Serena Williams Retiring: Serena Williams Announces Plans to Retire From Tennis: Analysis and Takeaways (Published 2022) (2024)

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Serena Williams said she would leave the sport sometime after the U.S. Open.

On Tuesday, Williams set the stage for the tennis part of that journey to conclude at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and the U.S. Open, where it began so many championships, battles, fist pumps and screams of “Come on!” ago.

In a first-person article in the famed September issue of Vogue, published online on Tuesday, Williams said that she planned to retire from the sport after playing in the U.S. Open, which begins later this month, for the 21st time. And as she has for more than two decades, Williams made the announcement with her own unique twist, stating in the as-told-to cover story 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,” including working with her venture capital firm and growing her family, she said.

Williams was not explicit about when she might stop playing, but she hinted on Instagram that the U.S. Open could be her last tournament while leaving the door ever-so-slightly open to continue, or to come back, as players who retire often do. “The countdown has begun,” she said, adding, “I’m gonna relish these next few weeks.”

Williams is playing this week at a U.S. Open tuneup tournament in Toronto and is scheduled to play in Cincinnati during the next week.

Asked Monday after her straight-sets win over Nuria Parrizas-Diaz of Spain what motivated her now, Williams said “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Lately that’s been it for me,” she added. “I can’t wait to get to that light.”

Though some in tennis are skeptical that Williams will step away imminently, exiting the stage this year at the U.S. Open would be a fitting end to her storied career. Williams has won the singles title there six times, beginning in 1999, when she leapfrogged her older sister Venus to claim the family’s first Grand Slam championship 23 years ago, a number that matches her career Grand Slam tally. The tournament has also been the site of some of Williams’s lowest moments, including confrontations with umpires and tournament officials in the semifinals in 2009 and the finals in 2018.

“It feels like the right exclamation point, the right ending,” said Pam Shriver, the former player and tennis commentator who was one of the great doubles champions of the 1980s. “It doesn’t matter her result.”

Williams’s tennis future has been in doubt since she was forced to retire minutes into her first-round match at Wimbledon last year after she tore her hamstring.

The injury sidelined her for nearly a year. In fact, Shriver and others thought it was likely that Williams might never officially retire but would instead continue the existence that she assumed for months following her teary Wimbledon exit.

This spring though, Williams said she had the urge to play competitively again. In the Vogue story, she stated that Tiger Woods persuaded her to commit to training hard for two weeks and see what transpired. She did not immediately take his advice but eventually began hitting and signed up for the doubles competition at a grass court tournament ahead of Wimbledon .

At Wimbledon, she played a spirited but inconsistent three-hour, first-round match, losing to Harmony Tan of France, 7-5, 1-6, 7-6 (7). She showed flashes of the power and touch that had once made her nearly unbeatable, but lacked the fitness and match toughness that comes from being a regular on the WTA Tour.

Williams wrote that she and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, planned to have another child, though she lamented the choice between another child and her tennis career. She expressing envy that some male athletes, like the 45-year-old N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady, could continue to compete while their female spouses had children.

“I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete,” she said. “I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out.”

Williams won her last Grand Slam tournament title while she was pregnant during the Australian Open in 2017.

Williams has won nearly $100 million in prize money, but her tennis career has hardly prevented her from pursuing her other interests. She has frequently helped design her tennis outfits. She was an executive producer of “King Richard,” the Oscar-winning film about her family that focused on how her father took two girls from Compton, Calif., to the pinnacle of sports. In recent years, she has become a venture capitalist, creating Serena Ventures, which invests in early stage ideas and companies, many in technology and run by women.

On the tennis court, for the moment, Williams remains second to Margaret Court of Australia in Grand Slam singles championships, a record she had many chances to tie and then surpass in 2018 and 2019 when she lost four Grand Slam finals without winning a set. However, because many of Court’s wins predate the modern era of professional tennis, that shortcoming is unlikely to tarnish Williams’s legacy as the greatest female tennis player, one of the greatest players, and one of the best athletes in any sport.

“When Serena steps away from tennis, she will leave as the sport’s greatest player,” said Billie Jean King, the champion and pioneer of sports. “After a career that has inspired a new generation of players and fans, she will forever be known as a champion who won on the court and raised the global profile of the sport off it.”

