Farewell Serena

The Tennis Podcast

David Law

Sports, Wimbledon, Tennis, Sports & Recreation

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Serena Williams has published an article in Vogue announcing that she is “evolving away” from tennis, with the upcoming US Open expected to be her final tournament. It will bring to an end one of the greatest sporting careers of all time.

In the first part of this podcast, Catherine, David and Matt react to the news, discuss the effect it will have on tennis, and offer some reflections on Serena’s career.

We then get into the biggest stories from Canada so far, including encouraging signs and dramatic matches for Bianca Andreescu, Coco Gauff’s toughness, and defeats for Carlos Alcaraz, Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas which have left the men’s draw wide open.

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Read Serena’s Vogue essay - https://www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams-retirement-in-her-own-words

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Billie Jean King. This is Mary and Bartoli. I'm Matt Vellander. This is Mary Carillo.
0:05.2	This is Pam Shriver. This is Yannick Noah and you're listening to the tennis podcast.
0:20.5	Well as promised folks, we are back with a midweek podcast, but frankly,
0:26.7	even if we hadn't promised a midweek podcast, we would be back because as you very well might have
0:32.6	noticed, news has broken in the tennis world in the last couple of days. News in the form of a
0:40.2	vogue article, it's not often we get to break news via vogue, but here we are, or rather here is
0:48.9	Serena Williams writing a piece for the cover story of the September issue of vogue entitled
0:58.0	Serena's farewell to tennis in her own words. I am going to read some extracts from it to set the
1:04.9	scene, but I do strongly encourage you to go and read the piece. It's free to read online and
1:13.2	it's incredibly powerful and somehow incredibly insightful about a woman that we've all
1:21.2	known for 25 years to some degree, and yet I feel like I learned so much about her from this
1:27.2	vogue article, and I'm sure you'll feel the same if you get the chance to read it.
1:31.3	On the subject of stepping away from the sport in which she's won 23 major titles, she says the
1:38.8	following, I have never liked the word retirement. It doesn't feel like a modern word to me, I've
1:44.4	been thinking of this as a transition, but I want to be sensitive about how I use that word, which
1:49.6	means something very specific and important to a community of people. Maybe the best word to
1:55.3	describe what I'm up to is evolution. I'm here to tell you that I'm evolving away from tennis
2:02.4	to ward other things that are important to me. A few years ago I quietly started Serena ventures,
2:08.7	a venture capital firm. Soon after that I started a family. I want to grow that family,
2:14.8	but I've been reluctant to admit to myself or to anyone else that I have to move on from playing tennis.
2:21.2	Alexis, my husband and I have hardly talked about it. It's like a taboo topic. I can't even have
2:27.2	this conversation with my mum and dad. It's like it's not real until you say it out loud. It comes up,
	...

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