Serena Williams, the 23-time grand slam champion who had ruled the sport ever since winning her first US Open in 1999, said on Tuesday that she planned to retire from the sport after playing once more in the tournament, which begins later this month.
Serena, who long ago transcended her sport as a dominant cultural figure, said in an as-told-to 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 to me.”
“I’ve been reluctant to admit that I have to move on from playing tennis. It’s like a taboo topic. It comes up, and I start to cry. I think the only person I’ve really gone there with is my therapist,” she said. Serena won her first singles match in 430 days on Monday, defeating Spain’s Nuria Párrizas Díaz 6-4, 6-3 at the Canadian Open in Toronto. With her daughter Olympia “wanting to be a big sister”, Serena said that she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, planned to have another child.
“In the last year, Alexis and I have been trying to have another child, and we recently got some information from my doctor that put my mind at ease and made me feel that whenever we’re ready, we can add to our family.
“I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out,” Serena wrote in the Vogue article. Serena’s last grand slam tournament victory came while she was pregnant during the Australian Open in 2017. She was eliminated from Wimbledon in June in the first round. “Unfortunately I wasn’t ready to win Wimbledon this year,” she said.
“And 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. “I have never liked the word retirement,” she wrote. “It doesn’t feel like a modern word to me. I’ve been thinking of this as a transition but I want to be sensitive about how I use that word.
“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.
“A few years ago I quietly started Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm. Soon after that, I started a family. I want to grow that family...
“There is no happiness in this topic (of retirement) for me... I feel a great deal of pain. It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine.
“I hate that I have to be at this crossroads… the end of a story that started in Compton, California, with a little Black girl who just wanted to play tennis. This sport has given me so much. I love to win. I love the battle”
(Written with inputs from NYTNS & Reuters)
