American professional tennis player, ranked by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) as world No. 1 in singles on eight occasions, from 2002 to 2017. She became the world No. 1 for the first time on 8 July 2002. On the sixth occasion, she held the ranking for 186 consecutive weeks, tying the record set by Steffi Graf for the most consecutive weeks as world No. 1 by a female tennis player. In total, she has been world No. 1 for 319 weeks, which ranks her third in the Open Era among female tennis players.
Williams and her tennis-champ sister Venus were brought up in a supportive environment to prepare them for such pressures as the media and competition bring to bear during the tennis tours. Their dad Richard has been called both a genius and a racist who is keeping his gifted kids wrapped in the bosom of their family. He groomed his five daughters to play tennis, but it was the two youngest who paid off, with Venus winning $1.2 million in career prizes and Serena already winning $242,000 by the time she was 16.
During their early professional life, both girls became known as combative and confrontational, skipping tournaments and boasting about being best. Their professional behaviour needed a little seasoning to go along with their talent. Serena at 16 was 5’10”, 145 lbs, a black Amazon in coloured hair beads, so muscular that the crowd whistled when she took off her sweatshirt to reveal her sculpted shoulders. Off the court, the sisters were like teenagers everywhere, giggling about boys and talking about clothes and movies.
Serena signed a $12 million contract to represent Puma sporting gear in 1998. The following year she and her sister moved out of their parents’ home into a house they built nearby. They’ve remained close in spite of Serena’s surge into the No.1 spot on the tennis circuit.
On 11 September 1999, in New York City, Serena became the first black American to win a tennis Grand Slam singles title since Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon in 1975, and the first black American woman to win the U.S. Open since Althea Gibson in 1958. With her huge 6-3, 7-6 victory over Martina Hingis, Serena, in her third year as a pro, also proved that she was no longer a bratty wannabe with a tendency to feud with other players. Her cockiness was now backed up with winner’s cups.
In July 2000 Serena was challenged in a tournament against her sister in the finals elimination for the Wimbledon Title. Defeated by Venus, fittingly enough, the tournament ended on a family note of harmony with the sisters taking the ladies’ doubles crown on 10 July 2000.
The bonded sisters splurged some of the $45 million earnings on a new $2.7 million mansion that they shared, along with $3.2 million to buy a house for their folks, Oracene and Richard. Serena is the youngest of the five daughter of Richard, a former sharecropper, and Oracene, a nurse. Her sisters are Yetunde, Isha, Lyndrea and Venus.
Finding that her fame made her a target for fans when she went to the mall, Serena confessed that she got hooked on shopping by the Internet. She said it reached a point of becoming an addiction in May 2001 during the French Open. She was hitting the computer three hours a day and on days when she did not have a match, her binges stretches to as much as six hours, ordering clothes, shoes, books and items for her pet pooch. She had to take herself firmly in hand to break the habit.
After 22 years of marriage, Serena’s parents, Richard and Oracene, divorced on 29 October 2002 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Serena won her second Wimbledon title after defeating her sister, Venus, on 5 July 2003. Venus suffered from a strained abdominal muscle but played to the finish nonetheless.
Yelunde, the older sister of Venus and Serena Williams was shot and killed early on 14 September 2003 in Compton, California, the victim of a drive-by shooting. Trained as a nurse, Yetunde Price owned a beauty salon and served as personal assistant to her famous sisters. The Williams sisters said, “We are extremely shocked, saddened and devastated by the shooting death of our beloved Yetunde. She was our nucleus and our rock.”
Her knee surgery in August 2003 may have sidelined her from playing tennis, but didn’t stop her from working just as hard. She negotiated a contract with Nike, worth at least $60 million over the next eight years and embarked on a new fashion career modelling her own evening wear, a line she developed called Aneres. She appeared on popular crime series “Law & Order: SVU”. In the fall of 2003, she shot an episode of “Street Time” written especially for her. On 27 January 2007 Williams bounced back to the top of her game, winning her third Australian Open Championship and eighth Grand Slam event. Her spectacular victory made her the first unseeded player in 29 years to capture the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup. She took her third Wimbledon crown on 4 July 2009, beating her sister Venus, although she and her sister won in the doubles category for the second consecutive year and the fourth time in all. Her fourth Wimbledon victory was a year later, on July 2010. Shortly after her win, she cut her foot on glass and required surgery to repair the cut. She had a second surgery on the foot in October 2010.
In late February 2011 she was treated for a pulmonary embolism. The following week, on 28 February, she underwent surgery for a hematoma that resulted from the embolism.
On 31 January 2015, she won her 19th Grand Slam Singles title, better than Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. In 2016, she won her 7th Wimbledon singles title, her 22 Grand Slam title (like Steffi Graf). Defeated at the 2022 US open, she retired on 02 September 2022.
Williams announced her engagement to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian on 29 December 2016. She was 8 weeks pregnant when she won the Australian Open in January 2017 and on 1 September 2017, Williams gave birth to a baby girl named Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., in at a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida.
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