Beyond all the championships — Williams has won 73 singles titles, 23 in doubles, two in mixed doubles and has played on four Olympic teams, winning four gold medals — her impact on how the world perceives female athletes and inspiring the younger Black girls who now lead American women’s tennis may be her greatest legacies.

With a unique mix of power, strength, speed, touch and the tennis intelligence that produced her dominance, Williams made irrelevant the distinction between great male and female tennis players as no woman had done.

Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the great male tennis players of the 21st century — and the greatest the men’s game has ever produced — spoke of Williams as one of them.

Last year at the U.S. Open, as the pressure mounted on Djokovic to win a rare calendar year Grand Slam, he said only Williams could understand what he was going through.

Williams came to the U.S. Open in 2015 having won the year’s first three Grand Slam singles titles but lost to the unseeded Roberta Vinci of Italy in the semifinals. Winning the title that year would have given her a fifth consecutive Grand Slam singles championship, since she had already won four consecutive Grand Slam singles titles for the second time, a feat now known as the “Serena Slam.”

None of this has surprised Rick Macci, the famed professional coach who three decades ago evaluated Serena and Venus Williams playing in a rundown park in Compton when Black girls, especially poor ones, rarely pursued tennis. At first Macci was not impressed, but when the girls started playing points everything changed.

“There was a rage inside these two little kids once we kept score,” Macci said in an interview Tuesday. “They ran so fast they almost fell down. I took a huge chance because of what I thought I saw on the inside, and I haven’t seen it since.”

Coco Gauff, the rising 18-year-old who is the latest Black American player to bear the burden of being labeled “the next Serena,” said Williams was “the reason why I play tennis,” after her win Tuesday in Toronto.

“I saw somebody who looked like me dominating the game,” Gauff, ranked 11th in the world, “It made me believe that I could dominate, too.”

Serena Williams at the U.S. Open: Along with Venus, she was a ‘game changer.’

While emerging as the face of tennis, Williams, along with her older sister Venus, changed the faces of tennis.

“It’s a great feeling to see it,” said Martin Blackman, the general manager of player and coach development for the United States Tennis Association. “I attribute that to Serena and Venus. They completely changed the narrative.”

Blackman’s father attended the U.S. Open in Forest Hills, Queens, to see Althea Gibson in the late 1950s, and was one of three Black fans in attendance, he told his son. When Blackman went to the U.S. Open for the first time 20 years later as a fan, there were more Black spectators than the amount his father saw, but nothing like now, thanks largely to the Williamses. Blackman went to the tournament later, as a player representative in 1999, the year Serena won her first major singles title at age 17.

“I had the privilege of working in the junior space at that time, and I gradually started to see more and more African American girls and African American boys coming to our camps,” he said. “And the common thread was the inspiration and demonstration effect that Serena and Venus provided. That was the inflection point. That was the game changer.”

Over a quarter-century, Serena Williams came to dominate the U.S. Open, winning six singles titles and reaching four other singles finals; winning two doubles titles, with Venus; and winning a mixed doubles title. She also flamed out in spectacular fashion on more than one occasion.

For each title, there were untold numbers of players, like Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys, Naomi Osaka, Coco Gauff and others, whose passion for the game was ignited by Williams’s fiery and unapologetic charisma.

There were groundbreaking victories, shocking losses, emotional outbursts and hours of thrilling, inspiring tennis, all of which is coming to an end. Williams wrote in a cover story for Vogue magazine, published online Tuesday, that she was transitioning away from tennis to focus on other pursuits, including growing her family.

“I started playing tennis with the goal of winning the U.S. Open,” she wrote.

She attained that goal, and plenty more. In an era of the sport when American men faltered, she more than carried the load for the nation’s tennis aspirations.

Williams was 16, beads in her hair, when she played her first U.S. Open singles match, beating Nicole Pratt and making it to the third round. But being Serena Williams, she did come away with a title, winning mixed doubles with Max Mirnyi.

“Even at that age you could see her talent and athleticism,” Mirnyi, 45, recalled. “I would notice, every time she went back to strike the ball, the opponents would be back on their heels. They literally backed up.”

Mirnyi’s father, Nikolai, was responsible for arranging the pairing two months earlier at Wimbledon. He asked Richard Williams, Serena’s father, and within days the two had won their first tournament. The only things that could stop them, Mirnyi felt, were the warnings and point penalties chair umpires would impose when beads fell out of Williams’s hair and onto the court.

