Serena Williams made tennis evolve for a quarter century. Now, she’s finally ready to evolve away from it herself

WATCH: Prakash Amritraj on Serena Williams' impending retirement

“I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis,” Serena Williams wrote in Vogue on Tuesday, “toward other things that are important to me.”

Leave it to Serena to invent her own word for “retirement,” a term, she says, that doesn’t feel “modern” to her. In truth, it’s never seemed very apt for professional athletes, who may be in their 20s, 30s or 40s, to announce that they’re retiring. It sounds like they’re putting themselves to bed, or out to pasture. Either way, it’s a tacit admission that their most productive years are over.

Serena, of course, won’t admit to any such thing. She says she’s evolving away from tennis and into venture capital, where she hopes to be, as a Black woman, as much of a pioneer as she was in her sport. Do you doubt that she will?

Serena, who turns 41 in September, has been gradually moving away from tennis for a few years now. After becoming a mother in 2017, she mostly saved herself for the Grand Slams. This year, she didn’t play at all until Wimbledon, and now it appears all but certain that the US Open will be the final tournament of her quarter-century career.

But it has been years since Serena was simply an athlete. She’s a symbol—of Black excellence, modern motherhood, female success without compromise, survival. She’s one of a group of African-American women, along with Beyoncé, Rihanna and Oprah, who are at the center of American culture, not just sporting culture.

Still, Serena’s good-bye announcement was also a reminder of how much she continues to love playing her game, and how hard it is for her to let it go.

“There is no happiness in this topic for me,” she writes. “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.

“It’s like a taboo topic…It comes up, I get an uncomfortable lump in my throat, and I start to cry.”

Like many top players, Serena grew up immersed in tennis. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t surrounded by racquets and sneakers and baskets of balls, and there were at least two older members of her family—her father and sister Venus—who were crazy about the game. “There’s a picture of Venus pushing me in a stroller on a tennis court,” she writes, “and I couldn’t have been more than 18 months.”

Over the years Serena had plenty of reasons not to be so crazy about tennis. The early criticism of her father, and accusations that he fixed her matches with Venus; her treatment by the Indian Wells crowd in 2001; the criticism she heard for taking time off and pacing herself; the years it took for the fans at the US Open to fully embrace her and her sister. There were times when she did hint at an early retirement.

But what defined Serena as much as anything was her ability to put everything—good and bad, triumphant and controversial—behind her and keep going. Past Hingis, past Venus, past Billie Jean, past Chris and Martina, past Steffi, past everyone except Margaret Court. I like that Serena admits to caring about passing Court for the most major titles—“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that record,” she says.

I also like that she understands she doesn’t need it. “I didn’t get there. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. I didn’t show up the way I should have or could have. But I showed up 23 times, and that’s fine. Actually it’s extraordinary.”

Extraordinary is the word for what Serena did during her 24 seasons on tour. Before she reinvented the word “retirement,” she reinvented tennis: How hard you could hit, how fast you could run, how many Slams you could win, how perfect you could make your serve, how expressive you could be on court, how many years—or decades—you could stay at the top.

“The sheer physicality, the serve, a new level of pace and power; it was a complete shift with Serena,” one of her early opponents, Chanda Rubin, told me last year. “Everyone had to get better.”

A lot of people did get better. But not better than Serena. We should consider ourselves lucky that she loved tennis as much, and for as long, as she did.