Venus Williams

Venus Williams had made it to the quarterfinal round of the U.S. Open women’s doubles competition five times. Each time, she was partnered with younger sister Serena Williams.

Venus Williams is back in the U.S. Open quarterfinals this year, for the first time since 2014, with new doubles partner Leylah Fernandez.

Williams’ retired sibling hasn’t made it to Flushing Meadows for any of this year’s action so far, but the seven-time Grand Slam singles champion made a plea for that to change following her and Fernandez’s 6-3, 6-4 victory over Zhang Shuai and Ekaterina Alexandrova on Monday.

“She’s so happy for Leylah and I, and she’s given us advice,” Williams said of her sister during an on-court interview. “We just need her in the box. So, my message is: Serena, you need to show up.”

Williams was responding to a question about a recent TikTok post by Serena in which the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion is watching Williams and Fernandez on TV and rolling her eyes. Once she notices she is being filmed, however, Serena forces some humorously fake-looking smiles.

“When you see your sister @Venus Williams has a new doubles partner @leylahanniefernandez and you are really happy she’s winning with someone else…” the caption reads.

Venus Williams called the post “very funny.”

The Williams sisters have won 14 Grand Slam titles (including the U.S. Open in 1999 and 2009) and three Olympic gold medals as doubles partners. While Serena hasn’t played since the 2022 U.S. Open, Venus returned to the court after a lengthy hiatus for July’s D.C. Open.

At that tournament, the 45-year-old Williams became the second-oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match with a first-round victory over 23-year-old Peyton Stearns. Williams also won a first-round doubles match with 23-year-old partner Hailey Baptiste.

At the U.S. Open, Williams lost her first-round singles match to 29-year-old Karolina Muchova in three sets. But she and Fernandez, a 22-year-old Canadian who played in the 2021 U.S. Open singles final, have been on a roll. They have yet to drop a set in three rounds of play.

Williams told reporters that Serena has actually been very supportive.

“She’s definitely coaching from afar, and she’s so excited,” Williams said. “She gets so nervous watching, and she’s got the kids watching. They’re all at home, just really on our side.”

Williams also addressed her earlier request for her sister to “show up” for Tuesday’s quarterfinal match against the top-seeded duo of Taylor Townsend and Katerina Siniakova.

“If she came, it would be a dream for both of us,” Williams said. “We’d have her on the court coaching. And we’d force her to hit, even though she doesn’t hit often.”

She added with a laugh,”So it’s probably best she doesn’t come because we’d just like, probably bully her.”

NEW YORK — Even at age 45, even after two years away from Grand Slam tennis, Venus Williams displayed some big serves and powerful groundstrokes at the U.S. Open on Monday night in front of a supportive crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium, before losing 6-3, 2-6, 6-1 to Karolina Muchova.

Williams was the oldest singles player at the hard-court tournament since Renee Richards was 47 in 1981.

“She’s such a legend of our sport,” 2023 French Open runner-up Muchova said about seven-time Grand Slam singles champion Williams, adding that it was an honor “to share a court with her.”

In just the fourth match of a comeback that began last month after more than a year off the tour, Williams didn’t exactly get to ease into things Monday: Muchova, a 29-year-old from the Czech Republic, was seeded 11th in New York and made it to the semifinals there in both 2023 — when she lost to eventual champion Coco Gauff in a match interrupted by a climate protest — and 2024.

Karolina Muchova, left, shakes hands with Venus Williams after their first-round match at the U.S. Open on Monday.

(Adam Hunger / Associated Press)

So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Williams started slowly, ceding 11 of the initial 13 points and falling behind 2-0. With members of the crowd shouting, “Let’s go, Venus!” and roaring after her winners — and her fiance, Andrea Preti, leaping out of his seat — Williams took three games in a row to go ahead 3-2

Muchova grabbed the next four games to claim that set, which ended with Williams hitting four of her evening’s 10 double-faults to get broken.

But Williams, who smacked serves at up to 114 mph and finished with just one fewer winner than Muchova, broke to begin the second set on her way to tying the match.

In the third set, though, as the contest reached two hours, Muchova was simply too good.

When the match ended, Williams left the court with a wave as fans rose to salute someone whose first U.S. Open title arrived a full quarter of a century ago.