“I kept saying, ‘We don’t want to lose any points because of the beads,’” Mirnyi recalled. “And she would just say, ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ And it was.”

But a singles title was her mission. Her first major singles championship came at the 1999 U.S. Open when she beat Martina Hingis in the final at Arthur Ashe Stadium to become the first Black woman to win a Grand Slam event since Gibson, who won five, including the 1957 and 1958 U.S. Opens.

Upon winning, she put her hands to her heart and could be seen saying, “Oh my God, I won, oh my God.” Later, she spoke to President Bill Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, by telephone.

In 2001, fans saw the first of the awkward Williams sister duels at a major final, won by Venus Williams. The next year, Serena Williams captured rematches at the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

It would be six years before she beat Jelena Jankovic for the 2008 U.S. Open title, which was followed in 2009 by an on-court flare-up that abruptly ended her semifinal match with Kim Clijsters. Williams had been called for a foot fault that set up a match point, then accosted the lineswoman. Williams was assessed a point penalty, which gave the match to a stunned Clijsters, who went on to win the tournament.

Williams won three straight titles beginning in 2012; in 2015, she entered New York looking unbeatable. She had won the three previous major events that year, and winning the fourth would have given her the coveted Grand Slam. But the pressure proved too much, and she was upset in a semifinal by an unseeded Italian, Roberta Vinci.

Her 2018 Open final, against Osaka, was marred by a lengthy and intermittent dispute between Williams and the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos, who initially set off the uproar by calling a code violation on Williams because her coach was signaling to her from the seats. The argument ensued over two changeovers and resulted in her losing a game, and her focus, allowing Osaka to take her first major title amid a cascade of boos and jeers.

The spectators were squarely on Williams’s side, and still are. On Tuesday, after news broke that Williams is retiring, 13,000 tickets were sold by 3 p.m., the U.S.T.A. said. As it has been for years, fans will flock to the U.S. Open again, because Serena, along with Venus, made Flushing one of the premier spots in the country to see a celebrated, groundbreaking Black hero in person.

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For Williams, tennis — not motherhood — was a sacrifice.

Her daughter, whom she calls Olympia, wants a little sister.

And Williams? She and her husband, Alexis Ohanian, would like that too.

“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,” Williams said in Vogue. “I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out.”

She is gearing up to walk both feet off the court, and in doing so, she continues to model what family planning can look like at the highest levels of sport.

In April 2017, Williams announced she was pregnant to the world by accident, uploading a photo of herself with the text “20 weeks” to Snapchat. The news, once confirmed, had fans doing some quick math. She had been about eight weeks pregnant when she won the Australian Open earlier that year.

She gave birth to Olympia on Sept. 1, 2017, and was bedridden for the first six weeks of motherhood because of a life-threatening pulmonary embolism.

She was soon plotting her return to the court, joining a long list of women who made it back to the highest levels of their sport after childbirth not just to compete, but to win.

In 1960, two years after giving birth to her daughter, the sprinter Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals at the Rome Olympics. Joy Fawcett, a three-time Olympian, was among the first American soccer players to have children midcareer — she played every minute of the World Cup in 1995, 1999 and 2003, each competition a year or two after giving birth to one of her three children. And the Olympic swimmer Dara Torres returned to competition just a few weeks after giving birth in 2006, won a national title in the 100-meter freestyle in 2007 and took home three silver medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

It’s a list that continues to grow and now includes the sprinter Allyson Felix, the most decorated U.S. track and field athlete in Olympic history, who returned to the global stage after having an emergency cesarean section at 32 weeks in 2018. A few weeks ago, Felix ran her last world-championship event in a full stadium of fans who gave her a standing ovation. Her daughter, Camryn, now a toddler, was in the stands.

Tennis is a uniquely grueling sport for new parents. Much of the calendar year is considered in season, and much of that season is spent crisscrossing the globe for tournaments.

But returning to the biggest stages in the world did not seem to be much of a question for Williams. “I went from a C-section to a second pulmonary embolism to a Grand Slam final. I played while breastfeeding. I played through postpartum depression,” she wrote. She reached her 10th Wimbledon final in July 2018, less than a year after childbirth.

