Serena Williams Announces Retirement From Tennis: Report

LOS ANGELES, CA — Serena Williams is reluctantly leaving tennis to focus on growing her family, she announced in a first-person Variety article Tuesday.

The 23-time Grand Slam winner said she will put her racket down after a 26-year career. Williams is currently playing in the Canadian Open and is expected to play the Western & Southern Open, ESPN reported. Williams implied she would still play the U.S. Open in New York in late August.

The decision was extremely difficult, Williams said in the Variety article.

"There is no happiness in this topic for me. I know it’s not the usual thing to say, but I feel a great deal of pain. It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads," Williams wrote in the Variety article.

Williams, who calls the Miami area home, is leaving to grow her family, she said. After continuously hearing her 4-year-old daughter Olympia Ohanian say she wants to be a big sister, Williams realized it was time to "evolve" from her tennis career.

"Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family," Williams said. "And I almost did do the impossible: A lot of people don’t realize that I was two months pregnant when I won the Australian Open in 2017. But I’m turning 41 this month, and something’s got to give."

Widely considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Williams has collected four Olympic gold medals and 319 weeks at the No. 1 spot, according to ESPN. She was the second-highest-paid female athlete in the world in 2021 following tennis player Naomi Osaka, according to Forbes.

Williams and her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, live in a 14,500-square-foot Spanish Mediterranean–style home just north of Miami that was featured last year in Architectural Digest.