Serena Williams

Serena Williams will go down in history as one of tennis' greatest players, winning 23 Grand Slam titles, just one short of women's record holder Margaret ...

“But I’m turning 41 (in September) and something’s got to give.” – Rappler.com “Unfortunately I wasn’t ready to win Wimbledon this year. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record. I want to grow that family.” “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. “A few years ago I quietly started Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm.

Williams brought her own distinctive flair to tennis, challenging norms that governed fashion, power, decorum, race and gender.

She made that clear as she announced what she termed to be her “evolution,” which will include trying to have another child. Moreover, tennis is one of those games bound by a tradition of exclusion and uniformity. She wore clothing that flowed and swung, or that proudly showed her stomach and strong shoulders. And her comeback from pregnancy helped lead to an important rule change in women’s professional tennis — allowing players to enter tournaments based on their pre-pregnancy rankings for up to three years after giving birth. Yannick Noah, the mixed-race son of a Black Cameroonian father and white mother, won the French Open in 1983. Only the elite of the elite can change the way their sport is played. It is easy to forget that her championship journey, which came to include 23 Grand Slam singles titles, just shy of the record of 24 set by Margaret Court, began with a win at the U.S. Open in 1999. She had a knack, a hunger, a desire that demanded to be seen. After Williams’s power, speed and grit dispatched Hingis, 6-3, 7-6, tennis would never be the same. Announcing her plans to retire from tennis, Serena Williams said on Tuesday that she will focus her life far beyond sports, instead prioritizing being a mother, a fashion maker, a venture capitalist and much more. She has always done it her way, always operated on her own terms. She is a symbol.

On Monday, Williams played only her second singles match since she returned to action at Wimbledon in June after a year-long absence from competition, beating ...

If I’m in a Slam final, then yes, I’m thinking about that record. I want to grow that family.” “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record. “I have never liked the word retirement,” Williams wrote in a Vogue article. “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. “A few years ago I quietly started Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm.

Saying “the countdown has begun,” 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams announced on Tuesday that she is ready to step away from tennis so she can ...

Williams said she and Ohanian want to have a second baby, and wrote: “I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete. And I don’t know if I will be ready to win New York," Williams wrote in her essay. “Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record. She was off the tour for about a year after getting injured during her first-round match at Wimbledon in 2021. They can wear what they want and say what they want and kick butt and be proud of it all.” That unflinching desire to be the best helped make her the best — and also sometimes got her into trouble with chair umpires during matches, most infamously during the 2018 U.S. Open final she lost to Naomi Osaka, a woman more than a decade younger who grew up idolizing Williams, as have so many of today’s players. I’m torn: I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next.” I mean, that’s the reason why I play tennis,” Coco Gauff, an 18-year-old African-American who was the runner-up at this year’s French Open, said Tuesday. “Tennis being a predominantly white sport, it definitely helped a lot, because I saw somebody who looked like me dominating the game. “Serena Williams is a generational, if not multigenerational, talent who had a profound impact on the game of tennis, but an even greater influence on women in sports, business and society. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads,” she wrote. “There comes a time in life when we have to decide to move in a different direction.

AFTER winning 23 Grand Slam titles, Serena Williams says she is turning her focus to having another child and her business interests as she readies to step ...

But now, the countdown has begun,” Williams wrote on Instagram. “I have to focus on being a mom, my spiritual goals and finally discovering a different, but just (as) exciting Serena. I’m gonna relish these next few weeks.” “There comes a time in life when we have to decide to move in a different direction. She also owns 14 Grand Slam doubles championships, all won with her older sister, Venus.

On Monday, Williams played only her second singles match since she returned to action at Wimbledon in June after a year-long absence from competition, beating ...

I want to grow that family.” “A few years ago, I quietly started Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm. “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution.

The 23-time Grand Slam champion will soon be retiring from professional tennis, calling time on her Hall of Fame career.

But these days, if I have to choose between building my tennis resume and building my family, I choose the latter.” “Unfortunately I wasn’t ready to win Wimbledon this year. I love to entertain. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record. I love to win. I didn’t show up the way I should have or could have. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out,” insisted the 73-time titlist. Maybe I thought about it too much, and that didn’t help. I love the battle. “I have never liked the word retirement. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads. I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me.”

Thinking too much about the elusive 24th Grand Slam title to equal Margaret Court's record did not help Serena Williams' quest, the American great admits as ...

