Williams will now play Czech 10th seed Karolina Pliskova, who beat Croatian teenager Ana Konjuh 6-2 6-2 to reach the last four of a Grand Slam for the first time.
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There is no calendar-year grand slam up for grabs this year but history continued to beckon Williams, who would have stood alone as greatest grand slam champion in the professional era if she had claimed a 23rd title and moved past Steffi Graf.
She upset Kerber in the final there – thwarting the German in her first chance to seize the number one ranking – but acknowledged that Williams will be another matter.
She was attempting the rare calendar-year Grand Slam, having won her first 26 major matches of the season in Melbourne, Paris, Wimbledon and through the quarterfinals in NY.
Her fitness aside, Williams was blown away by Pliskova, who had earlier knocked out sister Venus in the fourth round at Flushing Meadows and goes into the final on an 11-match winning streak.
Instead, Williams and her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, pointed to the left leg that she repeatedly clutched.
More records await Serena Williams if she can win her next two matches at the US Open. Romanian Simona Halep, an underdog but far from a slouch at No. 5 in the world, unleashed her full arsenal against the 22-time Grand Slam champion, and made Williams dig deeper than she has all tournament for a 6-2, 4-6, 6-3 victory.
“I don’t believe it”, Pliskova said on court afterwards. Kerber had a chance to overtake Williams last month by winning a hard-court tournament in OH, but lost the final there to Pliskova. Halep closes down the gap down to two, 4-2, with a 40-30 win in the sixth game, but Serena Williams promptly answers with a 40-0 win to reach match point in the following game. It wasn’t for long though, because although she seemed uncharacteristically calm, Serena Williams was inwardly hell bent on taking control. But Mouratoglou insisted that if Williams had been “20 percent less injured, she would have won in two sets”. “She didn’t win the tournament”. She kept going for shots and she did what she needed to do.
Afterward, Williams dismissed the notion she was tired from a grueling three-set quarterfinal against Simona Halep that concluded less than 22 hours before the semifinal started (Pliskova, whose quarterfinal was earlier Wednesday, watched, then slept in until 1 p.m. on Thursday).
Carreno Busta and Garcia-Lopez defeated the No. 8-seeded team of Feliciano Lopez and Marc Lopez, the French Open champs, 6-3, 7-6 (4) in an all-Spanish semifinal.
They had played for 46 minutes, and it was clear who was better.
A U.S. Tennis Association official says it is “within the realm of possibility” that the joint ATP-WTA tournament in Key Biscayne could move at some point in the future to the new USTA National Campus in Florida.
“It was an awesome match for me, one of my toughest matches, mentally and physically against Juan Martin”, Wawrinka said.
The hope, too, is to “raise the bar” for youth tennis training facilities “and also to raise the teaching level”, Kamperman said. “We’re going to get those champions”.
A spot in the finals of the 2016 U.S. Open will be on the line Thursday night when the last four women take the court in a semifinal round loaded with stars.
Mattek-Sands and Safarova won the Australian Open and the French Open in 2015.
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Mladenovic and Garcia were provisionally suspended by the French tennis federation for “damaging” its image at the Olympics, accused of criticizing federation officials for a clothing mix-up before their first-round defeat.
