Serena Williams is giving tennis one more look at greatness

Serena Williams has already produced some impressive and unlikely comebacks.

She missed eight months following knee surgery in 2003 and returned, against most odds, better than ever. Williams played only 36 matches in 2005-06 after a variety of ailments, but her Grand Slam title total would continue to mount. In 2010, a serious foot injury cost her nearly an entire year.

Williams was already pregnant when she won the 2017 Australian Open, her 23rd major title. When she returned after a life-threatening delivery at age 36, Serena promptly advanced to four Grand Slam finals in two years’ time. She played her last match at the 2022 US Open, losing in the third round. She was just shy of her 41st birthday and would give birth to a second daughter one year later.

It seemed like the final chapter for one of the greatest tennis players ever.

But Serena Jameka Williams has decided she is not quite finished yet.

At 44 years old, Williams is returning to professional tennis at next week's HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club, where she will compete in doubles. 

"Queen’s Club feels like the perfect place to begin this next chapter," Williams said in a statement. "Grass has given me some of the most meaningful moments of my career, and I’m excited to be back competing on one of the sport’s most iconic stages.”

Williams is, by consensus, the greatest player of her generation on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz. Some tennis historians would go a step further and call her the greatest player the sport has ever seen.

To see her back on court, in real time, again doing Serena things? It’s a pretty remarkable thought.

Williams won a total of 98 WTA Tour-level titles across her career, which include 73 singles, 23 doubles and two mixed doubles championships. But statistics alone never fully explained Serena. The psychological edge she carried into matches was every bit as significant. Consider:

• Opponents often stepped on court already searching for answers to a serve they knew was coming and still couldn't stop.
• She won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, but perhaps more impressively, she won them over a span of nearly two decades.
• Her best tennis often arrived when the stakes were highest -- finals, deciding sets and the biggest moments.
• Entire generations of players measured themselves against her, then found themselves trying to beat her.
• For years, the question wasn't whether Williams could win a major. It was whether anyone could stop her from winning it.

Alongside sister Venus, Williams won 14 Grand Slam women’s doubles titles and completed the career Grand Slam. She also captured two mixed doubles majors. Williams, Martina Navratilova and Margaret Court are the only women in the Open Era to complete the career Grand Slam in both singles and doubles.

Hard to believe it has been more than a quarter century since Serena and Venus -- who first learned the game on the public courts of Compton, California -- took women’s tennis by storm. They both reached the semifinals of the 1999 US Open, with Serena winning the title after defeating Monica Seles, Lindsay Davenport and Martina Hingis.

Williams played with a style that combined power and athleticism to an extent never seen before in women’s tennis. Her serve might have been the best ever, and she could hit winners from either side. More important, she was a fierce competitor, focused solely on winning.

Her numbers still stand in another category. Williams’ 23 Grand Slam singles titles are the most in the Open Era among women and second all-time to Margaret Court’s 24. Williams spent 319 weeks ranked No. 1 and finished as year-end World No. 1 five times. Perhaps more remarkable was the span of those year-end finishes on top -- beginning in 2002 and extending to 2009, 2013, 2014 and finally 2015.

The landscape looks very different from the one she left behind in 2022.

After Serena’s last run at No. 1, the sport shifted from the eras of Angelique Kerber, Simona Halep and Ashleigh Barty into the current group led by Iga Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka. Swiatek already owns six Grand Slam singles titles. Sabalenka has four. Elena Rybakina and Coco Gauff are multiple major champions as well.

At the same time, women’s tennis has never seen this kind of depth of talent. With the sport becoming more global than ever, players like Alexandra Eala of the Philippines, Indonesia’s Janice Tjen and Zeynep Sonmez of Turkey are among those making historic breakthroughs for their countries.

It is a very different sport than the one Serena last left in 2022 -- which is part of what makes her return so fascinating in the first place.

And whatever this becomes from here, this sport won't turn down the chance to see a little more Serena Williams.