“I didn’t show up the way I should have or could have. “Unfortunately I wasn’t ready to win Wimbledon this year,” she added. “The way I see it, I should have had 30-plus Grand Slams,” Williams said. “I had my chances after coming back from giving birth… If I’m in a Slam final, then yes, I’m thinking about that record. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record.

Williams's second-round match on Wednesday at the National Bank Open could be her last in Canada, and everyone wants in on it, even the prime minister and ...

She added that she felt “grateful to have gotten the chance to play her and connect with her in some way. “That’s, I think, the place to do it,” she said. “In Toronto, we had a nice conversation going, and at the U.S. Open she said some very kind things to me in the locker room,” Andreescu said. It was the first time Olympia had sat through a full match, and she low-fived her mother — a go-to move when you’re 4 — after her win. Her opponent, Andreescu, approached the sideline and asked the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion if she could give her a hug. She is plainly having fun in Toronto. Over the weekend before the tournament began, she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, and their daughter, Olympia, went to Medieval Times, the theater show with crowns and swords. “All of the signs were definitely pointing to a U.S. Open retirement. (Canada was founded in 1867, and the women’s tournament started in 1892.) We’d like to thank you for reading The Times and encourage you to support journalism like this by becoming a subscriber. Doing so will give you access to the work of over 1,700 journalists whose mission is to cover the world and make sure you have accurate and impartial information on the most important topics of the day. Ahead of Serena Williams’s taking the court — which she did with a bowed head and a serious expression — a video with greetings from the retired champion Billie Jean King and some rising stars on the tour, Coco Gauff, Leylah Fernandez and Bianca Andreescu, played for the crowd. “In the players’ lounge, you heard the chatter.

Williams was bedridden for six weeks after childbirth because of life-threatening blood clots. She was playing in a Wimbledon final less than a year later.

At the Top Seed Open, she was spotted in the stands, a bit distracted by an iPhone (happens to the best of us). And she had a front-row seat to the U.S. Open bubble of 2020, pointing and saying “mama” in a nearly empty stadium. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family,” she said. I’d like to thank you for reading The Times and encourage you to support journalism like this by becoming a subscriber. Her evolution (retirement, she said, is not a word she likes to use) is not an easy decision; it’s not one she’s been able to talk about with anyone other than her therapist. This is not a simple ride into the sunset. Doing so will give you access to the work of over 1,700 journalists whose mission is to cover the world and make sure you have accurate and impartial information on the most important topics of the day. Williams knows exactly how becoming a mother changed her professional life. And the Olympic swimmer Dara Torres returned to competition just a few weeks after giving birth in 2006, won a national title in the 100-meter freestyle in 2007 and took home three silver medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. A few weeks ago, Felix ran her last world-championship event in a full stadium of fans who gave her a standing ovation. Tennis is a uniquely grueling sport for new parents. She had been about eight weeks pregnant when she won the Australian Open earlier that year. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out.”

Serena Williams serves in her womenssingles semifinal match against Naomi Osaka. The tension between accident and agency, acceptance and control, is among the ...

(After the Supreme Court’s recent decision, of course, it is less of a choice for many people in this country.) Williams has always seemed to know what she wants; it has always been her great gift, and her gift to us, to pursue it without regard for anything else. It is not fair, but it is life, and it is a choice—or should be—for those who want it. It feels off, and not just because only Serena Williams can be Serena Williams. Much of the essay is about Williams’s “evolution,” as she puts it, from professional tennis player to dedicated mother, and also to venture capitalist. For all the girl-bossing, though, the essay reads most powerfully as an acknowledgment of the things she can’t do, and of the pain that comes with that—even as new opportunities do, too. It is not the only one that Williams acknowledges in the essay. Williams has said that she did not plan to conceive a child just before the 2017 Australian Open—which she would win, defeating her sister, while about eight weeks pregnant—but that the birth of her daughter, later that year, was a great blessing. It’s no secret that Williams’s parents, and particularly her father, had a vision for how to shape Venus and Serena. Even the most talented athletes confront long odds, but the Williams sisters also confronted the tremendous headwinds of racism and misogyny and poverty, and in the cosseted world of tennis, no less. And so can you.” It can be fraught for commentators to address the role of anger in Williams’s play, given the existence of ugly stereotypes about angry Black women. It takes a lot of training to achieve that kind of consistency, no matter the situation, no matter the choice of serve. When I heard that Serena Williams had announced, in an essay for Vogue, her impending retirement, I forgot, for a moment, the long list of her accomplishments. I didn’t think about her records, her unmatched aura of dominance, her transformation from athlete into cultural force—into someone who demanded, by simply being who she was, that people change the way they talk about female athletes, and Black female athletes in particular. But I’ve been thinking about all those tosses that she must have practiced as a kid, lofting the ball over and over to hit the same mark.

