Serena Williams On The Sweet Reason She Didn’t Want To Bring Daughter Olympia To Her Matches
Serena Williams' daughter Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. (who goes by the name Olympia) watched her famous compete at the U.S. Open this summer.
Williams first went up against 80th-ranked Danka Kovinic of Montenegro on the first day of the tournament, before Australia's Ajla Tomljanović. The latter was a particularly poignant moment for the tennis champion as it proved to be her last game before she retires at the age of 41.
From watching her mother practice tennis before competing when she was just a baby, to hitting the court herself in recent years, Williams' now five-year-old daughter has played a special role in her mother's career journey.
But the mother-of-one, who shares her daughter with her husband and tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, 39, has revealed she didn't initially want her daughter to attend her matches.
A clip from Williams' appearance on Wednesday's episode of The Drew Barrymore Show documented the tennis star explaining why she didn't let her daughter come to her tennis matches until recently.
Barrymore asked Williams: 'Is it true that you didn't want Olympia to go to matches because you were afraid you would lose killer instinct?'
Williams responded: 'I just was worried I'd get distracted because I would be like, "Wait is she drinking? Is she doing this?" She came to a match once, like super brief, and I was like, "Oh my God, is she wearing sun cream?" It's nuts.
'I would get stressed out and be like "Wait a minute, oh my goodness I've got to serve. This makes no sense,"' she adds with a laugh. 'So yeah, I've never really had her at matches until this summer actually.'
Speaking of the 'the most watched moment in tennis history', when her daughter watched her U.S. Open match with Tomljanović on September 2, 2022, Barrymore asked if Alexia did anything to 'assuage [her mother's] fears' or 'calm something down'.
Williams assured: 'Absolutely. Apparently she was saying like, "Go Mumma, I'm so proud of you," and I was like, "What?"
'So then she comes back after I had lost in Cincinnati, she came back and she's like, "It's okay, Mumma, you just have to do what you feel," and I literally wanted to cry.
'It was like, "Do what you feel. Do what your heart tells you." It was the sweetest thing ever.'
Williams lost what was seemingly the final match of her career when competing against Tomljanović. Despite the end result, the 23-time Grand Slam champion fought to the end in three intense sets.
When announcing she would be retiring from her 27-year tennis career following the tournament, Williams told Vogue: 'There is no happiness in this topic for me. I know it’s not the usual thing to say, but I feel a great deal of pain.
'It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads. I keep saying to myself, I wish it could be easy for me, but it’s not. I’m torn: I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next.'
She continued: 'I have never liked the word retirement. It doesn’t feel like a modern word to me. I’ve been thinking of this as a transition, but I want to be sensitive about how I use that word, which means something very specific and important to a community of people. Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution.'
Williams did, however, say she'd like to grow her family with her husband, who she married in 2017.
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