My All Time Internet Crush...Serena Williams - Champion UPDATE: Officially Retired?

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Serena Williams named Associated Press’ Female Athlete of the Decade







With 12 Grand Slam singles titles and more than three years firmly atop the rankings, Serena Williams is the AP’s Female Athlete of the Decade. (AP/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

After consistent dominance on the court over the past 10 years, it’s only fitting that Serena Williams takes the top honors as the decade comes to a close.

Williams was named the Associated Press’ Female Athlete of the Decade after a vote by AP sports editors and beat writers, the AP announced on Saturday. It will announce the Male Athlete of the Decade on Sunday.



Gymnast Simone Biles took second in the vote after winning the AP’s Female Athlete of the Year award. Swimmer Katie Ledecky finished in third, and skiers Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin took fourth and fifth, respectively.

Williams won 12 Grand Slam titles over the past decade — no woman has won more than three over the past 10 seasons — and spent more than three years straight at the top of the WTA rankings. She became the oldest No. 1 player in WTA history, too, and tied Steffi Graf’s record for most consecutive weeks at the top.

The 38-year-old made the final at 19 of the 33 majors she competed in. She boasts 72 singles titles in her career, too, and has won 37 in the past decade — 11 more than anyone else.

Williams is currently No. 10 in the WTA rankings, and fresh off a loss to 19-year-old Bianca Andreescu in the Finals at the U.S. Open in September.

To make her accomplishments throughout the decade even more impressive, Williams nearly lost her life in 2018 after suffering multiple medical problems following the birth of her daughter. She won the Australian Open in 2017 while pregnant, too, and returned to the court just eight months after giving birth despite her medical scare — finishing runner up at four of the seven major tournaments she’s entered since.

Undoubtedly, she is one of the greatest athletes of all time.
 

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Serena Williams Turns Back Time at Australian Open
Against Aryna Sabalenka, Williams called back to a much earlier phase of her career, well before she was the undisputed queen of her sport.

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Serena Williams beat Aryna Sabalenka at the Australian Open after several times looking close to defeat.Credit...William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Karen Crouse
  • Feb. 14, 2021Updated 9:47 a.m. ET
MELBOURNE, Australia — Serena Williams became a time traveler on Sunday, pulled back to the past to essentially face down her much younger self.

Across the net from her in the fourth round of the Australian Open stood the 22-year-old Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, who turned pro at 14, like Williams, and whose strategy called to mind Williams’s game plan at the same age: If at first you don’t succeed, hit harder.

Williams, 39, stared down Sabalenka, and after two gripping hours, Sabalenka blinked. In the 10th game of the deciding set, Sabalenka mustered one point on her serve as Williams, a seven-time champion, seized the break and a 6-4, 2-6, 6-4 victory to set up a quarterfinal meeting with Simona Halep, who dispatched the 19-year-old Iga Swiatek in three sets.

Williams’s longevity makes it easy to forget that before she was the game’s grande dame, she was its whiz kid, collecting nine WTA singles titles, including one Grand Slam, before she was out of her teens.



Sabalenka, a nine-time winner on the WTA Tour, and Swiatek, the reigning French Open champion, are the latest in a long string of polished phenoms threaded through Williams’s career. One of the biggest stars to emerge, Naomi Osaka, saved two match points to beat Garbiñe Muguruza on Sunday. Still, from Jennifer Capriati and Monica Seles to Maria Sharapova and Sloane Stephens, Williams has watched many young talents come and go and, on occasion, stray far from tennis.


A sport with a history of suffocating its young has not stifled Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam champion in singles whose love for the game seems to have deepened over time. Against Sabalenka, she studied a page of written notes during changeovers as if she were back in high school. She fiddled with her “Queen” necklace. She dug balls out of the corners and ran from side to side as if she were on a school blacktop at recess.
Darren Cahill, one of Halep’s coaches, described Williams’s movement as the best he had seen from her “in a long, long time” and said, “If you can stay in more points and get more balls back, stay alive, then she’s got the power to turn those points around.”
What Williams is doing is also inconceivable to the younger Americans, three of whom have followed her into the second week. Marveled, one of the three, the 28-year-old Shelby Rogers: “What she’s been able to accomplish is absolutely incredible because some days I wake up now and I’m like, ‘OK, I’m not 21 anymore.’”Williams’s serve usually allows her to win her share of easy points. But against Sabalenka, her main weapon continually misfired. Williams put 52 percent of her first serves in play and recorded eight double faults, including one in the fifth game of the third set, which gave Sabalenka two break points.



