Serena Williams Reveals Process Behind Super Bowl Appearance With Kendrick Lamar
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23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams generated attention worldwide after appearing in Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl halftime show. The tennis legend described how it came about afterward.
Kendrick Lamar's halftime show at the Super Bowl on Sunday was epic. He played Not Like Us, a song that is a diss of fellow famous rapper Drake, during the halftime appearance with several dancers and other performers on stage.
Many others were present with Kendrick Lamar to make the spectacle more epic, which was unsurprising. However, few, if any, expected Williams to appear for a brief snippet while Not Like Us was played.
Williams went viral for crip walking during the performance of the song. There were two flashes of her doing that during a 10-second window, but that was enough to send many tennis fans online into a frenzy.
The former WTA world No. 1's appearance in a Drake diss track was probably not coincidental. Williams previously dated him, but their relationship did not work out. She is now married to Alexis Ohanian and has two children.
Understandably, Williams has no wish to confirm or deny whether she was particularly happy to appear in a Drake diss track. Instead, she revealed how the appearance at the Super Bowl happened in comments on Instagram.
Williams infamously crip-walked after winning a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. The 43-year-old mentioned on Instagram that Kendrick Lamar and his team loved her crip walk then and had wanted to collaborate with her for some time.
"When Kendrick Lamar and team called and was like 'we’ve been trying to do something forever, what about this? We loved your crip walk at the Olympics after you won the gold medal.'"
"I’m like Super Bowl? Are you serious? When in the world would I ever be able to dance at a Super Bowl? (Never) let’s do it! I knew my winning dance after the Olympics would pay off one day. End of story."
Williams has not consistently appeared publicly since retiring at the 2022 US Open. The seven-time Wimbledon champion has business interests and is also focused on being a great mother to her two children.
However, this is not the first time she has made a notable appearance at one of the biggest sporting events in the world. She and Rafael Nadal carried the torch during the opening ceremony at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Although those appearances generated much attention and must have been exciting for Williams, they are not enough to stop her from missing tennis, something she admitted to in a recent interview.
Even though the WTA Tour is a great place, no one can deny that Williams' retirement left a hole. She is one of the most iconic sportspeople ever, and women's tennis losing that, at least on the court, took some adjusting to.
Luckily, the women at the top of the WTA Tour have stepped up to fill that gap. That includes Coco Gauff, whose superb talent, charisma and humor off the court, and her reaching the top as a woman of color make many compare her to Williams.
