LONDON \u2014 After nearly four years away from professional tennis, Serena Williams made a winning return at Queen\u2019s Club.<\/p>\n
The 44-year-old Williams showed she still has plenty of her trademark power, hitting service winners of up to 120 mph as she teamed up with 19-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko to win their opening doubles match at the grass-court tournament.<\/p>\n
Williams and Mboko beat third-seeded duo Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Erin Routliffe 7-6 (2), 6-2 in Williams\u2019 first professional match since the 2022 U.S. Open. To punctuate that she\u2019s back, Williams served out the match with two aces followed by a service winner.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was so fun. I had so much fun playing with Victoria,\u201d Williams said in an on-court interview. \u201cShe really was able to hold up the team and really play big on the big points. I could really rely on her. We\u2019ve never played together but it just felt so natural playing with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mboko is one of the rising stars on the WTA tour, having already entered the top 10 in the rankings at No. 9.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel very honored to play with Serena,\u201d Mboko said, standing next to the 23-time Grand Slam winner. \u201cI had a lot of fun, if anything. We really did that out there. I\u2019m so happy to be playing beside you. And we\u2019re going for more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams announced her return to doubles, but has yet to decide whether to target a comeback in singles as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON \u2014 After nearly four years away from professional tennis, Serena Williams made a winning return at Queen\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-261402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}