The dream of playing professional tennis in front of her young daughters, Olympia and Adira, was the prime reason for Serena Williams’s return to the tour.
“It’s really about my kids getting to see me play,” Williams said on Sunday as she spoke to reporters for the first time since her comeback was confirmed.
“Olympia [who is eight] is a little bit older, Adira [two] is very young, but it’s also still [about] moments like that,” Williams said in the Queen’s media centre.
“It’s also just [being] an athlete is the best thing that you can be, in the highest place. Having an opportunity to still be able to possibly do that one last time is cool and exciting. It’s summer, the kids aren’t in school, so it’s a perfect time to get out there and just have fun and see what happens.”
Williams, 44, has been practising this weekend with her doubles partner Victoria Mboko, the 19-year-old Canadian who is No 9 in the world.
Williams has only entered the doubles at Queen’s, where she is expected to play her first competitive match in almost four years on Tuesday, and it is the same story for Berlin next week.
When asked whether she might also be interested in playing singles – the more physically demanding form of the game – the 23-time grand-slam winner’s answer was far from definitive. She did not express enthusiasm for the idea, but neither did she rule out the possibility of asking for a singles wild card from Wimbledon.
“For singles? I can’t say yeah, I can’t say no. Right now, no. I feel like I probably need to train a little bit more if I want to play singles. We’ll see if I get there. And if not … that’s not my journey right now.”
Does it matter whether results go her way? Williams’s official answer to that is no. Again, though, one wonders if this is actually the case. As her hitting partner David Quayle told Telegraph Sport this weekend, she is “an amazing competitor”. It is hard to imagine that Williams will be happy with a series of first-round exits.
“I don’t need to win,” said Williams, who strode into the media centre with her usual queenly bearing, dressed in a perfectly pressed cream jacket. “I’ve won more than most people have in their whole lives, so for me it’s not important. And it’s important that I keep reminding myself of that, because I don’t have anything to prove, I don’t have anything to lose, and everything here is just a gain.
“I think the biggest thing I’ve missed is the atmosphere. And the travel. I love travelling and I’ve done it my entire life. When you stop something that you’ve done since – honestly, I don’t even remember a start date – you take it for granted. Now there’s different things that I can experience in a different way that I’ve never been able to do before, and also do it with my family.”
The word at Queen’s on Sunday was that Williams has been looking sharp in practice. “She’s hitting great,” said Mboko. “I think she has such clean ball-striking: that’s really like a God-given gift. I personally think she’s ready to go.”
And yet, as any athlete knows, there is a huge gap between practice and competition. We will soon see whether this is just locker-room solidarity, or whether Williams can really recapture the power and sharpness that made her such a dominant champion for the best part of two decades.
Asked whether returning to elite tennis had been like riding a bike, Williams looked momentarily nonplussed. One wonders whether pushbikes were regularly spotted on the mean streets of Compton, Los Angeles, in the 1980s.
“Riding a bike?” she replied eventually. “Yeah, it feels good. I’ve hit with Vicky twice, and today I felt a lot better off the ground. I felt a lot better everywhere. So it felt like, OK, it’s riding a bike up a hill, but yeah, enjoying the ride.”
Williams’s representatives made contact with Mboko less than three weeks ago, while the WTA event in Strasbourg was in progress. Williams said: “I saw her play in Montreal [where Mboko claimed the biggest title of her career last year]. I was impressed with her attitude and what I liked the most about her was that, the next time she played, she still kept winning. And so I was like, ‘I love that’. It reminded me a lot of myself.
“Sometimes you win one, and then have a little bit of a low, which is normal, and that’s OK as well. But I loved how she had this drive. It was a last-minute commitment, and so I was like, ‘OK, who am I going to play with now?’ It was pretty 11th hour.”
While Queen’s is braced for a day of heavy rain on Monday – when the main draw is due to begin – the presence of Williams has brought an extra buzz to the site.
For Emma Raducanu, who has entered singles and doubles – with Katie Boulter as her partner – it has been “amazing” to share the locker room with Williams, a player represented by the same management agency and even some of the same personnel.
Asked about her decisive 6-4, 6-0 victory over Williams, in one of the last matches played before the American’s retirement, Raducanu said: “I was super nervous before playing her because it was just announced that she was stopping. It’s really great to see her back.
“It’s an amazing inspiration and for all of us to see her around is a really cool thing. She’s the greatest female tennis player of all time.”
As for whether the British No 1 sees herself competing on the circuit at 44 years old, Raducanu replied: “I personally don’t. With sports science these days and how everyone takes care of their body, it’s much more achievable. But I have a lot of respect for anyone who comes back and keeps playing for the duration.”
Tatjana Maria, last year’s Queen’s champion, will get the chance to defend her title after coming through two qualifying matches on Sunday, with a 6-2, 1-6, 6-2 victory over Britain’s Yuriko Miyazaki followed by a 6-4, 6-3 victory against Uzbekistan’s Kamilla Rakhimova.
Telegraph Sport revealed that the German player was not afforded a wildcard by the Lawn Tennis Association despite lifting the trophy 12 months ago, a move that attracted criticism from her husband and coach, Charles-Édouard Maria.
“It’s sad,” he told Telegraph Sport. “After all the advertising they did for the tennis women, all the headlines last year about ‘The Queen of Queen’s’, the reality is that they are not helping us.”