Early Life & Family
Born in September 1981 to Oracene Price and Richard Williams, Serena was the youngest of 5 daughters. Her first couch was her father, who had picked up the essentials from tennis books and videos to teach Serena and Venus how to play the game. Venus Williams is her elder sister, who is also a big name in the world of tennis.
Around the age of three, Serena and her family moved to Compton, California. With its high rate of gang activity, it was no mistake that they had relocated to that particular city. Her father wanted to expose his daughters to the harsh realities of life and instill in them a deep commitment to hard work and a good education if they wanted to rise above the ugliness.
Around that time she started practicing at a court near her house. Riddled with potholes and at times missing nets, daily they carried out rigorous two-hour practices there. By 1991, Serena was 46-3 on the junior United States Tennis Association tour and ranked first in the 10-and-under division. It was around then that the family moved to Florida and professional trainers were asked to step in, while Richard took over the management of his daughters’ career.
In September last year, Williams gave birth to her daughter Alexis Olympia, through an emergency cesarean due to the babies plummeting heart rate. The daughter was born fine, but she had to undergo a six-day ordeal with a pulmonary embolism that led to multiple surgeries. Two months later in November, Williams tied the note with the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, Lousiana.
Highs & Lows
Williams has won 72 career singles titles, 23 doubles titles, and two mixed doubles titles. This includes 39 Grand Slam titles, of which 23 are single titles, 14 doubles titles and two mixed doubles titles. Apart from that, she is a four-time Olympic gold medalist and has won more career prize money than any other female athlete.
In 1999, she won her first Grand Slam in the US Open, having earlier lost to her sister in the second round at the Australian Open. In 2002, she was ranked Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) number 1 for the first time in her career, at age 20 and maintained the title for 186 consecutive weeks before losing it to Angelique Kerber in 2016. In 2002-2003 she achieved her first “Serena Slam” by winning all four Slam titles –the French Open, Wimbledon, US Open, and the Australian Open.
While there have many other highs in her career, there have also been some sore thumbs. In 2009, Williams had an outburst laced with profanity against a line-judge who called her for a foot fault at the US Open semifinals against Kim Clijsters. The Grand Slam committee later fined her a record $82,500 and put her on probation for the following two years. She has also been in and out of surgeries, including an emergency treatment regarding a blood clot in her lungs.
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