At the 2022 US Open, a crowd of spectators holds its breath. In the massive stadium in the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, the stands are packed. Thousands of eyes are fixed on the two figures competing below. Cameras catch their every move, broadcasting a live feed to a record-breaking five million viewers.
On the court, a tennis giant spends her final moments as a competitive player. It is September 2, 2022, and this may be the last time the world sees Serena Williams swing a racket.
Williams announced her departure from professional tennis on August 9, and the announcement caused shock waves on and off the court. Williams had been a powerhouse in the sport for so long that many couldn’t imagine what tennis would look like without her.
For many, Williams is an image of Black success in a sport long dominated by white players. But while she was one of the most impactful, Williams was certainly not the first Black player to achieve success in tennis. Arthur Ashe, Althea Gibson, Zina Garrison, and many others had broken that barrier. These legendary players racked up Grand Slam titles and Olympic golds long before the Williams sisters entered the scene.
“It goes beyond Serena,” said Khat Tuchscherer ‘23, a player on Yale’s Club Tennis team. “There was a player that I really looked up to when I was younger named Arthur Ashe, who was sort of the first majorly successful Black tennis player.”
Serena Williams and her sister Venus built on the progress that these foundational Black tennis players made. But the second they entered onto the scene, it was clear that the Williams sisters were different.
“There had been prominent black players,” said Caitlin Thompson, a collegiate tennis player who co-founded and publishes popular tennis magazine Racquet. “But really, somebody who was perceived as a threat to the establishment wasn’t on the scene until Venus and Serena started playing in the late 90s and got into some professional tournaments.”
The sisters stood apart from other players, Black or white, from the beginning, something that can be largely attributed to their father. Richard Williams took tennis lessons as a young boy. One day, he saw a Virginia Ruzici match on television. Then and there, he decided that his future daughters would be tennis stars. His mind was set, and he never gave up on this goal.
According to him, Richard crafted an 85-page plan and never deviated from it. He served as his daughters’ first coach, starting their training at the age of four. But unlike other up-and-coming tennis stars of the day, the Williams daughters operated outside the system.
“The important thing to remember is that they did not go through the US Junior development program,” said Thompson. “They did not really play with or around any of the other promising young kids coming up at that time. Their father correctly knew that that wasn’t the way to build a champion.”
Instead, Richard kept the two sisters out of the establishment, building up their skills until they were ready to enter professional tennis. Along the way, he strengthened them for what they would find when they did. “He prepared them for an establishment that wasn’t going to be friendly to them. And by them, I mean Black people — loud, proud, Black people. I think he knew from growing up in the sharecropper South that their presence in tennis was going to be a seismic change, especially if his daughters were as good as he said they were — and they were,” said Thompson.
Initially, Serena Williams wasn’t the one in the spotlight. She began her professional tennis career in the shadow of her older sister Venus. Venus was the one with the tournament invitations, coaching offers, and winning record. Venus was the rising star.
Serena Williams, on the other hand, was an underdog. She had to fight hard to get recognition. She credits her eventual rise to success not to inborn talent but to drive and determination. She would travel to Venus’s tournaments and hope that a spot would open up for her to play.
She was committed and dedicated, even as she faced a constant uphill battle. According to Thompson, “she’s always had this hunger for the limelight in a way that has meant her tennis has been aggressive and bold. She feels entitled to win — like all the really exceptional champions do. And she’s been unapologetic about that.”
Eventually, that dedication paid off. Williams made her professional debut at the age of 14, and four years later, she became the youngest Black woman in history to win a Grand Slam singles title. Today, she’s a 23-time Grand Slam champion, just one shy of the world record. She is widely considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time.
One remarkable feature of Williams’s game is her longevity. Before her, it was certainly not typical for a tennis player to start their career as one of the world’s best teenage players and remain a world best into their forties. The Guardian remarked that Williams “started her professional career beating women who were twice her age and will finish it beating girls who are half as young.”
Shriver emphasized that this endurance is part of what makes Williams so legendary. “That longevity, that excellence from your teenage years to your late thirties, is one of the things that sets her apart.”
Around the world, Williams’s name is inseparable from the sport of tennis. But her reputation and image have grown far beyond the sport. Today, she has become a cultural icon with investment ventures, merchandise, and book deals. What has caused Serena Williams to transform from an (albeit legendary) athlete into an icon?
Pamela Shriver, a Hall of Fame tennis player who is widely regarded as one of the greatest doubles players in history, thinks that what sets Williams apart is a combination of innate talent and simple grit. “Obviously, she had the talent. She had the belief, she had the mindset. She had the work ethic,” said Shriver. “And she put it all together to become a 23-time major singles champion.”