With the state of Victoria in Day 2 of a hard lockdown, no fans were in the stands, but the restrictions placed on the local populace did not extend to Williams’s inner circle, which includes her husband, coach, agent, hitting partner and older sister Venus, 40, who lost in the second round.
Williams didn’t need to be told by the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, that her entourage qualified as “essential workers,” a classification that made it possible for them to attend the match. Her team is elemental to her success, and she looked over often to where everyone was seated. When she was down 15-40 in that fifth game, Venus raised both hands as if signaling a touchdown and they locked eyes.


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Williams’s sister Venus Williams was in the stands for support at crucial moments during the match.Credit...Loren Elliott/Reuters
Williams’s most recent Grand Slam championship came at Venus’s expense at Melbourne Park in 2017, when she was two months pregnant with her first daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian. Since becoming a parent, Williams has found her voice as an advocate for working mothers everywhere, speaking openly of the hardships, both physical and emotional, that she and others on the WTA Tour — and in the wider world — confront daily while balancing their jobs and child-rearing.
But in that telepathic moment between the sisters, Serena was not tennis’s earth mother. She was transported back in time to her early years as a pro when she looked to Venus for direction.
“When I hear her voice, it just makes me calm and confident,” Williams said. “Yeah, I think there’s something about it that just makes me feel really good.”
She got her first serve in on the next three points and won them all, earning an advantage with a 126 mile-an-hour ace. Williams closed out the game on a frazzled Sabalenka’s forced error.



Sabalenka fought back, winning the next three games to draw even at 4-4. At that point, she said: “I felt like I should win it. I felt like I was fighting really well.”

But so was Williams. She held, and with Sabalenka serving to stay in the match, Williams got enough balls back to fluster her younger opponent, whose service game ended with a double fault and two forehand unforced errors.

“I just needed to play better on the big points,” Williams said. “I knew that I could. I still hadn’t reached my peak. I was like, ‘OK, Serena, you got this. Just keep going.’”


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Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus threw her racket in frustration as she missed opportunities against Williams.Credit...Hamish Blair/Associated Press
After 23 major singles titles and hundreds of millions of dollars in prize money and endorsements and motherhood, how does Williams find the motivation to keep chasing a tennis ball?

The answer could be found in how Williams spent her off day. After her Saturday practice, she put her daughter down for a nap and then made work calls to the United States, finalizing orders and obsessing about fabrics for her fashion line, S by Serena, which she described as her “second career.”
There’s a method to Williams’s multitasking. She has been doing it her whole life, she said. She never played a full tennis schedule as a junior and has never played a full schedule as a pro.



“I still went to college, I still did a lot of other things,” Williams said. “I had other careers. It was impossible to burn out.”
Convention holds that Williams continues to play because she has Margaret Court’s career record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles in her sights. But the truth might be simpler.

“I like my job,” she said. “I like what I do. It’s pretty special I get to come out and still get to do it.”

 

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Naomi Osaka Shouts Out Serena Williams After Emotional Australian Open Win
By Justin Curto
Photo: Andy Cheung/Getty Images

The stakes were high as Naomi Osaka bested Serena Williams in the semifinals of the Australian Open, keeping Williams from the record-tying 24th Grand Slam title she’s been chasing for years. “I was a little kid watching her play, and just to be on the court playing against her, for me, is a dream,” 23-year-old Osaka said of Williams after the match, which she won in straight sets. The two last met in a Grand Slam tournament in the finals of the 2018 U.S. Open, when Osaka netted her first Grand Slam win. “Of course, every time I play her I feel like it’s something I’ll definitely remember a lot,” Osaka added in her post-match press conference. “For me, I want her to play forever. Well, that’s the little kid in me.” Osaka will face Jennifer Brady in the finals, chasing her fourth Grand Slam title — and maybe by then she’ll have her biggest cheerleader, rapper boyfriend Cordae, back in the stands.


Williams, meanwhile, left to a standing ovation from the Melbourne crowd, who had been cheering her on for a third set. As fans and reporters speculated about her retirement, the 39-year-old dismissed questions about it in an emotional press conference. “I don’t know,” she said, asked if that exit was a good-bye. “If I ever say farewell, I wouldn’t tell anyone.” She then looked to tear up during the next question and left the press conference early.
 

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“Congratulations on winning Grand Slam Number 23”: Michael Jordan surprised Serena Williams with a gift after her 2017 Australian Open Title
ADVAIT JAJODIA
29/03/2021


Michael Jordan surprised Serena Williams with a gift after she clinched her 23rd Grand Slam at the Australian Open in 2017.
It is often said that ‘Game recognizes game’. In the sporting world, the appreciation, love, and mutual respect what athletes from different sports hold for each other are highly commendable. Two such athletes, who have often shown their respect to each other are basketball legend Michael Jordan and tennis superstar Serena Williams.