Williams’s daughter hasn’t been far from the stands since. There’s Olympia at the Fed Cup, sporting a red-and-white headband with a glitter bow. And at the ASB classic, sitting on her dad’s lap, clapping, eager to see what shiny trophy Mom has this time. At the Top Seed Open, she was spotted in the stands, a bit distracted by an iPhone (happens to the best of us). And she had a front-row seat to the U.S. Open bubble of 2020, pointing and saying “mama” in a nearly empty stadium.

In the past five years, Williams said, she has not spent more than 24 hours away from her daughter.

But Williams made one thing clear. Her evolution (retirement, she said, is not a word she likes to use) is not an easy decision; it’s not one she’s been able to talk about with anyone other than her therapist. This is not a simple ride into the sunset. No, it’s a more difficult decision — one that she really didn’t want to make.

“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family,” she said. “Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity.”

That’s the case for 36-year-old Rafael Nadal. He announced that his wife, Maria Francisca Perello, is pregnant with their first child. In a news conference in June, Nadal, the winner of 22 Grand Slam singles titles, said, “I don’t think it will change my professional life.”

Indeed.

Williams knows exactly how becoming a mother changed her professional life. “The fact is that nothing is a sacrifice for me when it comes to Olympia. It all just makes sense,” she said, continuing, “I think tennis, by comparison, has always felt like a sacrifice — though it’s one I enjoyed making.”

Before she steps off the court for good, she may have a few more performances to put on for the almost-5-year-old fan in the stands, excitedly waving her arms for her mama.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett.

Charting a career at the top.

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Looking back at Serena’s play through the years.

Playing at Wimbledon in 2005. Her sister Venus would win the tournament that year.

Serena has long been a symbol for Black women.

Williams, with her deep brown skin and curvy body shape, has experienced racism, sexism and body shaming throughout her career that many Black women can relate to. So when she takes the court — in all white at Wimbledon, in catsuits, in braids or as a blonde — many Black women come together to support her and, in a sense, support themselves, too.

“For me Serena has always been Black excellence and misunderstood,” said Cari Champion, a journalist and television host who is Black.

Champion runs Brown Girls Dream, a mentorship program for women of color that has received financial support from Williams. “I just love her for always being honest and true and authentic to who she is, whether it was received well or not,” Champion said.

Black women, especially those with darker skin tones like Williams’s, are often perceived as less feminine than white women. In 2014, Shamil Tarpischev, then the president of the Russian Tennis Federation, was fined $25,000 and suspended for a year by the Women’s Tennis Association after he referred to Williams and her sister Venus as “the Williams brothers.” He also said it was “frightening when you look at them.”

In a 2018 interview with Harper’s Bazaar U.K., Serena Williams said those kinds of comments were “hard for me.”

“People would say I was born a guy, all because of my arms, or because I’m strong,” she said. “I was different to Venus: She was thin and tall and beautiful, and I am strong and muscular — and beautiful, but, you know, it was just totally different.”

Coco Gauff, who is Black and one of the rising stars in women’s tennis, said on Tuesday at a tournament in Toronto that Serena Williams was “the reason why I play tennis.”

“Tennis being a predominantly white sport, it definitely helped a lot because I saw somebody look like me dominating the game and it made me believe that I could dominate, too,” she said.

Champion is often among the Black women on social media alternately rooting for Williams and challenging people who make negative comments about her or downplay her accomplishments. Champion said that with 23 major singles titles, Williams should be seen as one of the greatest athletes ever — male or female — but many recognize her only as a great female athlete.

“Black women understood that,” Champion said. “We understood when people cannot see our contributions to society.”

Champion said Williams and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in June was sworn in as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, are important because they show Black women and girls that they can “succeed at all levels.”

“Serena is a self-made woman in a world that didn’t really understand who she was,” Champion said.

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Serena Williams forced tennis to reconsider how it viewed rest.

At that point, Williams had won five of the six Grand Slam tournaments she entered during a stretch that ran from 2002 to 2003, but fell out of the top 10 rankings in 2005 as she dealt with a hamstring injury and out of the top 100 in 2006 as she rehabbed her knee. In that time, she pursued acting (she was a patient on “E.R.” in 2005), showed up on red carpets, and sought out therapy for depression, which she described in her 2009 memoir.