Chanda Rubin, a former top-ten professional women’s player who once beat Williams in a Los Angeles tournament, agreed that Williams’s sheer force of will is what made the difference: “When it gets tough, she kind of digs in and has that ability to fight and battle and not shy away from these big moments, these tough moments. And so I think that’s a real strength. And I think that is really one of the challenging parts about playing her.”
Williams certainly had the grit that it took to face off against skilled players. But for her, the biggest obstacles weren’t her opponents. Richard Williams had warned his daughters that, despite their talents, they might not always be welcomed with open arms into the tennis establishment. He was right.
“Their style, bombastic arrival, and the way they played tennis was not exactly seen as familiar,” said Thompson. “At worst, it was an active threat. And so they were really not received well when they came on the scene.”
The sisters were victim to the same discrimination that characterized the careers of Black players who had come before them. While things had changed since the time of Arthur Ashe, who had been prohibited from playing on the white-only courts of his hometown, racism still followed the Williams sisters. The most egregious examples come from the tennis media establishment. In 2001, for example, sports radio commentator Sid Rosenberg said that the sisters were more likely to appear in National Geographic than in Playboy (he was later fired for these remarks). After Serena Williams’s notorious loss to Naomi Osaka in the 2018 Australian Open, an Australian newspaper famously ran a cartoon depicting Williams as an angry child stomping on her racket. Many believed that this strip, which exaggerated the size of Williams’s lips, nose, and hair, harkened back to the anti-Black imagery of 1950s cartoons.
From her position as a publisher for a major tennis magazine, Thompson has a unique perspective. She believes that this racism to which Williams has been a victim is partly due to the fact that the tennis media establishment is not held to a high enough standard. “The press has not been as good or as diverse or as modern as the athletes in tennis for quite a while. And I think that definitely predates Venus and Serena, but Venus and Serena helped really show it in stark relief: how old, male, white, and misogynistic the press has been. And even now, those are the voices I hear speaking about tennis, even though the game has changed so radically from their time that it’s almost a joke.”
Not all of the racism and classism the sisters faced was obvious on the surface. Some of it also manifested in more superficial aspects of the sport, like clothing choice or the distribution of sponsorship money. Of course, tennis has always had a reputation for being a sport of the wealthy — a reputation based in historical and modern truth. In fact, tennis’ white uniform was originally designed to prevent the less affluent from taking up the sport, because in the 1800s, white was the most expensive fabric to keep clean. This elitist tennis atmosphere has never fully disappeared. And when the Williams sisters first entered into professional tennis in the 1990s, the establishment was even less welcoming.
Serena and Venus Williams were born and raised in Compton, CA. Their father Richard worked the night shift as a security guard. Originally, the sisters were unable to find coaching because they could not afford to pay for it. And above all, the Williams sisters had not been brought up to follow the norms of elite tennis society: they introduced new fashions to the court, proudly sporting jeans skirts, hoops, and hair beads. Perhaps it was predictable, then, that commentators, sponsors, and event organizers would refuse to shine a spotlight on the sisters. Instead, they focused on players with whom they were familiar — players who had come up the usual way, who reflected the tennis tradition.
Tuchscherer grew up in New York City, the home of the US Open. She remembers attending the tournament as a child and watching the Williams sisters’ games. Even then, she could tell that something about the sisters distinguished them from the other players and from the tennis establishment. “There was something so different about Serena and Venus because they came from such humble beginnings,” Tuchscherer said.
Williams faced obstacles on the basis of her race and class throughout her professional career, even when she had secured enough titles and trophies to silence all doubt of her skill. Despite her huge following and growing influence, sponsors still shied away from working with her.
Chanda Rubin said that seeing Williams denied recognition sent a message to her and other players of color. “[For Williams] to still be one of the underpaid players in terms of sponsorships compared to players who had far less on their resume? That was kind of a slap in the face,” said Rubin. “Because if Williams is not getting what she deserves, well, what does that mean for the rest of us?”
It wasn’t only sponsors that were treating Williams unfairly. Throughout her career, she has also faced notoriously unfair treatment from umpires and line judges. Perhaps the most egregious example was when Williams played Jennifer Capriati in the 2004 US Open. Three of Williams’s shots were called out even though they were well inside the line. These famous “three bad calls,” according to Rubin, were so severe that they actually served as a major catalyst for the modern electronic review system. Even the game’s commentators can be heard over replay reacting with shock: “That ball was out? No way. That was not even close. That was way in. That’s one of the worst calls I’ve seen.”
