Serena Williams Is Retiring from Tennis
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Serena Williams, who has dominated women's tennis for over two decades and is widely considered the greatest women's tennis player of all time, announced today she will be retiring from the sport.
"I have never liked the word retirement," Williams wrote in Vogue. "Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me."
Williams first won the U.S. Open in 1999, and has gone on to win 23 Grand Slam titles with her most recent at the 2017 Australian Open, when she was two months pregnant.
She plans to play the U.S. Open this month, and that will likely be the end of her remarkable career. "I don’t know if I will be ready to win New York. But I’m going to try. And the lead-up tournaments will be fun," she wrote at the very end of her essay. "I’m not looking for some ceremonial, final on-court moment. I’m terrible at goodbyes, the world’s worst. But please know that I am more grateful for you than I can ever express in words. You have carried me to so many wins and so many trophies. I’m going to miss that version of me, that girl who played tennis. And I’m going to miss you."
Williams, now 40, married tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian in 2017. They have one daughter, Olympia, and Williams writes that they want to have more kids, but she doesn't want to be pregnant again as an athlete. "I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out," she writes. Part of the reason she is leaving tennis is to focus on her family and business ventures.
Williams has been a trailblazer, and her impact on the sport—particularly on Black women playing tennis—is immeasurable. "I don’t particularly like to think about my legacy," she writes in her goodbye essay. "But I’d like to think that thanks to opportunities afforded to me, women athletes feel that they can be themselves on the court." She continues, "I’d like to think that I went through some hard times as a professional tennis player so that the next generation could have it easier."
Williams is currently playing at a hard court tournament in Toronto, and is set to play the Cincinnati Open next week. Both are lead-up tournaments to the U.S. Open, which begins August 29 in New York City.
"I’m gonna relish these next few weeks," she wrote.
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