Evert was hardly alone in criticizing Williams for not putting her tennis career first. Later, when she took extended stretches from the game to recover from injuries, those absences prompted analysts to question her love for the game.

Focused insularity is a defining characteristic of professional tennis, whose nine-month season is organized around tournaments where athletes are isolated and have to summon single-minded intensity to win a trophy over the course of a few weeks, then do it again.

Burnout ends as many careers as injury or decline in a sport where future pros often begin intense training in adolescence, travel on the junior circuit in their early teens and turn pro before they can vote. Tennis champions including Bjorn Borg, Steffi Graf, Jennifer Capriati, and most recently Ashleigh Barty, the world No. 1 who announced her retirement at 25 in March, have cited burnout for their exits.

“Fire is an absolutely essential thing, but it also might be distracting when it’s too strong, when it just booms too fast, when it’s too intense,” said Daria Abramowicz, a sports and performance psychologist who has worked with Iga Swiatek and the Polish national cycling team. “It might be connected to perfectionism, which actually is absolutely not a constructive thing in terms of building strong performance.”

Under the guidance of their parents, Serena and Venus Williams avoided the junior circuit, which had battered some players’ self esteem. During her breaks from the game, Serena Williams often used her time to nurture other interests, a decision that undoubtedly extended her 24-year career. She enrolled in Palm Beach Nail School to get her certification as a nail technician in 2009 as she again rehabbed her knee. Both Venus and Serena studied fashion at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and each launched successful clothing lines that they nurtured between matches.

Williams again took time to focus on her mental health in 2015 after a semifinal loss in that year’s U.S. Open thwarted her attempt at a calendar-year sweep of the Grand Slam events. In 2018, after the emotional U.S. Open final she lost to Naomi Osaka, Williams in her downtime sought therapy again as she considered all that had happened in the match.

It has become more common in recent years for tennis pros to take time off without backlash over their priorities. Barty had previously taken a break from the W.T.A. in 2014 to play professional cricket. Osaka took time off from tennis in 2021, citing a need to address her mental health. Victoria Azarenka returned to the game in 2017 after a yearlong maternity leave, the same year that Williams gave birth. Their returns helped prompt the WTA to change its rules to accommodate athletes returning from pregnancy.

Abramowicz cited Williams, alongside Barty and Mikaela Shiffrin, the Alpine skiing Olympian who took time off after her father’s death, as examples of the changing attitudes toward mental health among professional athletes. She said the athletes she counsels were more comfortable talking about it in locker rooms, but noted that they can’t typically accept the concept of work-life balance because their work is a centerpiece of their identities.

“There is a lot of work to be done still to understand this fundamental truth that I think is, first of all, and always a human being has this right to to take a pause and a break because they are not robots,” Abramowicz said.

Williams wrote in her retirement announcement that she hoped to be remembered for her off-court pursuits as much as her victories.

“Over the years, I hope that people come to think of me as symbolizing something bigger than tennis. I admire Billie Jean because she transcended her sport,” she said, referring to the retired champion Billie Jean King. “I’d like it to be: Serena is this and she’s that and she was a great tennis player and she won those slams.”

These are Williams’s upcoming tournaments (that we know of) before she retires.

Her next match is set for Wednesday in the round of 32 of the National Bank Open in Toronto against Belinda Bencic, a Swiss player ranked 12th who defeated Tereza Martincova on Tuesday. Williams will be scheduled for a night match, the tournament said on its website. Bencic, 25, last faced Williams at the 2017 Australian Open.

National Bank Open matches are televised by its official broadcasters Sportsnet and TVA Sports. In the United States, the Tennis Channel is broadcasting the Canadian tournament, and some matches are available on Bally Sports.

After the National Bank Open, which ends on Sunday, Williams is expected to play in Mason, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, at the Western & Southern Open, which runs Aug. 13-21. The tournament said on Twitter that it was “honored to be a small part of” Williams’s career.

“We’re so excited to watch her at our tournament this year,” the tournament said.

Williams is expected to play outside Cincinnati with a protected ranking that has yet to be determined. The tournament, which has tickets available online, is set to feature a number of formidable players, including Iga Swiatek, the No. 1-ranked player on the women’s tour, and Emma Raducanu, the reigning U.S. Open champion.

