Day: July 14, 2018

Angelique Kerber was so steady, so patient, so accurate throughout the Wimbledon final, she never really gave Serena Williams much of a chance.

Kerber won her first championship at the All England Club and third major overall by playing cleanly and picking her spots for big shots, beating Williams 6-3, 6-3 on Saturday.

“I knew that I had to play my best tennis against a champion like Serena,” said Kerber, the first German woman to win Wimbledon since Steffi Graff in 1996.

Kerber made only five unforced errors the entire match, 19 fewer than Williams. Perhaps more impressive was that she broke Williams in four of nine service games.

The 30-year-old German lost to Williams in the 2016 Wimbledon final. She beat Williams in the Australian Open final that year, then won that year’s U.S. Open to briefly replace her at No. 1 in the rankings.

Kerber addressed Williams during the on-court interviews, saying: “You’re such an inspiration for everybody, for all of us. I’m sure you will have your next Grand Slam title soon. I’m really, really sure.”

‘I can compete’

Williams was indeed ready to look ahead.

“I didn’t know a couple of months ago where I was, where I would be, how I would do, how I would be able to come back. It was such a long way to see light at the end of the road, kind of,” said Williams, who gave birth to a daughter last September, then dealt with complications involving blood clots.

“So I think these two weeks have really showed me that, OK, I can compete. Obviously I can compete for the long run in a Grand Slam,” the 36-year-old American said. “I can, you know, come out and be a contender to win Grand Slams.”

There was a time, not all that long ago, that Williams was ranked No. 1 for years at a time. She won four major tournaments in a row and came close to a calendar-year Grand Slam. She was the favorite every time she entered a tournament.

Williams appeared to be regaining that form this fortnight. Barring some sort of setback in the next six weeks, she will head into the U.S. Open at the end of August as the player to beat.

If Williams does earn one more, it’ll tie her with Margaret Court for the all-time record of 24. As it is, Williams has the mark for the most majors in the professional era; she moved one ahead of Graf by winning the 2017 Australian Open.

She was pregnant at the time. It would be her last tournament for more than a year, in part because of a series of medical procedures that followed a difficult childbirth. As she put it this week: “I lost count after, like, four surgeries.”

Williams didn’t enter another major until this May, at the French Open, where she won the three matches she played before withdrawing with a chest muscle injury. After a little more time off, she played the fourth tournament of her comeback at Wimbledon.

“I just like to tell all the moms, like, I had such a long struggle to come back, and it was really difficult,” Williams said. “Honestly, I feel like if I can do it, they can do it.”
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Nancy Sinatra Sr., the childhood sweetheart of Frank Sinatra who became the first of his four wives and the mother of his three children, has died. She was 101.

Her daughter, Nancy Sinatra Jr., tweeted that her mother died Friday and a posting on her web page said she died at 6:02 p.m. but didn’t indicate where she died.

“She was a blessing and the light of my life,” her daughter said.

Attempts to reach representatives for Sinatra Jr. late Friday were unsuccessful.

Childhood sweethearts

Nancy and Frank Sinatra had been dating as teenagers and married at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic church in Jersey City, New Jersey, Feb. 4, 1939, just as Frank’s singing career was about to take off. Three years before marrying the former Nancy Barbato, he had landed a 15-minute radio show on local station WAAT.

During the marriage’s early years, the Sinatras lived in a modest apartment in Jersey City, where their two eldest children were born. For a time she was employed as a secretary while her husband worked as a singing waiter.

After Sinatra became a pop-music sensation in the 1940s, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where the singer would also become a movie star, raconteur, man about town and notorious womanizer.

That latter accomplishment led Sinatra to leave him after an affair with actress Ava Gardner became public knowledge. Weeks after the pair’s divorce became final in 1951, Sinatra’s ex-husband married Gardner, while Sinatra went on to raise the couple’s three children: Nancy, Frank Jr. and Tina.

After the gossip over the divorce and Gardner marriage died down, Nancy Sinatra devoted herself to family and numerous celebrity friends, largely withdrawing from the spotlight. She not only outlived her husband, who died in 1998, but her son, who died in 2016.

She is credited, under the name Nancy Barbato, on the Internet Movie Database with two TV and film appearances, in her daughter Nancy’s 1975 concert film, “Nancy and Lee in Las Vegas,” and in 1974 on her friend Dinah Shore’s talk show.

Respect and affection

In later years she would become known as Nancy Sr., especially after daughter Nancy became a 1960s singing star in her own right with “These Boots Are Made For Walking” and other hit songs.

She also remained friendly with her ex-husband, the latter being said to have put in requests over the years for pasta and other Italian food dishes she was known to be an expert at preparing. She never remarried.

“There is no bitterness, only great respect and affection between Sinatra and his first wife,” Gay Talese wrote in 1966, “and he has long been welcome in her home and has even been known to wander in at odd hours, stoke the fire, lie on the sofa, and fall asleep.”
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Pakistan is not a soccer powerhouse. But there’s a strong link between the country and the sport. A lot of the credit goes to the city of Sialkot where about 40 percent of the world’s soccer balls are produced. Many wonder how a small city in northeastern Pakistan can compete on the global stage in manufacturing high quality soccer balls. VOA’s Saman Khan visited several factories in Sialkot to learn more. Bezhan Hamdard narrates.
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The newest stadium in U.S. Major League Soccer officially opens Saturday, when DC United, the home team for the nation’s capital, hosts the Vancouver Whitecaps FC. The $400 million Audi Field is generating excitement for the DC United fans, who hope the new venue will invigorate the team’s performance and bring in more spectators. Ariadne Budianto has more in this report.
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