As I write, the media world continues to debate what Serena Williams said, since the noise of the crowd at the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament drowned out at least some of her words. By one account, those words included: “I swear to God I’m f—– going to take this f—– ball and shove it down your f—– throat. You hear that? I swear to God.” Another subtracts one of these bits of improbable fornication and the double reference to the Almighty, making the threat only a hypothetical one: “If I could, I would take this f—– ball and shove it down your f—– throat.” A third account has it that this implied threat was unambiguously aspirational, in a detached and merely fanciful way: “I wish I could take this f—– ball and shove it down your f—– throat!”—as if to say that, in spite of the vehemence of the language, both Serena Williams and her interlocutor, a female linesman, both knew that this wasn’t going to happen. The linesman herself, however, who was presumably in a better position to hear the words than anyone else, apparently heard a threat against her life, which Miss Williams was overheard denying she had made.

Being “in the moment,” as she later put it, she claimed to be unable herself to remember what she had said, but whatever it was she had no regrets about it. “An apology? From me?” said the puzzled superstar in answer to a question from the