Ohanian, Alexis

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    ‘The Interview’: Serena Williams’s Next Challenge

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    A lot of people reach middle age having achieved some career success and ask themselves: Well, now what? Apparently this happens even if you’re Serena Williams.Williams, who’s now 42, retired from competitive tennis a little under two years ago. She won 23 Grand Slam tournaments, more than any woman in the Open era and one shy of the record. Her level of fame and achievement — both on and off the court — broke boundaries for Black women and female athletes in general. She is, by most accounts, the best ever at what she did.Listen to the Conversation With Serena WilliamsThe greatest women’s tennis player of all time is trying to find her new normal in retirement.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music | NYT Audio AppSince retiring, Williams has directed that drive at new projects. She has a venture-capital fund, which mostly invests in founders who are women or people of color, and she just started a makeup line. She and her husband, the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, also have two small girls: Olympia, who is 6, and Adira, who will turn 1 this summer. So it’s not exactly like Williams has been idle. But the tennis court still calls.She has gone back to it, in a way, with a new eight-part documentary called “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” which will stream next month on ESPN+. She told me that revisiting her career through the series has really been the first chance she has had to sit back and take in all she has accomplished.One thing that I was thinking about while watching the documentary is really the kind of amazing competitive spirit that you had, and I’m curious about where that competitive spirit goes or how it changes once you’re no longer playing sports. You’re doing the different projects: the venture-capital fund, the makeup line, you’ve written a children’s book. Did you feel as if you had to find a new outlet for it? For me, it was a necessary thing. I needed to not be done and sit down and wake up and be like: “Oh, my God. What just happened?” It was definitely too fast to throw myself full-heart, full-body into everything, but that’s kind of what I needed to do to survive after I’ve been playing tennis all my life. More

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      Serena Williams Reveals She Is Pregnant At The Met Gala

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      Williams said last year that she was stepping back from competing on the women’s tennis tour because she wanted to grow her family.Serena Williams has resisted saying publicly that she has retired from tennis and the finality that would bring, but now she has another reason to stay away from competition in the near future.Amid the costume-themed glitz of the Met Gala on Monday night Williams announced, both on the red carpet and on social media, that she was pregnant with her second child.She attended the event with her husband, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, and said in a post on Instagram that she “was so excited when Anna Wintour invited the 3 of us to the Met Gala.”On the red carpet before the event, Ohanian put his hand on his wife’s stomach in a gesture indicating a pregnancy. Williams also posted a series of portraits that included an image of her cradling her stomach with both hands.Williams was not the only pregnant celebrity at the gala. The singer Rihanna, who wore a white Valentino gown on Monday night, made her pregnancy public during her halftime performance at the Super Bowl in February.Williams and Ohanian had their first child, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., in 2017. Williams had won the Australian Open that year while roughly two months pregnant.She returned to tennis and made four more Grand Slam finals in 2018 and 2019, although she did not add to her total of 23 Grand Slam singles titles.In August, Williams said she would step away from tennis after the U.S. Open. But last October she said she was “not retired” and that the chance she would come back at some point was “very high.” Officially, she is on the retired list.In an essay in Vogue at the time of her retirement, she wrote: “If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family. Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity.” Brady, the star N.F.L. quarterback, played until he was 45 and announced his retirement in February.Williams, 41, has won 23 Grand Slam singles events, starting in 1999, when she was 17: seven Australian Opens, three French Opens, seven Wimbledons, and six U.S. Opens. The total is one short of the record of 24, set by Margaret Court, although about half of Court’s wins came in the pre-1968 amateur era. More