Twenty-four is the number of times the Australian tennis player Margaret Court won a Grand Slam singles title before retiring, in 1977. But any comparison falls ...

It looked squarely in the face at the deadening repetition inherent to training, the exhaustion in the travel, the physical loneliness of life on tour. She may not be able to dually serve the gods of tennis and motherhood, but generations of young athletes will continue to pick up racquets of their own because she inspired them to do so. He came back in 1995, retired for the second time in 1999, then came back again in 2001 before finally retiring for good in 2003. Next, an exquisite, bodysuited lunge in 2003, taken shortly after her historic “Serena Slam” (four Grand Slams in a row, but not within a calendar year). And finally there she is, resplendent in red in 2015, the year she won her 19th Grand Slam at the Australian Open, her 20th at the French Open, and her 21st at Wimbledon. Twenty-two came one year later, also at Wimbledon. And then there was the illustrious 23, at the 2017 Australian Open, when she was 35 years old and two months pregnant with her daughter, Olympia. Five years later, it is Olympia who matters most. The reality is that Williams wants another baby; her daughter wants a sibling. He was back in the pool by 2014, then retired “for real” in 2016 after Rio, and five more golds. But any comparison falls comically short: Court won the majority of her slams before the Open Era of tennis (in which pros and amateurs compete against one another) began, in 1968. The woman who has broken every barrier and defied the boundaries of the game has at last collided with the same fate of countless women before her: She simply can’t have it all. There she is with Venus Williams, her sister, in matching striped gowns on a sofa in 1998, one year before Serena won her first Grand Slam, at the U.S. Open, at 17 years old. It was, as The New York Times noted, “one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete.” There were no platitudes on hard work or a champion’s mentality, no dithering over the necessary sacrifices or the payoffs to come. Unless Serena Williams pulls off the kind of feat typically reserved for Hollywood endings at this year’s U.S. Open, 23 is the number of Grand Slam singles titles with which she will retire. These beings, light-years of talent and discipline and stamina beyond us mortals who admire them, are, technically, leaving the day jobs that made them rich and famous.

The greatest female tennis player will call it a career. Here's how athletes from around the globe are responding to Serena Williams' retirement.

We’ve all watched you wear the crown of greatness with the kind of humility, grace, and integrity that all of us can aspire to. “Can't wait to see what the next chapter holds for you... “I think in the year off, she realized she wasn't in it long-term... Andy Roddick, a legend on the men’s tennis tour, told Tennis Channel, "It's weird when... you know it's not going to go on forever but you're still shocked by the news... While some responded right away, most had to take their time to react to the tennis legend’s bombshell announcement.

She was an early investor in MasterClass – one of 16 unicorns, or companies whose market value exceeds $1 billion, to receive funding from Serena Ventures. In ...

She cites Sheryl Sandberg, who stepped down as Facebook’s chief operating officer on Aug. 1, as a mentor. In addition to investing Williams has developed a fashion line, struck a deal with Amazon Studios and serves on the board of the ecommerce marketplace Poshmark. The tennis great seeks companies started by women and people of color, and her fund is led by a team of women.

Demand for tickets to witness tennis great Serena Williams in action at the U.S. Open spiked in the 24 hours following her announcement that she would ...

“Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. “Over the last 24 hours, we’ve seen eight times more sales on StubHub for the U.S. Open than the daily average, but the great news for fans is that the average price paid for a ticket has stayed steady, signaling that there is plenty of inventory for people who want to watch this historic moment in sports in-person.” Demand for tickets to witness tennis great Serena Williams in action at the U.S. Open spiked in the 24 hours following her announcement that she would retire after the hardcourt major in New York, ticket retailer StubHub told Reuters.

“We relate to her triumphs and defeats . . . and what she has accomplished transcends the sport we love and will impact Black and brown girls and women ...

