Her Daughter in Tow, Serena Williams Welcomes the Pressure of Wimbledon

It was Williams’ first time bringing her daughter on site at a Grand Slam event. In a video she posted to Instagram, Williams told her daughter a story about her own journey from being a “girl from Compton” to playing at Wimbledon.

“I got a little emotional when I was telling her a story about a girl who had a big dream,” Williams said at a news conference Sunday. “I started getting choked up.”

Williams will start her tournament on Monday against 105th-ranked Arantxa Rus.

Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam singles champion, is actually ranked lower than Rus, at No. 183, after returning from maternity leave in February. Her draw could have been much more difficult had she not been granted a seeding of 25th by the tournament. Williams’ seeding was the committee’s only deviation from the current WTA rankings; her elevation meant that the 32nd-ranked player, Dominika Cibulkova, was left unseeded.

Williams’ seven titles at Wimbledon — and an active 14-match winning streak here — would suggest that there are not 24 women more likely than her to win the title this year. Still, Williams said she was content with her seeding, calling the committee’s decision “very, very noble.”

“I think I would be very ungrateful if I sat here and said it was too low, to be honest,” she said, adding, “In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. I came in here expecting that maybe I wouldn’t get a seed.”

Williams was unseeded at the French Open, the first Grand Slam event of her comeback, and won her first three matches. But she withdrew before her fourth-round match against Maria Sharapova because of an injury to her right pectoral muscle. (The injury may have been exacerbated by her playing doubles in Paris; thus, she is sticking to singles at Wimbledon.)

The pain severely hampered Williams’ serve, the biggest weapon in her game. On Sunday she said she had not been serving consistently in practice until she arrived at Wimbledon a week ago.

“Still, I’m debating whether to go 120, or whatever,” she said, referring to her serve speed in miles per hour.

Williams first competed at Wimbledon in 1998, reaching the third round that year. Twenty years later, Williams said her competitive fire was undimmed.

“It definitely surprises me a little, because I thought it would be different,” she said. “I thought, you know, ‘Hey, I have this amazing child, I have all these Grand Slams, this is all super bonus.’ And it is.

“I definitely feel a lot less pressure out there, but I am a little bit shocked at how much I almost want that pressure, you know? I almost want to feel the need to go out there and be the best that I can be.”

The defending champion, Garbiñe Muguruza, who lost to Williams in the 2015 Wimbledon final but beat her in the French Open final the next year, expressed a similar eagerness regarding Williams’ return to the field.

“She’s one of the greatest; it’s good to have her in the draw,” Muguruza said. “You always want to face the best opponents.”

Williams had severe complications after childbirth, and her physical condition has been a concern during her tennis comeback. To get back into shape, she decided to stop breastfeeding because it was making it difficult to lose weight.

In the final episode of her HBO documentary series “Being Serena,” a physical exam in April showed her weight to be 93.1 kilograms, or 205 pounds — 50 pounds more than her listed weight on the WTA website. The decision to stop breastfeeding played out on the show in a conversation between Williams and her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou.

“It’s all about getting the results that we want, and the results we want is that you play and you win,” Mouratoglou said. “So the question is how to do that. The first thing is: stop breastfeeding. Because the problem is you’re too heavy. You are stocking a lot of fat. To practice feeling super heavy, the effort is a joke. It’s too difficult.”

Williams teared up during the conversation.

“I don’t want you to think that I haven’t been doing the work, because I have,” she said. “I work out all day, every day.”

She later added: “I have been doing absolutely the right thing every day — with the exception of probably the main thing, which is breastfeeding.”

On Sunday, Williams, 36, said she had relied on a popular theory that women lose weight when they are breastfeeding. The opposite proved true in her case. Once she stopped breastfeeding, she said, she lost 10 pounds in a week.

“What I’ve learned through the experience: Every body is different, every person is different,” she said.

Roger Federer, who skipped the French Open, was among those happy to see Williams again at Wimbledon instead of leaving the sport after having her daughter.

“After everything she’s done, it would have been the perfect excuse and exit to say, ‘I’ve had it,'” he said Sunday. “I’m very excited to see her attempting an amazing comeback, this time with a baby. It’s a different life. Massive challenge for her, but I’m sure one she’s up for it.”

The New York Times