Serena Williams is back. Her tennis career already defied belief
· Yahoo Sports
After 23 Grand Slam titles, more than a thousand matches, and innumerable GOAT debates, Serena Williams’ professional tennis career ended for the first time. It was September 2022, at the U.S. Open.
She bowed out having spent 319 weeks as the world No. 1 (the third most behind Steffi Graf’s 377 and Martina Navratilova’s 332) and with 73 singles titles (the fifth best of all time), despite often playing a reduced schedule to save herself for the four majors.
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No, it was not the mic-drop, record-equaling 24th major singles title ending of which she had dreamed. But that thrilling week in New York lent even more gravitas to one of the most significant dates in tennis history: The day that Williams, after a quarter of a century of domination, said farewell to the sport she helped define.
Another day in the summer of 2026 might just match it. After returning to tennis on the grass at Queen’s in west London in doubles, and confirming a Wimbledon doubles wild card with her sister and fellow legend of the sport, Venus, Serena will play singles at Wimbledon via wild card entry, nearly four years after she left the sport she dominated.
Since September 2022, tennis fans all over the world have come to understand the sport without Williams, who played her first qualifier for a professional tournament in 1995, her first main-draw match two years later, and won her first Grand Slam as a 17-year-old at the US Open in 1999.
Now, she is back. And still, few superlatives remain to describe someone who achieved as much as she did in what appeared to be her career, but was in fact just the first part of it.
As she returns to tennis, it’s a chance to put one of the greatest sporting careers of all time into proper context. To explain why, when reliving those 25-or-so years, there are so many moments that defy belief.
Like the fact that she beat a player born in each year from 1966 to 2001, and then one born in 2003 for good measure. The fact that she reached a Grand Slam semifinal in four separate decades. The fact that 6-1 was a more frequent set scoreline in her favour than 6-4. The fact that she won more bagel (6-0) sets than tiebreaks, because more often than not, no one could get near her.
This is a breakdown of Williams’ career and an attempt to convey the extent of her domination, the evolution of her game, and how she changed the sport forever — the first time over.
Greatness and longevity
It was October 1995 when a 14-year-old Williams played her first professional match — a defeat in qualifying to the then-world No. 149 Annie Miller at the Bell Challenge in Quebec City. By way of tennis context, Steffi Graf, Mary Pierce, Andre Agassi, Thomas Muster and Pete Sampras won that year’s Grand Slam titles. Bill Clinton was the president of the U.S.
The following year, Ash Barty, a player Williams would beat twice in their only two meetings, was born. In November 1997, Williams won her first professional match — at the Ameritech Cup in Chicago against the world No. 27 Elena Likhovtseva. She followed that up with wins at the tournament over top-10 players and major champions Mary Pierce and Monica Seles. A month earlier, Naomi Osaka — another future adversary of Williams — was born.
A look at the first part of Williams’ career has numerous quirks like these, constant reminders of how long she has been around and how much the tennis landscape has changed since those first steps.
When she won that first match in Chicago, equal prize money at Wimbledon was still a decade away, Hawk-Eye technology was nine years from being introduced and John McEnroe was still two years away from playing his final competitive match at Wimbledon.
Crystalizing Williams’ longevity is the list of players she has beaten, which spans generations. It takes in former doubles world No. 1 and singles world No. 13 Larisa Savchenko (née Neiland), who is now 59 and was born before England won the men’s football World Cup in 1966, and Lisa Pigato, who was born with Williams already a five-time Grand Slam champion and a few weeks from picking up her sixth. Williams beat her when she was 19; she is now 22.
The graphic below shows that spread and also introduces how strong Williams’ head-to-head record was against the best players. Of the 36 players listed below, only Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, who played Williams exclusively at the very start of her career, and Osaka boast a winning record against her.
That longevity and dominance against her rivals are further illustrated by the next chart, which shows that Williams beat the winner of every Grand Slam from the 1991 Australian Open to Wimbledon 2019 inclusive — a span of almost 30 years. And again, it’s only Sánchez Vicario and Osaka with winning records.
Head-to-head records matter a great deal to tennis players; they clarify who has the upper hand in what is essentially individual combat. Williams prided herself on how hard she was to beat regularly — a player might do it once or twice, but doing it regularly was extremely difficult.
