Serena Williams hit a 120mph serve and celebrated her comeback to tennis with a 7-6 (2) 6-2 first-round doubles victory alongside Victoria Mboko after the pair beat Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Erin Routliffe at the HSBC Championships in London.<\/p>\n
Williams, at 44, a quarter-century older than 19-year-old Mboko, and had not played competitively in 1,376 days, since her farewell at the 2022 US Open.<\/p>\n
She chose Mboko, the 2025 WTA Newcomer of the Year, in part, she explained on Sunday, because the Canadian teen reminded Williams of herself.<\/p>\n
Her return, after a “why not?” moment, was also a chance for Williams, she explained, to play in front of Olympia and Adira, the daughters she shares with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.<\/p>\n
Both daughters were in attendance at the Andy Murray Arena, where the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion seemed to do something to appease the tennis gods after rain affected much of Monday’s action.<\/p>\n
Weather did cause some brief delays earlier in the day, when British number one Emma Raducanu opened her grass-court season with a win over Russian qualifier Anna Blinkova.<\/p>\n
But the skies were decidedly sunnier when Williams, Mboko and their opponents walked out at around a quarter to six to a standing ovation and a roar from the crowd.<\/p>\n
They cheered again when Williams secured two of the pair\u2019s points en route to a first-game victory, immediately broke serve in the next and, on what remained a windy west London evening, reached a highest 113mph in her first service game, also claimed by the North American duo.<\/p>\n
Williams and Mboko lost their serve for the first time in the seventh game of the set but a big double backhand, which brought out a big grin from the American, made it 5-4 before Williams produced her quickest serve of the set \u2013 120mph \u2013 two games later.<\/p>\n
The seven-time Wimbledon singles champion and Mboko, who lifted her first WTA title as a Montreal wild card last year, continued to settle into their partnership as they secured the set in the tiebreak.<\/p>\n
They were a set and a break up after the third game of the second set \u2013 which also featured the first video review challenge of the match, requested by Melichar-Martinez, but with an inconclusive result.<\/p>\n
Mboko secured their second break point as the pair began to close in on victory and Williams then produced two emphatic aces to bring up two match points.<\/p>\n
And though she said before this contest that she had won enough in her lifetime and was not focused on the outcome here, Williams nevertheless looked pleased to secure a first comeback victory after the pair closed it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Serena Williams hit a 120mph serve and celebrated her comeback to tennis with a 7-6 (2) 6-2 first-round…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-491298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}