WIMBLEDON – So was it worth it?
It is a question that only Serena Williams can answer, and she wasn’t available to respond on Tuesday night, declining the supposedly mandatory press conference after her latest first-round defeat at Wimbledon.
Williams, as she made clear upon arrival at the All England Club, still enjoys the back-and-forth with an opponent much more than she does the give-and-take with the news media. Yet it seemed no way to treat a grand occasion and a tournament that had happily offered her a wildcard and a fresh opportunity to test herself in the closest thing tennis has to a temple.
In bottom-line terms, she did not pass the test, losing in the opening round on Centre Court to Maya Joint, an 87th-ranked Australian who is more than half her age. Williams was up an early break in the third set and could not ride the wave, playing a particularly poor service game at 2-3 and failing to come up with the returns and inspiration she needed down the stretch.
Final score: 6-3, 6-7 (6-8), 6-3 for the 20-year-old Joint, who has struggled to win any matches this season after a breakthrough year in 2025. Williams is the first player Joint has beaten on the main tour since January.
This was the sort of vulnerable opponent Williams once rumbled past in the majors, flexing her serve, groundstrokes and intimidating aura and expeditiously moving on to the next challenge.
Those days are gone for good, but in light of the circumstances, more nuance than the bottom line seems appropriate.
Williams is 44 years old and had not played a singles match in nearly four years. Viewed through that lens, this was a remarkable performance, one in which she produced some flashes of first-rate, first-strike tennis and in which she showed trademark competitive fire under duress late in the second set: finding her still-formidable first serve in the tiebreaker, saving a match point with a forehand winner and extending the festivities.
Read more