Serena Williams will be closing the tennis chapter of her life soon, and now she has shed light on how she went about it.
Williams has been in the sport of tennis for over two decades. She first emerged in 1995 as a 14-year-old playing her first professional event, and fairly quickly, it was evident that she would go on to change history.
Four years later, Williams would win her first Grand Slam at the US Open, and the rest is history. She would add 22 more to get to 23 majors, just one shy of Margaret Court's record of 24.
While her last win came quite a few years ago (2017), Williams is still in the sport, but not for much longer. She will retire at the 2022 US Open, which is coming up shortly.
Her choice to retire was announced in a Vogue piece that she penned herself, and it wasn’t an easy thing to do. Tennis was one of the most important things in her life for much of it, and now it was time to close the chapter.
How it went internally for her was revealed in the Archetypes podcast, which she did a few days after the news of her retirement broke. In the interview, Williams explained that it wasn’t easy to make the decision.
"Yeah. It wasn't very easy. Like, I remember I was in … randomly, I was in Switzerland and I was just sitting in the hotel at the desk, just typing and deleting and typing and thinking and then crying and sitting at my computer and tears streaming down my face as I'm writing these words and going back on these memories."
As hard as it was, Williams was able to get it done in the end, and her piece appeared in Vogue, just as she jokingly revealed was the plan all along.
"And it was just like, God, it was, it was really hard. Um. I mean, but I was like, if I'm going to do this, it has to be Vogue September issue, right?"