NEW YORK (AP) — Even at age 45, even after two years away from Grand Slam tennis, displayed some big serves and powerful groundstrokes at on Monday night in front of a supportive crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium, before losing 6-3, 2-6, 6-1 to Karolina Muchova.
Williams was at the hard-court tournament since Renee Richards was 47 in 1981.
“She’s such a legend of our sport,” 2023 French Open runner-up Muchova said about seven-time Grand Slam singles champion Williams, adding that it was an honor “to share a court with her.”
In just the fourth match of a comeback that began last month after more than a year off the tour, Williams didn’t exactly get to ease into things Monday: Muchova, a 29-year-old from the Czech Republic, was seeded 11th in New York and made it to the semifinals there in both 2023 — when she lost to eventual champion in a match — and 2024.
So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Williams started slowly, ceding 11 of the initial 13 points and falling behind 2-0. With members of the crowd shouting, “Let’s go, Venus!” and roaring after her winners — and her fiance, Andrea Preti, leaping out of his seat — Williams took three games in a row to go ahead 3-2
Muchova grabbed the next four games to claim that set, which ended with Williams hitting four of her evening’s 10 double-faults to get broken.
But Williams, who smacked serves at up to 114 mph and finished with just one fewer winner than Muchova, broke to begin the second set on her way to tying the match.
In the third set, though, as the contest reached two hours, was simply too good.
When the match ended, Williams left the court with a wave as fans rose to salute someone whose first U.S. Open title arrived a full quarter of a century ago.
More recently, Williams was until entering a tournament in Washington last month, where she won one match each in singles and doubles. She hadn’t competed anywhere since the Miami Open in March 2024, and had surgery for uterine fibroids later last year.
The U.S. Tennis Association awarded wild cards to Williams for both the mixed doubles event last week and singles.
She hasn’t won a match at the U.S. Open in singles since 2019, when she got to the second round. Since then, Williams exited in the first round in 2020, 2022 and 2023, and missed the tournament in 2021 and 2024.
She won singles championships at Flushing Meadows in 2000 and 2001, and another five at Wimbledon.
, Williams also collected 14 Grand Slam trophies in women’s doubles alongside her younger sister, , plus two in mixed doubles, earned a record five Olympic tennis medals and reached No. 1 in the WTA rankings.
Through the years, both siblings transcended their sport and became much more than successful athletes. Serena, , played her .
“She’s Venus Williams. She’s so iconic in so many different ways,” said Frances Tiafoe, an American player who won his first-round match in Ashe earlier Monday. “She’s won so much. And to see how much she loves game still at her age is amazing. It’s amazing to still see her out here.”
It was at the U.S. Open more than a decade ago that Williams revealed she had been diagnosed with , an energy-sapping auto-immune disease that can cause joint pain.
Some thought she might leave her sport because of that, but she remained a leading figure — on and off the court. To her fans — for years, and certainly on Monday night — it never mattered that she now has exited in the first or second round in each of her past 13 appearances at major tournaments.
When she was asked at the Washington tournament in July why she was still competing, she offered a simple reply: “Why not?”
“I want to be my best, and that’s the expectation I have for myself: to get the best out of me. And that’s all any player can ask for,” Williams said Saturday, the day before the start of singles play at the U.S. Open. “I haven’t played as much as the other players, so it’s a different challenge when you’re dealing with that. So I’m just trying to have fun, stay relaxed and be my personal best.”
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