Famously, Williams did not take the unfair treatment lying down. After the first incorrect call in the Capriati game, Williams walked over to the umpire’s chair and showed her frustration. “It was not out! I’m trying to tell you, it was not out! Do I need to speak another language?”
Williams’s willingness to be loud and fight back against bad calls was also unfamiliar to the tennis establishment. Many criticized Williams for demonstrating “unprofessional” behavior toward line judges and umpires. But Rubin doesn’t blame Williams for her reaction. She feels that criticisms of Williams’s behavior lack perspective. “Nobody can understand what that is like. When you’re supposed to be in a place that is safe. That is fair. And yet it is not, and you are on your own, and there is no one to help you. And you are powerless. And so sometimes there’s not a lot of grace given to her, and I think there should be,” Rubin said.
An essential part of Williams’s legacy is the battles she has won and the paths she has forged as a Black woman in tennis. Indeed, part of what made Williams so angry was the fact that she could see that white tennis players, especially white male tennis players, were not exposed to the same biased calls and constraints. “How much of it was being a woman?” wondered Shriver. “How much of it was being Black? How much of it was because she’s both? I think bringing up all that stuff is important. And she was brave to bring it up.”
Despite these hurdles, Williams continued to rack up Grand Slam titles and make waves in a sport that had previously been dominated by establishment favorites.
She also continued to draw new fans, which many players feel is one of Williams’s greatest contributions. Over the course of her career as a player, broadcaster, and pundit, Shriver has seen Williams’s effect on audiences of color. “While certainly we’ve had black champions in tennis, we’ve had nothing in tennis like Williams. So the fact that she was able to dominate a sport that for the most part had been dominated by white people, I think was even more impactful. [She let] people of color know that you can make an impact in professions and industries and in cultures that previously haven’t been that inclusive.”
Serena represented a break from the traditional norms of tennis. This was a break that, in many cases, inspired young players to see themselves in the sport. When Tuchscherer would attend the US Open every year, she found herself drawn to the sisters’ games. Seeing someone on the court who looked like her was a breath of fresh air. “As a young black athlete, seeing Venus and Serena playing, specifically in a sport like tennis, which is super dominated by wealth, was super refreshing,” said Tuchscherer.
But now that Williams is no longer playing professional games, many are looking around to see who will take up her mantle. What is the future of tennis without the G.O.A.T?
Some worry about the sport’s ability to hold onto the fresh perspective that Williams brought to tennis. There is concern that now that Williams is gone, the attention that she generated within tennis will just disappear.
Shriver is one of those who worries for the future. “I don’t know whether tennis has been prepared for how to keep the audience that Serena brought in,” she said, “or how to engage them and keep them as fans of tennis long after Serena has retired.”
Thompson, meanwhile, has a more optimistic view. She believes that Williams has succeeded in effecting major change in the tennis establishment — change that will remain long after she’s gone. She pointed out young tennis players such as Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka who have been making change in their own right. She also notes the comparative freedom that these young players have experienced since Williams blazed a trail.
“[Osaka’s] willingness to push back against some of the established norms… I think she would never have been able to do that if Williams hadn’t made the point,” said Thompson. “People know how to test those boundaries because Williams set new ones.”
From her place on the Yale Club Tennis team, Tuchscherer sees new young players following in Williams’s footsteps. That will be Williams’s greatest legacy, Tuchscherer believes: the fresh generation of players she inspired to enter tennis and break barriers themselves. Tuchscherer specifically pointed out the example of players who are children of immigrants. She believes that many of these players’ parents entered them into the sport largely due to Williams’s example.
“If you have a player like Serena who is showing representation, it can push immigrant parents who don’t really know much about tennis to introduce their kids to the sport,” said Tuchscherer. “And then those kids excel at tennis. Like, for example, there’s Frances Tiafoe, who is one of the top players in the world now.”
As for Williams, she doesn’t like to call her departure from tennis a retirement. Rather, she’d like it to be considered an evolution. She’s not losing steam, she says, but rather switching tracks — moving from the world of tennis into a focus on business, investment, and motherhood. Serena Ventures, the investment group that she founded in 2014, has raised more than $111 million to help companies like Masterclass, Daily Harvest, and Noom achieve major commercial success. Williams wants to focus her efforts on this passion. And she doesn’t want to lose a minute with her five-year-old daughter, Olympia.
As Williams moves into this new stage of her life, Chanda Rubin said that she’ll be sad to see her go. But she also sees the joy that can come from Williams’s “evolution.”
“I’m just happy for her, that she feels that she’s moving into a new phase on her own terms. I mean, that’s what every player wants. It’s kind of a dream.”