Take the case of Maria Sharapova, who won her second and third meetings against Williams. She held three match points in the fourth, but Williams found a way to come through on one of an unrivaled three occasions when Williams saved a match point at a Grand Slam before going on to win the title. Including that victory, Williams won a staggering 19 straight matches against one of her great rivals. Their head to head ended up a lopsided 20-2 in Williams’ favor.
Williams simply loved putting supposed threats back in their box. She spent much of her career ranked world No. 1, but still managed to beat the then-world No. 1 and No. 2 players in the same tournament eight times, with Williams accounting for more than a fifth of the occasions this has happened since the WTA rankings were introduced in 1975.
Few players in the history of tennis have ever been so adept at lifting themselves when seemingly down and out. Sometimes, she would let out a roar of celebration and everyone would know the tide was about to turn.
The next graphic shows Williams’ record against the players who were most successful across her professional career (those who won three or more majors since she started playing main-draw matches in 1997) and the ones she played most regularly — most fit into both categories. Of these players, only Osaka has a winning — or even drawing record — which shows how Williams was able to dominate her rivals, from big hitters such as her sister Venus to less powerful, touch-based adversaries such as Simona Halep.
As Serena put it in a news conference ahead of the 2007 French Open: “I always say that when I’m playing well, no one can beat me. I’m not just saying that to sound full of myself or anything, but it’s true.”
During another news conference, at Wimbledon 11 years later, she said that the perception of her opponents was that they folded when they played her. In Williams’ view, they would in fact raise their games: “That’s what makes me great, I always play everyone at their greatest.”
How dominant Williams often was against her “rivals” was also a theme that ran through her career, and the absence of any one adversary for any length of time can be seen as both a blessing and a curse. A more genuine threat might have deprived her of some major titles, but they could also have elevated her game even further.
That said, she still had to overcome plenty of legendary players. She beat the already five-time major champion Martina Hingis to win her first Grand Slam at the 1999 U.S. Open, before toppling sister Venus, by then the dominant force in women’s tennis, in the finals of four straight majors from the 2002 French Open to the 2003 Australian Open.
Winning those tournaments meant the younger Williams held all four of tennis’ major titles simultaneously, an achievement dubbed the “Serena Slam.” Williams then beat Venus again at that year’s Wimbledon to move to six majors at just 21.
Over the next few years, injuries hampered Williams, but she kept on coming back and picking up major titles — overcoming players such as Lindsay Davenport, Sharapova and new, flickering threats such as Jelena Janković and Dinara Safina.
Tennis was changing around her, with legends Sampras, Agassi and Jennifer Capriati retiring as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal emerged. Toward the end of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s, contemporaries of Serena’s, such as Justine Henin (one of the only consistent, genuine threats to her supremacy other than her sister), Marat Safin and Andy Roddick bade their farewells to the sport.
When Williams got to 30, she kept going — even after suffering a life-threatening blood clot in her lung in 2011. Between 2012 and 2017, Williams won an Olympic singles gold to complete the Golden Career Slam (Olympic singles gold plus all four majors) and won 10 more majors, to move clear of Steffi Graf (who Williams beat at the start of her career), Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. She was and remains just one away from Margaret Court’s record of 24, though many of Court’s titles were won before tennis turned professional in 1968. In 2015, she came within two matches of tennis’ Holy Grail: winning all four Grand Slams in the same year.
“Late in her career,” McEnroe said in 2015, “Serena seems to be mentally tougher than she has ever been. And she has been awfully tough at times.”
Year after year, she was able to dominate, racking up win percentages higher than 90 percent in several seasons. (This graphic does not take into account the 2022 U.S. Open).
Her dominance does not just span time; it also covers the globe.
And the thing is, Williams didn’t just beat opponents — she pummelled them. The next graphic shows that winning a set 6-0 was a more common scoreline for her than 7-5 or 7-6.
“Bagel” sets are a rarity in tennis and for a big server, tiebreak (7-6) sets are to be expected. Winning more sets by a scoreline of 6-1 than 6-4 is similarly staggering.
Overall, Williams won 85 percent of her 1,000-plus matches, and 68 percent of her matches in straight sets. She lost only nine percent of her matches in straight sets.
Unfortunately, though, four of those straight-set defeats came in consecutive Grand Slam finals between 2018 and 2019, when Williams came within one match of equalling Court’s record four times but was handily beaten in each.
The other way to frame those defeats is that they all came after she had given birth to her daughter, Alexis Olympia, in September 2017. Williams won that year’s Australian Open while pregnant, and reached the Wimbledon final fewer than 12 months after she came close to death during labor.
