Serena and Venus Williams' Emotional US Open Return
On a late-summer New York night, the US Open slipped back in time.
Serena and Venus Williams walked out under the Arthur Ashe Stadium lights again, not as a nostalgia act, but as competitors who still believe they can bend a match to their will. The tournament responded by giving them something doubles almost never gets in the first round: the night session on the biggest court in tennis.
Carlos Alcaraz, fresh off another routine win, made sure he didn’t miss it.
“I think there is no better plan than to watch the doubles, the Williamses once again, while getting a treatment,” the defending men’s champion said. “I’m going to be ready for that.”
He picked the right show. It was wild, flawed, gripping.
Serena, 44, back from a long layoff. Venus, 46, still grinding on tour. Two legends dragging their bodies and their timing back toward the level their minds still inhabit. Across the net, Hao-Ching Chan and 18-year-old Australian Maya Joint refused to play the role of supporting cast.
Chan and Joint eventually won it 6-3, 6-7 (6), 7-6 (10-7) on Friday night, but the scoreline barely captures the chaos.
The sisters looked gone at 4-1 down in the third set. Then came the surge. Returns started to sting again, the crowd roared, and suddenly it was level. The old patterns reappeared: Venus carving angles at the net, Serena unloading on second serves, both reading each other’s movements with the shorthand of a lifetime.
They forced a 10-point match tiebreak and exploded out to 5-0. Arthur Ashe shook. It felt, for a few minutes, like every comeback they had ever authored might be rolled into one more.
Then the air shifted.
Perhaps it was the years. Perhaps Serena’s long absence. Perhaps the weight of knowing how few of these nights remain. The errors crept in at exactly the wrong time. Both sisters double-faulted in the breaker, a jarring contrast to the sharp tennis that had dragged them back into the match. Chan and Joint steadied, chipped away, and then sprinted past.
From 5-0 up to a 10-7 defeat in the breaker. A gut punch of an ending.
The US Tennis Association said the sisters would not be available for comment. The silence only underlined how much this one hurt.
This was their first US Open appearance since 2022, at a Grand Slam they have won twice together, in 1999 and 2009. Their doubles record in New York now stands at 27-8 across 10 appearances, a number that speaks to an era when they dominated the discipline. Fourteen Grand Slam doubles titles together. Olympic gold in 2000, 2008 and 2012. Eight weeks sharing the No. 1 ranking in women’s doubles. For years, if the Williams sisters entered a draw, everyone else played for second.
Back then, a first-round doubles match under the Ashe lights would have felt normal. Now, it felt like a tribute as much as a contest.
It once seemed that 2022, when they lost in the opening round here, would be their final act as a pair. Serena stepped away from tennis that year, leaving behind 23 Grand Slam singles titles and the sense that the sport had to figure out what it looked like without her. She returned this summer, only to run into Joint twice in a matter of months.
At Wimbledon, in her singles comeback, Serena lost to Joint in three sets. Later, she and Venus had to pull out of their doubles there after Serena injured her knee. That setback delayed their shared return to the Grand Slam stage until New York, and it has not been kind. They fell in a match tiebreak in Cincinnati. Now this, another match tiebreak, another loss.
Venus’s singles campaign ended quickly as well, with a first-round defeat. The body of work remains untouchable, but the present is brutal.
Across the grounds, the current generation kept moving.
Alcaraz, back at the US Open after a four-month layoff with a right wrist injury, brushed past Wu Yibing 6-3, 6-4, 6-1 to reach the round of 16. The two-time champion looked loose, aggressive, and far sharper than a player who spent a third of the season on the sidelines has any right to be.
“To be honest I’m better than I thought,” he admitted.
His next test comes against No. 20 seed Tommy Paul, who outlasted No. 15 Alexander Bublik in five sets. It is the kind of matchup that belongs to this new era: athletic, high-octane, unforgiving.
On the women’s side, Aryna Sabalenka finally had to dig.
The No. 1 seed, chasing a third straight US Open crown and trying to become the first player to pull off that feat since Serena Williams from 2012 to 2014, beat Kamilla Rakhimova 6-3, 6-4. The second set stretched to 54 minutes — one minute longer than her entire previous match. Rakhimova pushed her, the rallies lengthened, and Sabalenka had to ride out the discomfort, including the smell of marijuana drifting in, to close it out in straight sets.
Her reward is a round-of-16 showdown with Taylor Townsend, a player who thrives in the chaos of New York and loves a big stage.
So the tournament marches forward: Alcaraz cruising, Sabalenka tested at last, the next wave jostling for position.
Yet the image that will linger from this night is not a forehand winner or a post-match fist pump. It is Serena and Venus, walking off Arthur Ashe together again, having led 5-0 in a deciding breaker and still lost, leaving behind the uneasy question that has followed them all summer.
How many more times will we see this?
