Venus Williams is back on the professional tennis tour at age 45 and will be returning to the U.S. Open next week for her first Grand Slam competition in two years.
She received a wild-card entry for singles from the U.S. Tennis Association on Wednesday — she will be the oldest player in that event in New York since Renee Richards was 47 in 1981 — after earlier getting one for mixed doubles.
Here is a look at the career of Williams, who owns seven Grand Slam titles in singles, 14 in women's doubles
with her younger sister, Serena, and two in mixed doubles, plus a record five Olympic tennis medals:
Williams, who was born in Lynwood, California, on June 17, 1980, played her first WTA tournament in Oakland in October 1994, at 14. In the first round, Williams faced Shaun Stafford, the 1988 NCAA singles champion, and won 6-3, 6-4. In the second round, Williams lost to Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, who would retire with four Grand Slam trophies.
Her Grand Slam debut came at Roland-Garros in 1997, eliminating Naoko Sawamatsu in the first round and losing to Nathalie Tauziat in the second. Later that year, Williams played in the U.S. Open for the first time and reached the final before losing to Martina Hingis.
Venus beat Serena — who is 15 months younger — in the second round of the 1998 Australian Open, the first of 31 meetings as pros. Serena went 19-12, 11-5 in Slam matches.
Venus and Serena teamed up to win their first major doubles title at the 1999 French Open. They also won the U.S. Open that year.
Her first Grand Slam singles trophy arrived at the All England Club when she was 20, via a victory over Lindsay Davenport in 2000. That made Williams the first Black woman to win Wimbledon since Althea Gibson in the 1950s. With Serena having won the 1999 U.S. Open, they became the first sisters in tennis history to each win a major singles championship. They were just getting started. “I always expected to win Grand Slams,” Venus said at the time. “This was meant to be.” She also collected the Venus Rosewater Dish — the Wimbledon women’s trophy — in 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008.
Williams left the 2000 Sydney Olympics with gold medals from singles and doubles (with Serena, of course), then added golds in women's doubles in 2008 and 2012, plus a silver in mixed doubles (with Rajeev Ram) in 2016.
Venus won her first U.S. Open title in 2000 with another victory over Davenport, and her second by defeating Serena a year later in the first major championship match between sisters since Maud Watson beat Lillian Watson at Wimbledon in 1884. During one remarkable stretch from 2002 into 2003, the Williams siblings met in four consecutive Slam finals; Serena went 4-0.
Venus was ranked No. 1 for the first time in February 2002 and was there for 11 weeks. Serena spent a total of 319 weeks at No. 1.
During the 2011 U.S. Open, Williams withdrew before her second-round match and revealed she had been diagnosed with Sjögren’s syndrome, an energy-sapping auto-immune disease that can cause joint pain.
Williams had a career resurgence in 2016-17, making it to the finals at two major tournaments (at the Australian Open and Wimbledon) and the semifinals at two others (at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open).
Williams had 10 consecutive Slam exits in the first or second round, including at the 2023 U.S. Open, her most recent major appearance. No one knew until recently, but Williams also was having more health issues: She had surgery for uterine fibroids last year. She was away from the tour for 16 months until returning at the DC Open this July, winning once each in singles and doubles.
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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis writer since 2002. Find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich. More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
