NEW YORK — Serena Williams is set to call it a career, at least when it comes to tennis.
The soon-to-be 41-year-old superstar penned a farewell to the game she has dominated for much of the last two decades in a Vogue magazine essay that was published on Tuesday morning.
While not specifically saying the U.S. Open, which begins in Queens on Aug. 29, will be her final tournament, she wrote on Instagram promoting her piece: “I’m gonna relish these next few weeks.”
One of the greatest to ever pick up a racket, Williams earned her first win in more than a year on Monday after beating Nuria Parrizas-Diaz 6-3, 6-4 at the National Bank Open. The 23-time Grand Slam champ lost in the first round at Wimbledon last month in her first tournament of the season. Before Monday, her last win came at the 2021 French Open.
“I’m just happy to get a win. It’s been a very long time, I forgot what that felt like,” Williams said after the match in Toronto.
“I have never liked the word retirement,” Serena wrote in Vogue in an as-told-to piece by Rob Haskell. “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, which means something very specific and important to a community of people. 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.”
Serena, whose last Grand Slam title came in 2017 at the Australian Open, says she wants to grow her family and continue her work with the venture capital firm — Serena Ventures — that she started “a few years ago.”
She admitted even talking about walking away from tennis leaves her with “an uncomfortable lump in my throat.”
“There is no happiness in this topic for me,” she wrote. “I know it’s not the usual thing to say, but I feel a great deal of pain. It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads.”
Serena won her first Grand Slam at the U.S. Open in 1999 and has won the title in Queens six times.
Her 23 Grand Slam singles titles are the most of any player, male or female, in the Open era and just one shy of Margaret Court’s record.
“There are people who say I’m not the GOAT because I didn’t pass Margaret Court’s record of 24 grand slam titles, which she achieved before the “open era” that began in 1968. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record. Obviously I do. But day to day, I’m really not thinking about her.”
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