NEW YORK (AP) — Venus Williams played her first Grand Slam match in two years on Monday night at the U.S. Open, facing 2023 French Open runner-up Karolina Muchova in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Williams dropped the opening set 6-3. She 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, Williams took the next three games to go ahead 3-2, before Muchova grabbed the next four to claim the set.
At age 45, Williams is the oldest singles player at the hard-court tournament since Renee Richards was 47 in 1981. She wasn’t exactly easing 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 Coco Gauff in a match interrupted by a climate protest — and 2024.
Williams won two of her seven major singles championships at Flushing Meadows in 2000 and 2001. The other five came at Wimbledon.
Since making her professional debut in 1994, she’s also collected 14 Grand Slam trophies in women’s doubles alongside her younger sister, Serena, 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, who won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, played her last match at the 2022 U.S. Open.
The elder Williams was off the tennis tour for 16 months until making a comeback at 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.
“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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