She wrote in Vogue that focusing on being a parent was one of her motivations in leaving the sport. In 2003, she dealt with trauma after her half-sister, Yetunde Price, was the victim of a drive-by shooting in Compton. She drew criticism for her form-fitting outfits, especially at the 2018 French Open. And she had life-threatening complications during the birth of her daughter, Olympia, that required four surgeries. At the time she started, she and Venus were adolescents and young women when they first bore the brunt of the force of the tennis world against them,” the author said. Serena earned more than $94 million in prize money, more than any other women’s player in the game’s history. Off the court, she carried herself with aplomb, often reflective in her responses to probing questions, and at times, exposing her raw emotions. In 2000, she pulled out of the Family Circle Cup in South Carolina in support of the NAACP’s call for a boycott over the Confederate flag flying above the statehouse. She stood in her Black beauty. “Serena is our role model for tennis excellence and beyond,” she said. She and her older sister, Venus Williams, another tennis great, burst onto the tennis courts and into Black America’s heart in the mid-1990s, with their no-nonsense father and coach Richard Williams, who directed, cajoled and motivated them. Serena played with the grit of her upbringing. She spent 319 weeks as the No. 1 player in the world and returned to the top spot after nearly 15 years — a record. Their father told the world to watch out for Serena after Venus had established herself as the best player in the world.

The first stop on Serena Williams's farewell tour came to a quick end as she fell 6-2, 6-4 to Belinda Bencic in the second round of the Canadian Open.

I wish I could’ve played better but Belinda played so well today.” I’ll be coming back just as a visitor to the city but otherwise it’s been remarkable.” “It’s been a pretty interesting 24 hours ... I’m terrible at goodbyes.

For someone who doesn't pride herself on goodbyes, Serena Williams exceeded expectations on Wednesday in Toronto. The American tennis icon proved herself a ...

It could be a different story in Cincinnati or later this summer at the US Open, where she will likely play her final Grand Slam match with an adoring public ready to fill Arthur Ashe stadium with resounding echoes of her sonorous name. I never imagined to play Serena so many times and it’s always an honor to be on the court with her, and that’s why I think tonight is about her, especially here in Toronto.” She seemed to teeter on the precipice of an all-out cry, but didn’t allow herself the luxury of doing so.

No one knows exactly how many more matches Williams will play before walking away, and the 23-time Grand Slam champion exited the National Bank Open on ...

Delivered another later in that opening game, too, showing off the superb serve that helped her to so many victories. But because of a leg injury that sidelined her for the last half of 2021 and first half of 2022, she was playing for only the third time in the past 12 months, and it showed. "Belinda played so well today."

Serena Williams has lost her first match since telling the world she is ready to leave professional tennis.

Williams will exit the court one last time at the U.S. Open in New York next month. Williams held serve and seemed to have a jump in her set. Her longevity and ability to stay great throughout it all is unparalleled. "She's used tennis as a platform way beyond just the sport. Williams wiping away tears as she leaves the court. Throughout the evening the crowd tried to motivate Williams by yelling and clapping. Her last win in Canada came in 2013. A number of occasions the head umpire asked the fans to be quiet. Williams cried, wiping her face with a towel as she waved to the crowd. She made no mistake and ended it in short order. As Williams says goodbye to Canada.

What a scene here. She cruised to a first set victory, 6-2, in just 41 minutes.

Williams's career is coming to an end before it would if she were a male player, simply because she must choose between tennis and having more children.

For the men in her line of work, parenthood is usually framed as an opportunity for some kind of spiritual change. Djokovic, 35, won five of his grand slam titles after his son was born in 2014, and three of them after his daughter in 2017. Williams, on the other hand, won the Australian Open in 2017 while she was two months pregnant, which, as she writes, seems “almost impossible”. The biggest impact having four children had on his body is that he needed surgery in 2016 because he twisted his knee while he was running a bath for them. But she can’t because she has to choose between having more children and having a playing career. She’s won more singles titles than any of them, more Olympic medals too, and did it all, as they used to say about Ginger Rogers, “backwards and in high heels”.

The first stop on Serena Williams farewell tour came to a quick end as she fell to Belinda Bencic in second-round action at the National Bank Open on ...

Available to download now on - iPhone & iPad and Android "As I said in the article, I'm terrible at goodbyes. "Thank you," she said with a grin as the presentation ended with a gift to her from the Toronto Maple Leafs NHL and the Toronto Raptors NBA franchises. I wish I could have played better but Belinda played so well today. "As I said in the article, I'm terrible at goodbyes. "I love playing here, I've always loved playing here.