All the best stuff about Sloan Stephens beating Serena Williams

Stephens in the instant after beating Serena.

After watching the conclusion of another discouraging Celtics loss last night, I flipped through the channels to find something else to put on the TV in my bar.  I stopped on ESPN2 when I noticed that Serena Williams had been taken to a 3rd set in her quarterfinal match at the Australian Open.  Serena was in the midst of a 20 match winning streak, and considered the heavy favorite to win the tournament; a loss to the 29th seed would be a major upset.

I've never been a fan of Serena, I like to call her the "Shaq" of women's tennis because she dominates by being bigger and stronger than everyone else.  So for the next half hour I greatly enjoyed watching her get beat, even before I knew anything about the 19 year old who did it.

Sloan Stephens became the first American younger than Serena to ever defeat her.  After her victory the thing Stephens was most excited about was that her twitter following increased from 17,000 to 38,000 in roughly an hour, and she was ecstatic that Dirk Nowitzki had tweeted about her.  Both of those would pretty much make my day too.

Stephens is the daughter of former Patriots running back John Stephens, who I have childhood memories of as the NFL Rookie of the Year in 1988.  Her mother was also a swimmer at Boston University.  Stephens learned tennis from her stepfather Sheldon Smith, who died of cancer in 2007.  Sadly her biological father John was also killed in a car accident in 2009.

To get back to a lighter note (is it in poor taste to make a Manti Te'o joke about her dead fathers being real?), in the second set of yesterday's match Stephens frustrated Williams so much that Serena smashed her racket and hurled it towards the stands:

Here's a blog post from Sloan Stephens on ESPNW today that was actually put together by my sister, who's an editor there.  Oh yeah, and that look on Sloan's face (in the above photo) when she won is spectacular.

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