The world first got here to know Serena Williams as a 17-year-old with beaded braids, overwhelming energy and precocious intelligence and poise when she shocked her sport by profitable the primary of her 23 Grand Slam singles titles on the 1999 U.S. Open.
So started a journey that, with loads of assist from her sister Venus and her trailblazing mother and father, modified the sport, transcended tennis and turned Williams right into a beacon of trend, leisure and enterprise, shifting the way in which folks inside and outdoors of sports activities seen feminine athletes.
On Tuesday, Williams set the stage for the tennis a part of that journey to conclude on the Billie Jean King Nationwide Tennis Middle and the U.S. Open, the place it started so many championships, battles, fist pumps and screams of “Come on!” in the past.
In a first-person article within the famed September difficulty of Vogue, printed on-line on Tuesday, Williams mentioned that she deliberate to retire from the game after enjoying within the U.S. Open, which begins later this month, for the twenty first time. And as she has for greater than 20 years, Williams made the announcement along with her personal distinctive twist, stating within the as-told-to cowl story that she has “by no means favored the phrase retirement,” and most well-liked the phrase “evolution” to explain her subsequent steps.
“I’m evolving away from tennis, towards different issues which might be vital to me,” together with working along with her enterprise capital agency and rising her household, she mentioned.
Williams was not specific about when she would possibly cease enjoying, however she hinted on Instagram that the U.S. Open could possibly be her final event whereas leaving the door ever-so-slightly open to proceed, or to come back again, as gamers who retire usually do. “The countdown has begun,” she mentioned, including, “I’m gonna relish these subsequent few weeks.”
Williams is enjoying this week at a U.S. Open tuneup event in Toronto and is scheduled to play in Cincinnati in the course of the subsequent week.
Requested Monday after her straight-sets win over Nuria Parrizas-Diaz of Spain what motivated her now, Williams mentioned “the sunshine on the finish of the tunnel.”
“Recently that’s been it for me,” she added. “I can’t wait to get to that mild.”
Although some in tennis are skeptical that Williams will step away imminently, exiting the stage this 12 months on the U.S. Open could be a becoming finish to her storied profession. Williams has received the singles title there six occasions, starting in 1999, when she leapfrogged her older sister Venus to assert the household’s first Grand Slam championship 23 years in the past, a quantity that matches her profession Grand Slam tally. The event has additionally been the positioning of a few of Williams’s lowest moments, together with confrontations with umpires and event officers within the semifinals in 2009 and the finals in 2018.
“It appears like the appropriate exclamation level, the appropriate ending,” mentioned Pam Shriver, the previous participant and tennis commentator who was one of many nice doubles champions of the Eighties. “It doesn’t matter her end result.”
Williams’s tennis future has been doubtful since she was pressured to retire minutes into her first-round match at Wimbledon final 12 months after she tore her hamstring.
The damage sidelined her for practically a 12 months. In reality, Shriver and others thought it was probably that Williams would possibly by no means formally retire however would as a substitute proceed the existence that she assumed for months following her teary Wimbledon exit.
This spring although, Williams mentioned she had the urge to play competitively once more. Within the Vogue story, she said that Tiger Woods persuaded her to decide to coaching onerous for 2 weeks and see what transpired. She didn’t instantly take his recommendation however finally started hitting and signed up for the doubles competitors at a grass court docket event forward of Wimbledon .
At Wimbledon, she performed a spirited however inconsistent three-hour, first-round match, shedding to Concord Tan of France, 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (7). She confirmed flashes of the facility and contact that had as soon as made her practically unbeatable, however lacked the health and match toughness that comes from being an everyday on the WTA Tour.
Williams wrote that she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, deliberate to have one other little one, although she lamented the selection between one other little one and her tennis profession. She expressing envy that some male athletes, just like the 45-year-old N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady, might proceed to compete whereas their feminine spouses had youngsters.
“I positively don’t wish to be pregnant once more as an athlete,” she mentioned. “I should be two ft into tennis or two ft out.”
Williams received her final Grand Slam event title whereas she was pregnant in the course of the Australian Open in 2017.
Williams has received practically $100 million in prize cash, however her tennis profession has hardly prevented her from pursuing her different pursuits. She has regularly helped design her tennis outfits. She was an govt producer of “King Richard,” the Oscar-winning movie about her household that centered on how her father took two ladies from Compton, Calif., to the head of sports activities. Lately, she has turn into a enterprise capitalist, creating Serena Ventures, which invests in early stage concepts and corporations, many in expertise and run by ladies.
On the tennis court docket, for the second, Williams stays second to Margaret Courtroom of Australia in Grand Slam singles championships, a file she had many possibilities to tie after which surpass in 2018 and 2019 when she misplaced 4 Grand Slam finals with out profitable a set. Nevertheless, as a result of lots of Courtroom’s wins predate the fashionable period {of professional} tennis, that shortcoming is unlikely to tarnish Williams’s legacy as the best feminine tennis participant, one of many biggest gamers, and top-of-the-line athletes in any sport.
“When Serena steps away from tennis, she is going to go away as the game’s biggest participant,” mentioned Billie Jean King, the champion and pioneer of sports activities. “After a profession that has impressed a brand new era of gamers and followers, she is going to endlessly be often called a champion who received on the court docket and raised the worldwide profile of the game off it.”
Past all of the championships — Williams has received 73 singles titles, 23 in doubles, two in combined doubles and has performed on 4 Olympic groups, profitable 4 gold medals — her impression on how the world perceives feminine athletes and provoking the youthful Black ladies who now lead American ladies’s tennis could also be her biggest legacies.
With a singular mixture of energy, energy, velocity, contact and the tennis intelligence that produced her dominance, Williams made irrelevant the excellence between nice female and male tennis gamers as no girl had completed.
Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the good male tennis gamers of the twenty first century — and the best the boys’s sport has ever produced — spoke of Williams as one in every of them.
Final 12 months on the U.S. Open, because the strain mounted on Djokovic to win a uncommon calendar 12 months Grand Slam, he mentioned solely Williams might perceive what he was going by.
Williams got here to the U.S. Open in 2015 having received the 12 months’s first three Grand Slam singles titles however misplaced to the unseeded Roberta Vinci of Italy within the semifinals. Successful the title that 12 months would have given her a fifth consecutive Grand Slam singles championship, since she had already received 4 consecutive Grand Slam singles titles for the second time, a feat now often called the “Serena Slam.”
None of this has stunned Rick Macci, the famed skilled coach who three many years in the past evaluated Serena and Venus Williams enjoying in a rundown park in Compton when Black ladies, particularly poor ones, not often pursued tennis. At first Macci was not impressed, however when the ladies began enjoying factors every little thing modified.
“There was a rage inside these two little children as soon as we saved rating,” Macci mentioned in an interview Tuesday. “They ran so quick they virtually fell down. I took an enormous probability due to what I believed I noticed on the within, and I haven’t seen it since.”
Coco Gauff, the rising 18-year-old who’s the most recent Black American participant to bear the burden of being labeled “the subsequent Serena,” mentioned Williams was “the explanation why I play tennis,” after her win Tuesday in Toronto.
“I noticed any individual who appeared like me dominating the sport,” Gauff, ranked eleventh on this planet, “It made me imagine that I might dominate, too.”