Victoria Mboko<\/a> at the Queen\u2019s Club grass-court tournament.<\/p>\n\u201cUnexpectedly, before her first match she asked me did I have any motivational quotes I use for myself,\u201d Venus Williams said Saturday. \u201cI told her what I was using at the time. I don\u2019t know if that helped or not. She did win the match.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Williams sisters will play their first-round doubles match against Colombia\u2019s Camila Osorio and Solana Sierra of Argentina.<\/p>\n
Serena and Venus have won 14 Grand Slam titles together in doubles, including six at Wimbledon. Their first two doubles titles at the All England Club, in 2000 and 2002, came as wild cards.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us it was about the titles, we wanted the Grand Slam titles. We just wanted to bring them home,\u201d Venus said. \u201cWe did pretty good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Djokovic inspired by Serena<\/p>\n
Novak Djokovic calls Serena Williams\u2019 tennis comeback \u201cinspirational\u201d and \u201cepic.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what I told her,\u201d Djokovic said Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see her in the gym more than I have, I think, seen her when she was at her prime,\u201d Djokovic, a 24-time major champion, said of Williams, a 23-time major winner in singles. \u201cIt tells me that she really wants this to work out the best way possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Djokovic added: \u201cI always admired her career, her journey, her story. Of course, Venus\u2019, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gauff and Sabalenka too<\/p>\n
Coco Gauff, the No. 7 seed at Wimbledon, said Serena and Venus were the \u201cbiggest\u201d inspiration on her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI played the sport because of them, believed that I could do things because of them. I look up to them a lot,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Sabalenka added: \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what she\u2019s doing. Also it\u2019s Serena Williams, everyone was talking about that. She\u2019s bringing more eyes on tennis. It\u2019s a good thing for tennis. I\u2019m really excited to see her play.\u201d<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP tennis: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/tennis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By KEN MAGUIRE LONDON (AP) \u2014 Iga Swiatek is the defending champion. Aryna Sabalenka is the No. 1…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":322228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140,110,32029],"class_list":["post-322227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}