BY Mattie Kahn
Every morning, Serena Williams wakes up and says to herself: “Put your best foot forward today.” It sounds pat, coming from the literal Greatest of All Time—an athlete so decorated she constructed her own trophy room and whose 23 Grand Slam wins set a record for women in the Open Era.
But for the 2024 Glamour Global Woman of the Year, whom I meet at home in Jupiter, Florida, on the kind of blazing hot morning that bathes the ground in almost eerie white light, the new motto in fact represents personal growth.
To her it’s a concession. She can’t be perfect all the time. She can’t always summon the strength to conquer the morning. She can only resolve to give the day her best. “Sometimes my best foot is going to be really wobbly. It’s going to be really unstable,” she says, now settled onto a couch in her game room dressed in a fuchsia workout set and wrapped in one of her daughters’ blankets. “Every day is not going to be easy, but that’s the whole journey.”
RETIRED NOT TIRED
It’s now been two years since Williams retired from professional tennis, wrapping up an operatic run at the very pinnacle of the game. In that time she netted not just those 23 Grand Slam titles, but four Olympic medals, a slew of doubles wins, and 319 weeks in the top spot of the Women’s Tennis Association rankings. She traveled the globe, the champion who represented the best of what athletics—and its attendant grit, determination, and sure, bravado—could be. With her parents, Richard Williams and Oracene Price, coaching both her and her older sister Venus, Williams shattered expectations—and boundaries—breaking into what was then (and can still be) a racist and sexist sport. It wasn’t her job to fix it, but fixing things is what Williams does. She sees a problem. She itches to solve it. But now she is done winning other people’s games. She is building toward a new kind of international domination.
Hence a postretirement blueprint that revolves around not just her two daughters—Olympia, age seven, and Adira, one—whom she shares with her husband, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, but an ambitious venture fund that invests for the most part in founders who are women or people of color, her makeup line Wyn Beauty, and a slew of partnerships and commitments that range from hosting the ESPY Awards on ESPN to serving as a parent volunteer at school.
This summer ESPN+ aired In the Arena: Serena Williams, an eight-part docuseries that serves as a career scrapbook, recalling in intimate and sometimes anguished detail the incredible highs and occasional lows of her tenure on the court.
LIKE MUM, LIKE DAUGHTER
When Williams was growing up, she couldn’t fathom her mother’s nerves—her need to warn and correct and caution. She and Venus had earned their sense of confidence, and she hated to hear Price’s voice in her ear, nudging her in one direction or another. “I’d be like, ‘I know what to do!’” Williams remembers.
Later she came to appreciate what a mother offers that not even the most relentless coach or dedicated team can: She alone has no other interest at heart but her child’s. Williams understands better now.
Her own daughters have been giving her agita almost since conception. It’s sports lore now that Williams found out she was pregnant just before competing in the Australian Open in 2017. She won that tournament and revealed she was expecting a few months later. She liked being pregnant, but she worried the entire time. Williams confesses that she checked her underwear for blood—a sign of potential miscarriage—for nine straight months.
BIRTH TRAUMA
For her it almost didn’t work. Birth was harrowing in ways she could not have anticipated. In a frank op-ed for CNN, Williams recalled being thrust into an emergency C-section after Olympia’s heart rate dropped precipitously during contractions. Soon after, Williams was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism. Her surgical wound burst open. When she was returned to surgery, doctors found a hematoma. She was incapacitated for six weeks and still considers herself fortunate to have survived with her life and her fertility intact.
When she learned she was expecting Adira, she resolved to savor the process—despite the trauma that she had endured and the postpartum depression that had followed not long after Olympia was born. She was thrilled to be having another girl. “I mean, I grew up with girls. I’d honestly never been around boys unless I was dating one,” she says. “And sisters are so special.”
SPECIAL VENUS
She happily admits that she and Venus “are still codependent.” “Some things never change,” she says. “I don’t even want to not be codependent with her. I love her. I don’t want our lives to ever be separate. Tennis is so lonely. You’re on the road for 10 or 11 months out of the year. You really rely on having someone else out there. And Venus was there, and who else was going to relate to me? We were successful, and we were Black. We leaned on each other. We lived together. We lived together until a year before I had Olympia, so literally our whole lives.”
Still, Williams seems to have no interest in creating a dynasty or raising Olympia and Adira to follow in her footsteps. Olympia “isn’t into sports,” and that’s fine. Williams would, however, like her daughters to find a calling. Her own father used to tell her she could be a garbage collector if that’s what she wanted, but she better try to be the best garbage collector. “Whatever you want to do, give it your all,” she says now. “It even says that in the Bible. ‘Whatever you do, do it wholeheartedly.”
DEEPLY RELIGIOUS
She doesn’t often talk about it publicly, but Williams is deeply religious. She was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and has a Bible within reach on her desk during our conversation. “It’s the one thing that was able to keep me grounded,” she says. “Especially with getting famous and wealthy so early, that stuff can really change who you are as a person, and I didn’t want to change.
“I pray every night that the girls stay close and have a true relationship with God on their own and get to know him,” she says. “It’s the most important thing that I personally think you can do.”
She hopes that in exposing them to faith, she can show them that their extraordinarily blessed existence.
Perhaps because Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to maintain political neutrality, Williams doesn’t frame her outspokenness as activism. “I don’t try to change the world, by no means,” she says. “That’s not my mission.” But when she sits with her children, she is acutely aware of how unjust it is that so many mothers don’t have the same opportunity. Equal pay and paid leave are issues that both she and Ohanian work to elevate in the public consciousness, and she’s grateful to have a partner who is as loud about their necessity as she is.
Retirement looks different for Williams. She is as busy and committed as she’s ever been. But her most awe-inspiring achievement might just be the fact that she is starting to be gentler with herself.
