Serena Williams To Retire from Tennis

The GOAT will hang up her racket following the U.S. Open.

The GOAT of tennis will be hanging up her racket come September.

Serena Williams announced on Tuesday that the upcoming U.S. Open tournament will be her last. “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution,” she wrote for the September issue of Vogue.  “I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me.”

Serena Williams. Photo: @serenawilliams.

Williams, with her confident, headstrong, competitive energy, has become a legend both within the tennis world and in popular culture: she’s won more grand slam titles (23) than any other player in the Open Era, she’s littered the covers of newspapers and magazines around the world, and her childhood was deconstructed in an Oscar-winning film starring Will Smith (King Richard). In many ways, Williams, along with her sister Venus, changed thew entire trajectory of women’s tennis, ushering in a new era of aggressive, fast, and powerful play.

Since breaking onto the scene in 1995, Williams has been dominant, holding the No. 1 spot in the world for 319 weeks. Across all currently active tennis players, Williams holds the most combined major titles in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. She remained dominant through her pregnancy in 2017, winning the singles title at the 2017 Australian Open while two months pregnant.

Williams with Olympia. Photo: @serenawilliams.

 

Though her dominance has slightly waned over the past few years, Williams has remained playing matches at the highest level of the sport. Now 40, she cites her reasoning for retirement as her family, which consists of her husband, Alexis Ohanian, and her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian, who “prays to Jehovah to bring her a baby sister” at night. Having grown up with six siblings, four being sisters, Williams said she wants to give Olympia a sibling.

“I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next,” Williams continued. “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to look at this magazine when it comes out, knowing that this is it, the end of a story that started in Compton, California, with a little Black girl who just wanted to play tennis.”

Williams’ final tournament will be the 2022 U.S. Open, which kicks off on Aug, 29 in New York.

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