Game changer: What Serena Williams has meant to the women of tennis

Williams, 40, has chosen to step away. Her third-round exit from the US Open was likely her last match. The record books will mark it as the end of an era.

More than her near-incomparable tennis statistics — 23 Grand Slam singles titles, 14 doubles titles, 319 weeks as World No. 1 — it’s how she played the game that will stand out.

As heavily policed as women’s bodies and behaviour are, she constantly defied expectations. Dismissed as “ugly”, she kept winning. Dismissed as angry, she kept fighting.

There are those who believe that, when Osaka decided to speak publicly about her mental-health struggles, it was in part because of Serena. When black American teen player Coco Gauff scribbled “Peace. End Gun Violence” on a TV camera during this year’s French Open, that was in part because of Serena. If tennis’s women feel more empowered to shout, curse, argue, it can all be traced back to Serena.

“What’s she done with women’s tennis is showed the world that you can wear your emotions on your sleeve,” Rick Macci, Williams’s coach from ages nine to 14, told Wknd. “You can give those fist bumps, you can scream and yell. And I think that has inspired more players to just be themselves.”

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Growing up in Compton, California, on crime-marred streets where her 31-year-old sister would be killed in a shooting in 2003 (Serena was 21 at the time), the tennis-playing Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, heard it said repeatedly that there was no space for black women in the elite sport.

But their father, Richard Williams, saw tennis champions in his young daughters. He began coaching them, obsessively, on the public courts, and they showed a rare gift for the game. Serena’s play, in particular, was a heady mix of raw strength and innate ball-striking ability. She dominated matches and tournaments, crushed opponents, displayed a style of tennis few had seen in the women’s game before.

As she grew, the intense scrutiny and the slurs began. “I’ve been disrespected by my male colleagues and — in the most painful times — I’ve been the subject of racist remarks on and off the tennis court,” she wrote in a 2017 article for Fortune magazine.

It didn’t stop even as the sisters began to capture the public imagination. In 2001, at the WTA Indian Wells tournament, two years after she won her first Grand Slam at the US Open at 17, the Williams sisters were subjected to racial slurs from the stands. It was the tournament’s loss. For 14 years, they boycotted the event.

“The cycles of poverty, discrimination and sexism are much, much harder to break than the record for grand slam titles,” Serena Williams wrote in Fortune.

But she had a motto: “Overpower. Overtake. Overcome.”

As she broke free of ancient chains and soared, shrugging off criticism of her muscular arms, fighting back when she felt unfairly targeted, around the world, little girls were watching. Some opted to follow suit. Osaka, 24, a Japanese-Haitian American and a Black Lives Matter activist, has often spoken of how she was inspired. “Serena has been my idol,” says Indian tennis pro Ankita Raina. “What I take from her journey is that it never gets easy; you just have to shut your ears and go on. Even in the most difficult times, she went out on court and gave her absolute best.”

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Over the past year, Williams has played little competitive tennis. She has still earned over $35 million so far in 2022, according to Forbes magazine. Over her 27-year career, Brand Serena has earned about $450 million.

Business and family will be her focus now. Since 2014, Williams has run a venture capital firm, Serena Ventures, which currently funds 16 unicorns, most of them companies founded by women or people of colour. She runs a design apprenticeship programme with Nike. She’s raising her five-year-old daughter, Olympia, with entrepreneur husband Alexis Ohanian, 39.

Williams’s last Grand Slam title, at the 2017 Australian Open, was a remarkable win while pregnant. That was her 23rd Slam title, one short of matching Margaret Court’s all-time record. After Olympia was born, Williams returned, hoping to complete her mission of matching or exceeding Court’s tally. But even her greatest fans could see that the Serena on the courts wasn’t the Serena she used to be.

She crashed out in the first round at Wimbledon in June. She announced two months later that she was “evolving away from tennis”. She’s moving on, to explore a different version of herself.

“I know there’s a fan fantasy that I might have tied Margaret that day in London, then maybe beat her record in New York, and then at the trophy ceremony [said], “See ya!” I get that. It’s a good fantasy,” she wrote in Vogue’s September issue. “But I’m not looking for some ceremonial, final on-court moment. I’m terrible at goodbyes.”