There have been many instances of Jordan taking matters ‘personally’ on the basketball court, and proving his dominance over his opponents. He has been known for using opponents’ words to add fuel to his fire. Although, when required MJ too gives his appreciation to the deserving.
Back in 2017, Serena Williams defeated her sister Venus Williams in the finals of the Australian Open. It was Serena’s 23rd Grand Slam title and 7th at Australia. Jordan, who claimed to be a Serena fan, took note of her historic moment and decided to surprise her with a gift.

Also Read: “Lonzo Ball wants to sign with the New York Knicks or the Chicago Bulls”: Pelicans star reportedly does not enjoy playing in NewOrleans

“Thank you, Michael Jordan”: Serena Williams was left speechless after receiving the gift
Serena was in an interview with SportsCenter when she was handed a box. A box which came from ‘a very very special and a very accomplished fan’. Inside the box was a letter alongside a new red and black pair of NikeCourt Flare AJ1 sneaker that she puts on after winning her title, as well as a pink and black Air Jordan 1 shoe. Williams read out loud the letter:
“Winning is hard. It takes years of hard work, mental toughness, and a willingness to accept the fact that you hate to lose. Congratulations, with much respect on winning No. 23. It will be a privilege to keep watching your determination on the court.”



Arguably, both American athletes are one of the if not the greatest players in their respective sports. Both of them have a highly impressive resume are regarded as the GOAT of their sports. Williams and Jordan both, have been respected worldwide for their dedication to the sport.
Also Read: LaMarcus Aldridge reveals his reasoning for teaming up with James Harden and co: “The Brooklyn Nets have a better chance at winning the title than the Miami Heat”
As Serena was made aware of the gift, he was obviously stunned. She struggled to find words. It will obviously be a surreal moment for any athlete. One of the greatest athletes in the world validating you. She thanked MJ for the gift:
“These are my shoes in my favorite colors. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael Jordan. I can’t believe I’m saying thank you to Michael Jordan.”
 

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Serena Williams Admits That Marriage with Husband Alexis Ohanian 'Is Not Bliss' Without Work
Mon., March 29, 2021, 1:59 p.m.·2 min read


Serena Williams frequently serves relationship goals with husband Alexis Ohanian.
But the four-time Olympic gold medalist, 39, recently admitted that marriage "is not bliss" without work, as she opened up about matrimony and motherhood for Bumble's The Question Game.
"Marriage is not bliss," she admitted with a laugh when asked what was the most surprising thing she learned about marriage. "But it can be if you work at it." She also added during the video that "a dealbreaker for me in a relationship is definitely loyalty. Well, not having it, that is."
RELATED: Serena Williams Says Daughter, 2½, Is Already a Fashionista: 'She's Currently Wearing Heels'
Williams additionally offered some sage advice for anyone dealing with a broken heart. "Heartbreak is a part of life, whether it be a loved one, a boyfriend, or an animal," she mused. "But time heals all wounds."
Mike Coppola/MG19/Getty
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Serena Williams, Alexis Ohanian and their daughter Olympia
She and the Reddit co-founder, 37, tied the knot in November 2017 during a ceremony in New Orleans that was attended by Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian West, and Anna Wintour. The couple had previously welcomed daughter Alexis Olympia Jr., 3.
The 23-time Grand Slam winner revealed that motherhood was always in the cards for her, adding in Bumble's video, "I always knew I wanted kids. I never knew when but I always knew I wanted kids at some point."
RELATED VIDEO: First Black Leader of USTA, Katrina Adams, Talks Impact of Serena & Venus Williams on the Sport
She concluded the segment with some words of wisdom. "I learned that love is an amazing feeling. And if you have an opportunity to feel it, then it's a special thing," she said.
Williams previously gave PEOPLE a glimpse at home life, revealing that daughter Olympia "dresses me and her father" every day.
"She'll set up before bed what we need to wear in the morning," she said. "And she says, 'Blue shirt, blue shirt, blue shirt.' And then she goes, 'Mama wear this or these shoes.' She always tells me to [wear] heels. She's currently wearing heels."
Olympia Ohanian/Instagram Serena Williams and daughter Olympia
She and Olympia have frequently been twinning on her Instagram, looking adorable in matching tennis outfits and Disney Princess costumes. "We even have jammies. So now if she sees me in something, and she has the same thing, she immediately wants to change so we're twins," Williams added.

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