After a few months of cheeky silence and misdirection, plus an experiment on the doubles court, Serena Williams is completing her comeback to professional tennis. The 44-year-old has accepted a wild card into the singles main draw at Wimbledon, which begins next week, causing the traditionally stodgy tournament to post heatedly about the occasion.
Williams retired from competition after a third-round appearance at the 2022 U.S. Open. Her first-round match at Wimbledon will mark her first professional singles match since that day. She won the grass-court major seven times, most recently in 2016. In her last appearance in 2022, she lost in the first round.
When Williams reentered the anti-doping testing pool at the end of 2025, I thought we were about to witness an extremely effortful marketing campaign for the telehealth company her husband Alexis Ohanian invests in, and the GLP-1 drugs it prescribes. Since her original retirement, she has appeared regularly in ads for the company, and credited the drugs with losing 34 pounds before her return to competition.
To some extent, Williams's return is still about that, but it involves actual tennis, too. It started with a return to doubles earlier this month at Queen's Club, where she won a match alongside 19-year-old star Victoria Mboko, before the team withdrew when Mboko injured her knee. At Berlin, Williams competed alongside Karolina Muchova and lost in the opening round. At Wimbledon, she'll appear in both the doubles (with her sister Venus) and the singles, which will require a dramatic step up in movement and conditioning. She looked pretty good, though a doubles point only reveals so much about about a potential singles performance:
How Williams fits into the current landscape of the tour will be one of the most compelling questions in the opening days of Wimbledon. Will this question continue to be interesting or relevant after those opening days? I am skeptical, and not just because of the names at the top of the WTA; the talent pool has gotten deeper with every passing season. Even if talent in the top 10 is comparable, I suspect that the quality of opponent further down the rankings—the first players you encounter over the course of a major, say—has improved.
Serena winning one match in the main draw would be wildly impressive, given the context, yet somehow I doubt a 23-time major champion would return to the sport if she perceived a ceiling of second-round exits. Her return to Wimbledon is like getting to see one of those goofy era-comparison debates answered by reality. If a 44-year-old Serena can still credibly compete on the current WTA, that would say a lot about both her as well as her much younger competition.
