.
“I was just lost, so many questions,” she said.
“When you can count on someone like that, I mean, my goodness, that’s Tiger Woods, it was really helpful to get that clarity.”
After being world number one for 319 weeks, Williams reached New York, down 600, unseeded and with only one match win out of three events leading into the final Grand Slam of the season.
But Williams made a very Tiger-esque effort, harnessing his famous fighting spirit to register an impressive victory.
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