How Williams’ game evolved and differed across different surfaces
When Williams emerged, tennis was a very different sport. Serve-volleying was still in fashion, courts were generally quicker, and it was rare to be able to dominate on both the slick, low-bouncing grass of Wimbledon and the slower, much higher-bouncing clay at the French Open.
Williams’ initial success came on the quicker courts — her first Grand Slam was at the U.S. Open, when the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center’s courts played a lot quicker than they have in recent years. Williams then began to dominate at Wimbledon, where the grass has always lent itself to big servers, even after slowing down compared to the late 1990s. Williams was no different: after winning back-to-back titles in 2002 and 2003 to briefly break up her sister’s dominance, she ended up with seven Wimbledon titles.
Williams was able to dominate with her serve even on clay:
Given how much her game was supposedly based around the combination of big serve and huge forehand, winning three French Opens has to be one of the biggest achievements in her career. This versatility is extremely rare; only Graf and Court have also won all four of the majors three times or more.
In 2013, Williams was so dominant on clay that she won all 28 of her matches on the surface, losing a mere three sets along the way. Those are Nadal levels of clay-court dominance. Evert, who won 18 Grand Slam titles, called Williams’ 46-minute, 6-1, 6-0 destruction of world No. 5 Sara Errani in that year’s French Open semifinal the best performance she had ever seen from a women’s player on clay.
Generally, opponents would have more of a chance on clay when they could stretch out the rallies and try to upset Williams’ rhythm. But she’d tightened up her groundstrokes so much, working alongside coach Patrick Mouratoglou between 2012 and 2022, that she’d become just as unbeatable on clay as she was on grass.
How Williams changed the sport
When Williams began her professional tennis career, Navratilova had only just retired and Graf was coming close to doing so.
Those two were big hitters in their day with very effective serves. Navratilova’s quickest serve reached 104 mph and Graf’s 112 mph. Serena and her sister Venus completely changed the game, on this front, with their average first-serve speeds in a match often between Navratilova and Graf’s quickest ever. Serena’s top speed was 128.6 mph; Venus’ 129 mph. Excluding qualifying matches, this puts Serena sixth in the all-time list of quickest women’s serves and Venus joint-third. Sabine Lisicki is second at 131 mph, behind Aryna Sabalenka’s record of 133 mph.
Serena and Venus’ power when serving and from the back of the court was such that they pretty quickly rendered the No. 1, Hingis, obsolete — like a piece of analogue technology cast aside in the digital age.
But it’s one thing to have a fast serve and another to deliver it with accuracy at the clutch moments and come up with the precision required to consistently hold.
Williams mastered these skills, as shown by the charts below. When Williams first left tennis behind in 2022, she did so topping the chart across most serving stats — the percentage of points won on first serve, the percentage of service games won (as well as overall points on serve) and the most aces. She was also second for aces per match, but it’s telling that the only player above her was Kristýna Plíšková, a player whose ranking reached a high of No. 35 in 2017.
There’s banging down aces, and there’s delivering when it matters most.
“Other players don’t have that gift,” Billie Jean King told ESPN in 2015 of Williams’ ability to serve her way out of trouble.
“She’ll be behind and she can serve two or three aces in a row. It’s very uplifting when you can do that — they’re free points. That lifts you emotionally — now you can go up another level again. You can breathe.”
But Williams’ game was about so much more than a big serve. While dominating from the back of the court, Williams had a very solid volley game, too. She was one of the players who, at the turn of the century, helped bring in the drive volley that’s now customary to see in the women’s game and, helped by her skills at the net, won 14 women’s doubles Grand Slam titles and three Olympic gold medals with Venus. Serena also won two mixed doubles Grand Slams.
On announcing her plan to retire, Williams wrote, “I know there’s a fan fantasy that I might have tied Margaret (Court) 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 did not quite achieve this, but much of her career did feel like a fantasy — including the way she electrified New York that week in 2022. And even though she could not reach that magical mark of 24 majors, let alone 25, she achieved some amazing milestones toward the first end of her career: winning the Auckland Classic in 2020, her first and only title after becoming a mom; playing the 1,000th singles match of her career at the Italian Open in 2021 and still competing a few weeks before her 41st birthday.
Now she is 44, and ready to compete again. Serena Williams is back, but her tennis career already defied belief.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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