doubles competition next week<\/a> in the women\u2019s tournament at Queen\u2019s Club in London, one of the tuneups for Wimbledon. Does anyone actually believe it won\u2019t pick up speed, with appearances at bigger events and in singles before long?<\/p>\nAnd when that happens, Williams will immediately feel like the main character in any competition she participates in, until she\u2019s not in it anymore. Women\u2019s tennis in 2026 has plenty of stars and all-time greats. It has crossover stars like Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka. Does it have anyone on the order of Serena Williams, whose presence takes over a venue the way Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s or Taylor Swift\u2019s does?<\/p>\n
For so long, Williams had been so much more than a tennis player. Perhaps more than any other athlete, she forever changed the world\u2019s perception and understanding of women \u2014 especially Black women \u2014 in sports. On that night in 2022 when she kind of, sort of said goodbye, she went kicking and screaming to the end, saving five match points, making every stroke count as the match passed the three-hour mark.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t give up,\u201d Williams said after Tomljanovi\u0107 surged past her 7-5, 6-7, 6-1. \u201cDefinitely wasn\u2019t giving up tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a week, she had been the hottest ticket in New York. Hundreds of other matches unfolded over those first five days of competition. The only ones that seemed to matter were the three that Williams played \u2014 four, including a doubles match she played with her sister Venus between her second and third singles matches.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d been rusty all summer, after barely playing the previous year while managing knee tendinitis. Then she blitzed Montenegro\u2019s Danka Konivi\u0107 in the first round and beat Anett Kontaveit, the Estonian No. 2 seed in the second. That noise rattled Kontaveit, the memory of it searing her and sending her into tears when she tried to talk about it after. Tomljanovi\u0107 figured she had no shot.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s Serena,\u201d she said simply.<\/p>\n
The glitterati were there for all of them, riding to Queens from Manhattan or the Hamptons, because those matches were the place to see and be seen. The tournament made the rare move of scheduling a first-round doubles match during the night session on Ashe.<\/p>\n
Of course it did.<\/p>\n
![\"U.S.](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Serena-Williams-Tennis-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n The U.S. Open crowds rose to Serena Williams at her last Grand Slam tournament. (Julian Finney \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Williams transcended tennis as a dominant cultural figure. She became a wildly successful businesswoman and a mother \u2014 two endeavors that have only deepened in her time away from the sport, as her family and venture capital work have grown.<\/p>\n
When people would describe Williams as perhaps the greatest female tennis player ever, she would say, \u201ctennis player,\u201d to suggest that she should be compared to Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Few argued with her. Those three certainly didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Djokovic has 24 Grand Slam singles titles, a record for the sport\u2019s modern era, which began in 1969. Williams has 23, Nadal 22, and Federer 20. All are so much more than the numbers they created.<\/p>\n
Williams had looked rusty through the summer of 2022, but over the course of four days and two primetime matches, it looked like the 40-year-old might just mount a magical, storybook run for a 24th major title. She delivered what everyone came for: Power, ferocity, precision, touch and a passion for the game that had characterized her career for a quarter of a century.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a good chance that those qualities will still be there for this restart. Chances are, she wouldn\u2019t come back if she didn\u2019t feel like she could be some version of the player she has always been. She has spoken about her use of GLP-1 drugs \u2014 and her status as an ambassador for Ro, a telehealth company on whose board her husband, Alexis Ohanian, sits \u2014 and her feeling that joint stress caused by her weight had limited her pursuit of more titles in her late career.<\/p>\n
Still, there is no history of impactful and sustained success for a player in their mid-40s at the top of the game. And since Williams\u2019 first exit, women\u2019s tennis has changed, with Aryna Sabalenka, Iga \u015awi\u0105tek and other champions of the era demanding even higher-intensity movement and the ability to turn defense into attack from the furthest corners of the court.<\/p>\n
On that night four years ago, a few weeks before her 41st birthday, Williams could not maintain the rarefied level of play that has powered so many of her victories. She served for both of the first sets and had four set points in the second, only to let Tomljanovi\u0107, who had never played on Ashe, climb out of 5-3 holes in the first and second sets.<\/p>\n
Tomljanovi\u0107 matched Williams\u2019 power and edged her in steeliness and accuracy in front of a crowd that was entirely behind Williams. That\u2019s what in-form players can do. Great tennis almost never leaves a great player\u2019s hands. It\u2019s the ability to summon it under pressure and to perform at the highest level despite exhaustion that slips away, sometimes never to return.<\/p>\n
Williams dominated her sport like no one else. She won 23 Grand Slam singles titles \u2014 the most recent, the Australian Open in 2017, when she was pregnant \u2014 and she won nearly $100 million in prize money.<\/p>\n
She was, and still is a one-name brand who graces the covers of sports, fashion and news magazines. Just a few words from her so often immediately whip through the ether And maybe the frenzy that greeted her last U.S. Open run won\u2019t quite return next week at Queen\u2019s, when she\u2019s just playing doubles. But a lot of it will.<\/p>\n
And then, the way these things go, with the speed picking up and the stakes rising, if that is what happens, she will arrive at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in full, even if not on the singles court. Williams never did anything small. She never passed under the radar. If one thing is for sure, she certainly isn\u2019t going to start now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tennis record books don\u2019t contain decibel readings from big matches throughout the sport\u2019s history. If they did, there\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":709858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,569,4963,82,575,593],"class_list":["post-709857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-culture","tag-olympics","tag-sports","tag-sports-business","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/709858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}