Serena Answers the Questions
After the second match of her comeback, Bounces caught up with Serena Williams in Berlin on several pressing topics ahead of Wimbledon.
BERLIN, Germany — On a sunny late Tuesday afternoon in the leafy Berlin neighborhood of Grunewald, Serena Williams took to the Steffi Graf Stadium for the second match of her comeback to professional tennis.
It was surreal, I must say, seeing Serena back on a tennis court after all these years. But given how high-stakes so much of Serena’s tennis life has felt—including countless tense moments which I’ve been lucky enough to witness in person—this match never felt like the be-all-end-all of anything. This wasn’t Serena’s first match back—that came with a win last week in London—and nor was it her last.
Serena partnered this time with Karolina Muchova; they lost, 6-4, 6-4, to the team of Erin Routliffe and Giuliana Olmos.
Serena was focused and intent throughout the match, to be clear: she clenched her fist after nearly every point won. She didn’t serve quite as effectively as she did last week, but she also didn’t look as rusty on other parts of her game.
“Honestly, I felt pretty good out there,” Serena said. “I felt, actually, more nimble, more sturdy, and quicker than in the first match [at] Queen’s. Yeah, overall I felt pretty good.”
The German crowd was warm to Serena throughout, often cheering her on by name between points. Serena’s daughters, 8-year-old Olympia and 2-year-old Adira, watched from a box near the top of the small stadium’s lower bowl. Adira started getting bored during the second set, understandably—tennis would test the patience of any toddler—and Olympia tried to entertain and distract her, which her mom noticed from down on the court.
“Yeah, it was really fun,” Serena said of having her daughters watch her. “I saw that one was very active, and I think the other one was trying to calm her down. It made me smile. Otherwise, I would have been a little bit more on edge.”
I was also a bit nervous on this sunny day in Berlin, I’ll admit, for my first chance to speak to Serena in nearly four years. It ages us both to say it, probably, but I went to my first Serena Williams press conference 17 years ago, before a World TeamTennis match she played for the now-defunct Washington Kastles in the summer of 2009, shortly after I graduated from college.
Since then, I was there, more often than not, with questions for Serena after both her biggest wins and her most stinging losses. We’ve talked to each other hundreds of times, on four continents, and have had our ups and downs, as any reporter and subject would. It’s been a while, and after having done so much reporting here at Bounces about her comeback ahead of her intended announcement schedule, I wasn’t sure how this time would go.
I’ll also admit that after seeing how cagey and evasive Serena was in her first press conference last week in London, I put more time and thought than I normally would before a press conference into preparing what I was going to ask Serena and how exactly I would ask it. In the end, I think that paid off. I got the microphone three times—more than I could have expected—and I think each exchange was better and more revealing than the last.
For all of those moments—including my questions about Serena’s use of GLP-1 drugs as an athlete, her interest in the remaining Wimbledon singles card (this is the newsiest bit), and what her motivation was when she reentered the anti-doping testing pool last year—please become a paid subscriber to Bounces! You won’t regret it!
Don’t want to take my word for it? Behold this lovely reader comment on my recent Wimbledon wild cards post.
Plus, hear from Coco Gauff earlier on Tuesday about the reports that she’d turned down an invitation from Serena to be her doubles partner here in Berlin.
See you after the jump! -Ben
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