Serena Williams is back and still as relevant as ever — on and off the tennis court

Serena Williams’ announcement on Monday that she would return to professional tennis nearly four years after her last match felt Jordan-esque.

The Women’s Tennis Association’s website displayed a graphic that included only three words: “Serena is back.”

Williams heralded the return by posting a 17-second Nike ad on her social media accounts. In the video, she walks over to her phone, which is blowing up with notifications and calls. A tagline that reads “Guess everybody heard the news” appears on-screen before the Williams and Nike logos emerge in tandem.

Her accolades, including 23 Grand Slam titles, speak for themselves. She’s the only player who has won the Career Golden Slam, winning all four majors and Olympic gold, in singles and doubles, and she was the sport’s dominant force for more than a decade.

In the announcement, Williams said she has accepted a wild-card invitation to play doubles in the HSBC Championships, scheduled June 8-14 at Queen’s Club in London.

Responses to her comeback have ranged from thoughts on how fitting it is that she will play her first event at the Queen’s Club to jokes that her return is a recession indicator. Respectfully, it is a relevance indicator. So much has changed during Williams’ time away from the game, and yet much has remained the same.

A singular moment reflects her modernity: the catsuit she wore at Flushing Meadows in 2002. It was a statement of beauty and Blackness.

If the conversation around Naomi Osaka’s outfits at this year’s French Open is any indication, folks still don’t know what to do with a fashionable, forward-thinking Black woman.

After Osaka wore a flashy ’fit that looked like the Eiffel Tower at night, her first-round opponent, Laura Siegemund, expressed a critique to TNT Sports,

“I come here to play tennis, not to put on a fashion show. … I find something else problematic,” Siegemund said. “In our sport, at every tournament they count every second, right up until you’ve unpacked your water bottle. But she can have a minute and a half to change. … That’s the only thing regarding the rules that I don’t think is OK and where, once again, bigger names are treated differently.”

Problematic is the right word, especially considering a history of weaponizing fashion to take shots centered on the Williams family. Even before Venus and Serena Williams’ love for fashion was suggested to be a deterrent for their tennis aspirations, their braids and beads were criticized. Venus Wiliams was even penalized in the 1999 Australian Open.

This is part of what makes the Williams sisters legendary. Their relevance and cultural individuality became resistance in a buttoned-up tennis world that prioritized respectability and its interpretation of “purity.” Serena Williams’ catsuit moments not only asserted her as a Black, full-figured woman, but in later incarnations, as a mother and champion.

Osaka, who has openly dealt with depression and anxiety, said her clothes speak for her.

“I feel like fashion for me, I tell people, I don’t talk a lot, so that way I can talk through my clothes,” she said at the French Open. “That means I can be as loud with colors or patterns or fabric as I want.”

Serena Williams’ relevance also looks like reverence from players such as Coco Gauff and Taylor Townsend, and yet her return puts her in the position to be more of an on-court peer. When Gauff entered our cultural awareness in 2019 with her win at Wimbledon over Venus Williams, it wasn’t as much of a changing of the guard as it was a celebration of the present and the future.

That spirit still exists, especially when juxtaposing Serena Williams’ return with a photo Osaka, Townsend, Gauff and other Black players took at a dinner Osaka and Townsend organized ahead of the French Open.

“Growing up, there weren’t a lot of tennis players I could look up to that looked like me,” Osaka said in a post on her Instagram account. “Being a minority in a sport like tennis is very isolating, but the positive is that you keep tabs on everyone that … being blunt, is Black. There’s a fellowship, a camaraderie.”

Townsend also posted about the dinner on her Instagram account. In a comment on the post, Katrina Adams, the first Black president of the U.S. Tennis Association and a former tennis professional, said that cultural pride and togetherness is a time-honored tradition for Black tennis players.

“In our era in the 80’s/90’s, we hosted ‘Soul Food’ Sunday on the middle Sunday of Wimbledon, when there was no play,” Adams wrote. “All the Black players got together, cooked, ate and enjoyed each other.”

The throughline between Serena Williams’ presence and burgeoning Blackness is that it always transcended the sport. Last week, the caretakers of Roland-Garros celebrated Althea Gibson, who 70 years ago became the first person of color to win a Grand Slam tournament. A voiceover from tennis legend Billie Jean King praised Gibson’s milestone and how it influenced Serena Williams and many others.

However, King also expressed the uncomfortable truth associated with that milestone: “If she’d been white, she definitely would’ve had a different experience every day of her life.”

Serena Williams is in a space usually reserved for athletes who are far removed from their powers, a place of prominence and universal appeal. She’s a minority owner in various franchises, including joining the ownership group of the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo in March 2025. Even with the buzz around her and with her hand in multiple business ventures, she sees her upcoming play as a chance to return to a familiar refuge.

“Queen’s Club feels like the perfect place to begin this next chapter,” Williams said in a statement from the tournament. “Grass has given me some of the most meaningful moments of my career, and I’m excited to be back competing on one of the sport’s most iconic stages.”

Her return is akin to the most recent Michael movie. It allows us to enjoy the classics, whether that comes from her major wins or her fashion sense. If she can conjure up some tennis magic, it could elevate her from being a peer to being feared, proof that a queen’s reign endures for generations.

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