A three-year-old video from YouTube’s star sports supergroup Dude Perfect is going viral after a recent YouGov survey showed 12% of British men think they could score a point off tennis luminary Serena Williams.
Dude Perfect’s five members — Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, Garrett Hilbert, and twins Coby and Cory Cotton — have amassed more than 43 million subscribers by showing off inventive trick shots and competing against one another in a variety of athletic challenges. So, it’s more than fair to say that when Williams went up against all five of them on the court in their 2016 collab video, she was facing off against five pretty athletic guys who know how to play tennis.
And she absolutely crushed them.
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Multiple Twitter users have shared a two-minute compilation of clips from Dude Perfect’s video as proof that scoring against her is much, much harder than one in eight men assume.
“To all the non-tennis-playing men who think they can win a point against Serena, watch this,” reads what appears to be the tweet that sparked the video’s comeback, from account Embracing Black Culture. Posted July 19, it’s since garnered more than 100,000 retweets, and more than 300,000 likes.
In the two-minute compilation, Williams serves against the members of Dude Perfect, starting with Toney by himself, and adding each member until she’s serving against all five of them at once, seeing if any of them can manage to return just one missile. With the five playing in tandem, they do manage to get one back over the net, and rush forward in anticipation of Williams returning — but the moment she lifts her racquet, it’s instant regret on the Dudes’ part as they shriek and retreat. (Not fast enough; Hilbert, trying to jump out of the line of fire, takes a hit directly to the — er, a place you don’t want to be hit.)
The Dudes also set up trick shots for Williams to show her incredible accuracy. She bats a ball over the net and through a water balloon, knocks a ball can off a moving target, and, while high in the stands, uses a racquet to send an oversized tennis ball through a basketball hoop down on the court.
Williams, by the way, has a recorded serve speed of 128.6 miles per hour, so it appears she was taking it easy on the fivesome, who readily celebrate her wiping the court with them.
The survey that inspired all this polled 1,732 British people. As mentioned above, 12% of men (roughly one in eight) responded that they could score a point off her, while only 3% of women responded in kind. A further 14% of men weren’t sure if they could score a point or not.
So why were some participants convinced they could get one past a premier world champion player? It’s possible this all stems back to 2017, when retired tennis player John McEnroe — a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame — commented that if Williams, who’s widely regarded as the No. 1 player on the women’s circuit, played against men, “she’d be like 700 in the world.” His remarks drew backlash, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to assume women pros can’t hold their own against their male counterparts.
