Written By | Sports Desk
At 44, Serena Williams is walking back onto Centre Court for singles play, four years after she said she was "evolving" rather than retiring
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LONDON
Four years ago, Serena Williams lost in the third round of the US Open to Ajla Tomljanovic, stood in front of a sobbing Arthur Ashe Stadium, and refused to say the word "retirement." She called it "evolving." Tennis fans took it as a goodbye anyway. On Monday or Tuesday of next week, when Wimbledon's main draw opens, Williams will walk onto a grass court as a wild-card entrant in the ladies' singles, her first competitive singles match since that night in Flushing — and the tennis world is still trying to process that it's actually happening.
The All England Club confirmed the wild card on June 21, ending more than a week of speculation that had been building since Williams quietly returned to doubles competition earlier this month. She will face 20-year-old Australian Maya Joint, the world No. 53, in the first round — a player who was 16 years old the last time Williams played a singles match that mattered.
THE LONG WAY BACK
Williams's path back to Wimbledon has been anything but a straight line. She tested the waters in doubles at Queen's Club, pairing with Canadian rising star Victoria Mboko and winning her first match back before Mboko withdrew with a knee injury sustained in a separate singles match. Days later, at the Berlin Open, Williams and partner Karolina Muchova fell to Giuliana Olmos and Erin Routliffe. Neither result was the headline. The headline was simpler: Serena Williams was back on a tennis court, competing, four years after most of the sport had filed her career under "complete."
Then came the news that reset the entire Wimbledon storyline. Not only would Williams play doubles — she and her sister Venus, both wild-carded into the women's doubles draw, will reunite as a team at the All England Club for the first time since 2016, when they won the title together. It will be their first Grand Slam doubles pairing of any kind since a first-round exit at the 2022 US Open. Together, the sisters have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles, six of them at Wimbledon, along with Olympic gold at the 2012 London Games on these same courts.
And then, on top of doubles with Venus, came the singles wild card. Williams, at 44, will be competing in three Wimbledon events' worth of tennis in a single fortnight, a workload that would be ambitious for a player half her age, let alone one who hasn't strung together a full season in years.
WHY NOW
Williams has been candid that this comeback isn't built around chasing a record eighth Wimbledon singles title, even though she already holds one of the most decorated résumés in tennis history: 23 Grand Slam singles titles, seven of them won on these same lawns, an Open Era record she shares with Margaret Court overall. Instead, she has pointed to her two daughters — eight-year-old Olympia and two-year-old Adira — as the real reason she's lacing back up.
"It's really about my kids getting to see me play," Williams said in the lead-up to the tournament. By her own account, the push to play doubles with Venus also came from Olympia, who told her mother she should team up with her aunt again. "She's always right," Williams said, "so I was like, 'damn.'"
That framing matters for how this comeback is being read. This isn't a Tom Brady-style chase for one more ring, or a victory-lap retirement tour. Williams is 44, has been away from the tour for nearly four full years, and is stepping directly into the most physically demanding tournament on the calendar — best-of-three on grass, a surface that punishes movement and rewards players who've spent a season building up the specific muscles grass-court tennis requires. Few players attempt this kind of return at all; almost none attempt it at an age when even elite athletes in less punishing sports have long since retired.
WHAT THE DRAW LOOKS LIKE
Joint, Williams's first-round opponent, made her own Wimbledon debut just last year, losing in the first round to Liudmila Samsonova. She is exactly the kind of opponent a returning legend wants and doesn't want: young, unburdened by nerves, with nothing to lose against a name she grew up watching on television, but also untested at this level and potentially there for the taking. Whatever happens on court, the optics are impossible to script — a teenager-turned-pro who was in primary school during some of Williams's title runs, across the net from the player who effectively built the blueprint for the modern power game Joint herself plays.
Wimbledon organizers, for their part, appear to have leaned into the moment. Offering Williams wild cards in both singles and doubles, on top of the sisters' reunion, suggests the All England Club understands exactly what kind of story it is sitting on — one that transcends a single tournament's seeding sheet. Tennis has spent the better part of four years searching for its next dominant storyline after the retirements of Williams, Roger Federer, and the slow wind-down of Rafael Nadal's career. For two weeks at least, an old storyline is back in the building.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR FANS
For longtime tennis viewers, Williams's return is a chance to see, one more time, a career that reshaped the sport's power, athleticism, and visibility — particularly for Black women in a historically exclusionary sport. For newer fans, it's an introduction, in real time, to why Centre Court still goes quiet and then erupts when her name is called. And for Williams herself, by her own description, it's neither a farewell tour nor a comeback bid in the traditional sense, but something more personal: a chance for her children to watch their mother do, in person, what the rest of the world has only seen in highlight reels and history books.
Whether Williams wins a single game past the first round is almost beside the point this time, though nobody who has watched her career would bet against her finding something extra when the lights go on. Either way, when Williams steps onto a Wimbledon court next week — for the first time since 2022 — she will do it as both a 23-time Grand Slam champion and, for the first time in this particular building, simply a mother whose kids are in the stands.
Williams's first-round singles match is expected to be scheduled for Monday or Tuesday, June 29 or 30, with the Williams sisters' doubles debut to follow later in the tournament.
