Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam champion and a cultural touchstone since winning her first US Open in 1999, said in a magazine article published online Tuesday that she planned to retire from the sport after playing again in the tournament, which starts later. this month
Williams, who long ago changed and transcended tennis to become a beacon of fashion, entertainment and business, changing the way people inside and outside of sports viewed female athletes, saying in a cover story for Vogue that she has “never liked the word retirement” and preferred the word “evolution” to describe her next steps. “I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important for me,” including working with his venture capital firm and raising his family.
He wasn’t specific about when he might stop playing, but he hinted on Instagram that the US Open could be his last tournament while leaving the door slightly open to continuing or returning, as players who retire often do. ‘take away from the game. . “The countdown has begun,” he said, adding: “I’m going to be rocking these next few weeks.”
Williams is competing in the US Open tournaments, this week in Toronto and next week in Cincinnati.
Walking off the stage this year at the US Open would be a fitting end to Williams’ storied career. He won his first Grand Slam title there, in 1999, when he was just 17, or 23 years ago, a number that matches the number of Grand Slam singles in his career.
“It feels like the right exclamation point, the right ending,” said Pam Shriver, a former tennis player and commentator who was one of the great doubles champions of the 1980s. “It doesn’t matter his result, and it’s a conclusion that feels much better than last year at Wimbledon.”
At Wimbledon in 2021, Williams was forced to withdraw from her first-round match after just 34 minutes when she slipped and ruptured her hamstring.
The injury sidelined her for almost a year. In fact, Shriver and others thought it highly likely that Williams would never officially retire, but instead moved closer to the existence she assumed for nearly a year after her tearful Wimbledon exit.
This spring, however, Williams said he was eager to get back to playing competitively. In the Vogue story, she said Tiger Woods convinced her to commit to training hard for two weeks and see what happened. She didn’t immediately follow his advice, but eventually started hitting and signed up to compete in doubles at a Wimbledon tune-up event.
At Wimbledon in June, she played a spirited but inconsistent three-hour first-round match, but lost to France’s Harmoniy Tan 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (7), during which she showed flashes of power and the touch that had once made him almost unbeatable.
Williams said she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, planned to have another child.
“Alexis and I have been trying for another child for the past year, and we recently got word from my doctor that reassured me and made me feel that whenever we’re ready, we can add to the family. our family. I definitely don’t want to get pregnant again as an athlete. I need to be two feet in tennis or two feet outside.”
Williams’ last Grand Slam tournament victory came while pregnant during the 2017 Australian Open.
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready to win Wimbledon this year,” Williams said. “And I don’t know if I’ll be ready to win New York. But I will try. And the pre-tournaments will be fun.”
Williams has won nearly $100 million in prize money.
Williams is currently second only to Australia’s Margaret Court in Grand Slam singles championships, a record she had multiple chances to tie and then surpassed in 2018 and 2019 when she lost four Grand Slam finals without winning a set. Yet few in tennis believe the shortfall should in any way tarnish the legacy Williams leaves behind as the greatest women’s tennis player, one of the greatest players and one of the greatest athletes in any sport.
Beyond all the championships—he’s won 73 singles titles, 23 doubles, two mixed doubles and played on four Olympic teams, winning four gold medals—this may be his greatest legacy.
With her unique combination of power, strength, speed, touch and the tennis intelligence that produced her dominance, Williams relegated to irrelevance any distinction between great male and female tennis players and athletes as no woman had ever done before. This was no accident, Williams occasionally interrupted reporters during press conferences if they identified her as one of the best women’s tennis players.
“Tennis player,” she said.
“Tennis,” the reporters would say, and then continue with the question.
His fellow professionals hardly resisted. Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the greatest men’s tennis players of the 21st century — and the greatest the game has ever produced — spoke of Williams as one of them.
Last year at the US Open, as the pressure mounted on Djokovic to win one last championship to complete a rare calendar-year Grand Slam, he spoke of how only Williams could understand what was going on.
Williams came into the 2015 US Open having won the first three Grand Slam singles titles of the year, but lost to unseeded Roberta Vinci of Italy in the semifinals in three sets after win the first A title at that US Open would have given him a fifth consecutive Grand Slam singles championship, as he had already won four consecutive Grand Slam singles titles for the second time. This feat became known as the “Serena Slam”.
Correction:
August 9, 2022
An earlier version of this article misstated Serena Williams’ age when she first won the US Open in 1999. She was 17, not 18.