At her 20th Wimbledon, Venus Williams encounters something new and unwelcome

Across a dumbfounding 20 Wimbledons, she has been regal (20 consecutive match wins from 2007-09), bouncy (hopping after her reprise title of 2005), dignified (refusing to blame a chair umpire for botching the score in 2004), protective (ushering her 18-year-old sister from Centre Court in 2000 with, "Let's get out of here") and overlooked (through her lukewarm 2010s).

The run of Venus Williams at Wimbledon has been so elongated that it found room even for the cheeky - she berated an umpire in 1998, then claimed it made for compelling TV - when that is decidedly not her style.

Yet somehow, by Monday afternoon at the All England club, there appeared an unforeseeable element: despair.

Williams had just finished a thorny 7-6 (9-7), 6-4, first-round win over the Belgian 21-year-old Elise Mertens, boosting Williams's Wimbledon match record to 82-14 while dropping Mertens's to 0-1.

Per post-match custom, Williams came to the main interview room to field questions. Not per post-match custom, those questions would focus upon her South Florida car accident of June 9, from which a passenger in the other car, 78-year-old Jerome Barson, died two weeks later.

At first, Williams took all the questions about general emotions of recent weeks and steered them toward tennis.

She even handled a question about the pink bra she wore at the white-clothed club by saying, "I don't like talking about bras in press conferences. It's weird." Eventually, asked again about the accident, she said, "I have no idea what tomorrow will bring. That's all I can say about it. That's what I've learned."

Then, asked if she wished to add to her social media post of Friday in which she described being "heartbroken," she said, "There are really no words to describe, like, how devastating, and, yeah," her sentence trailing off. "I'm completely speechless. It's just, yeah, I mean, I'm just . . ."

It got quiet then, even for a plush, immaculate room that can feel sterile sometimes.

In the pause, Williams, 37, wiped away tears. Her cry persisted as listeners sat silently. The moderator said, "Can we just give her a minute, please?" The two people sat at the dais together. Then he said, "Do you want to take a minute outside? Shall we?"

"Maybe I should go," Williams said.

She walked out for a brief hiatus. She had helped kick off this Wimbledon, playing the first match on Court No. 1 while defending men's champion Andy Murray won on Centre Court. Per midday usual, the seats at 1 p.m. had been roughly one-third full. Clouds had gathered overhead, per routine invitation.

Rain would come, forging a delay near the end. Jets had made their way to Heathrow just beyond the stadium per usual.

Williams had returned to Wimbledon, the place she has given a thousand hosannas as it has given her five title plates. She had started off by smacking a 110-mph service that had earned her a sitter of a return, which she smacked away for 15-love.

She had claimed her fifth set point to win the first set, and her fifth match point to win the match. "Yes, this is my 20th Wimbledon," she had said to begin her remarks. "I never thought that I'd play that many. But I'm grateful to be here and to play. I love the game."

The police determined that Williams did not have the right of way when she entered the lane - at 5 mph, according to the police report per the Palm Beach Post - where the Hyundai rammed into the side of her Toyota Sequoia SUV.

There had been no charges filed. Williams told investigators she had gone into the intersection on a green light but had been unable to clear it because of traffic. The driver of the other car, Barson's wife, Linda, could not avoid Williams's car. Soon after the news broke last week came a second wave of news, that Barson's family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Williams, seeking undisclosed damages.

Now, as Williams returned to an interview room that generally deals in matters of shotmaking and confidence, the moderator asked that the questioners avoid the topic of the crash.

She took five more questions, including one about being the only Williams here, with her sister Serena Williams, the two-time defending champion and seven-time champion, absent during her pregnancy. ("I miss her a lot," Venus Williams said. "I think she misses me.")

Just before that, one reporter did go back to whether tennis could help with the trauma, and the moderator deflected that, a hint that this Wimbledon could be confusing to process. Already, even after 20 Wimbledons, it had found Williams as it had never seen her before, and wished it never had.