After the Western & Southern Open, there are two more tournaments before the U.S. Open — Tennis in the Land in Cleveland and the National Bank Championships in Granby, Quebec. Player lists for the tournaments, which run concurrently Aug. 21-27, have not yet been released, and it was unclear whether Williams will play in either.

The U.S. Open, the last Grand Slam tournament of the year, begins Aug. 29 and runs through Sept. 11. The tournament will be televised by ESPN, and has tickets available online. The women’s final is scheduled for Sept. 10.

While the U.S. Open draw has not been set, the first chance for fans to see Williams would be during the first round of the tournament on Aug. 29 or 30, a match that would most likely be played inside Arthur Ashe Stadium.

“I’m not looking for some ceremonial, final on-court moment,” Williams told Vogue. “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 was vague about her plans after the U.S. Open, and did not pinpoint exactly when she would wind down her time in the sport.

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After tennis, Serena Williams could spend more time on her venture capital firm.

“I’ve always been fascinated with technology, and I’ve always loved how it really shapes our lives,” said Williams, who has been investing for nine years. “When I met my husband, that was our first conversation. That’s how we met. I was talking about investments.” Williams’s husband is the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Serena Ventures doesn’t require that its founders come from historically underrepresented backgrounds, though it says about three-quarters of its portfolio company founders do.

The founding partners of Serena Ventures are Williams and Alison Rapaport Stillman. Williams’s other business activities include fashion lines, entertainment deals and a seat on the board of Poshmark. Rapaport Stillman previously worked at JPMorgan, Wasserman and Melo7 Tech. The fund’s limited partners include Norwest Venture Partners, Capital G (Alphabet’s growth fund) and LionTree.

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Williams has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, one shy of tying a record.

“Oh, my God, I won, oh my God,” Williams said, hand to her chest, looking as surprised as the rest of us.

Williams has seldom been the underdog since, but surprises have continued to be her trademark.

When she won the 2017 Australian Open, she was well aware that she was two months pregnant, but she kept the secret from all but her closest friends and family during the tournament and in the weeks that followed.

Now, the trophy from that victory sits on a shelf in the bedroom of her daughter, Olympia, who will turn 5 in September.

A strong argument can be made that that victory, which was Williams’s 23rd Grand Slam singles title, was as remarkable as her first, when she became the first African American woman since Althea Gibson in 1958 to win the U.S. Open.

Seven of Williams’s other major singles victories have come against her older sister Venus, who was born just 15 months ahead of her.

Williams, who said in Vogue on Tuesday that she plans to retire from tennis, is one championship shy of Margaret Court’s career record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles. Williams indicated that she would compete again in this year’s U.S. Open, which could end up being her last chance to tie Court’s record.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record,” Williams told the magazine. “Obviously I do. But day to day, I’m really not thinking about her.”

Williams gave Vogue the exclusive on her retirement.

Vogue’s editor, Anna Wintour, in real life is, first, a tennis fan and, second, a fashion person. She plays tennis at the Midtown Tennis Club and another one of her favorite tennis players is Roger Federer. Wintour has been to nearly every Grand Slam that Williams has won, as well as her U.S. Open appearances. (In 2019, she was photographed in Williams’s box, sitting right behind Meghan Markle.)

Wintour first placed Williams in the magazine in 1998, when Annie Leibovitz photographed Williams with her sister Venus in matching black-and-white ball gowns from Carolina Herrera.

Since then, Williams has been on the cover of Vogue numerous times: in 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2020.

Williams has been to five Met galas and debuted her baby bump at the May 2017 gala. The following year, the first pictures of her with her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., by Mario Testino, were for her Vogue cover.

Further, celebrities breaking major pieces of news in fashion magazines makes a certain amount of sense. Women’s magazines expressly exist to celebrate women. Cover subjects are generally treated well, both by photographers and writers.

The exposure they receive there also helps them obtain campaigns and roles as brand ambassadors.

Over the years, Williams has moved steadily into that sphere. Her corporate sponsors in recent years have included Nike, JPMorgan Chase, Beats by Dre, Pepsi and Audemars Piguet, the Swiss watch manufacturer with pieces that typically run over $20,000.

And when Williams married her husband, Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, Wintour consulted with her on her wedding dress, which was designed by Sarah Burton, for Alexander McQueen.

People magazine described it as a “grand slam.”