More recently, Williams was off the tennis tour for 16 months until entering a tournament in Washington last month, where she won one match each in singles and doubles. She hadn’t competed anywhere since the Miami Open in March 2024, and had surgery for uterine fibroids later last year.

The U.S. Tennis Association awarded wild cards to Williams for both the mixed doubles event last week and singles.

She hasn’t won a match at the U.S. Open in singles since 2019, when she got to the second round. Since then, Williams exited in the first round in 2020, 2022 and 2023, and missed the tournament in 2021 and 2024.

Venus Williams returns a shot to Karolina Muchova during the first round of the U.S. Open on Monday.

(Adam Hunger / Associated Press)

She won singles championships at Flushing Meadows in 2000 and 2001, and another five at Wimbledon.

Since making her professional debut in 1994, Williams also collected 14 Grand Slam trophies in women’s doubles alongside her younger sister, Serena, plus two in mixed doubles, earned a record five Olympic tennis medals and reached No. 1 in the WTA rankings.

Through the years, both siblings transcended their sport and became much more than successful athletes. Serena, who won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, played her last match at the 2022 U.S. Open.

“She’s Venus Williams. She’s so iconic in so many different ways,” said Frances Tiafoe, an American player who won his first-round match in Ashe earlier Monday. “She’s won so much. And to see how much she loves game still at her age is amazing. It’s amazing to still see her out here.”

It was at the U.S. Open more than a decade ago that Williams revealed she had been diagnosed with Sjögren’s syndrome, an energy-sapping auto-immune disease that can cause joint pain.

Some thought she might leave her sport because of that, but she remained a leading figure — on and off the court. To her fans — for years, and certainly on Monday night — it never mattered that she now has exited in the first or second round in each of her past 13 appearances at major tournaments.

When she was asked at the Washington tournament in July why she was still competing, she offered a simple reply: “Why not?”

“I want to be my best, and that’s the expectation I have for myself: to get the best out of me. And that’s all any player can ask for,” Williams said Saturday, the day before the start of singles play at the U.S. Open. “I haven’t played as much as the other players, so it’s a different challenge when you’re dealing with that. So I’m just trying to have fun, stay relaxed and be my personal best.”

Fendrich writes for the Associated Press.

Venus and Serena Williams were a pretty decent doubles team over the years.

The sisters from Compton won 14 majors and three Olympic gold medals as a duo.

But it turns out that the older sister was being held back by her younger sibling — at least that’s what Venus Williams joked on Monday after winning her first match with new doubles partner Hailey Baptiste during the first round of the D.C. Open.

“I think, from the first point, I could see that we were going to be a good team,” Williams said during her on-court interview following the American duo’s 6-3, 6-1 victory against Eugenie Bouchard and Clervie Ngounoue. “We just should have started playing earlier, years ago, right? I think Serena was just in the way.”

After the capacity crowd of around 3,000 roared with laughter at the quip, Williams smiled and waved to the camera: “Sorry, Serena.”

Williams, 45, had every right to be giddy after a successful return to the court following a 16-month hiatus, during which she underwent a medical procedure to remove fibroids from her uterus last July.

“It’s just nice to be able to play,” Williams said during her postmatch news conference with Baptiste. “Where I am at this year is so much different than where I was at last year. It’s night and day, being able to be here and prepare for the tournament as opposed to preparing for surgery a year ago.”

She added: “Tennis is a game. It’s our life. It’s literally our obsession. … But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if your health is not there. So it definitely put it in perspective for me and maybe made it easier to make the decision to maybe come back out here and maybe play even freer.”

Williams’ comeback is just getting started. The seven-time major winner and one-time Olympic gold medalist is scheduled to face Peyton Stearns of the United States in the first round of the women’s singles tournament at 4:30 p.m. PDT Tuesday.

Later this week, Williams and Baptiste will face the winner of Tuesday’s match between Cristina Bucsa/Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Taylor Townsend/Shuai Zhang in the women’s doubles quarterfinals.

As for Serena Williams, the 23-time major singles champion hasn’t played since “evolving away from tennis” following the 2022 U.S. Open, where she and Venus lost in the first round in doubles and she advanced to the third round in singles before losing to Australian Ajla Tomljanovic in her final match.

“I keep saying to my team: The only thing that would make this better is if she was here,” Venus Williams said of her sister while speaking to reporters Sunday. “Like, we always did everything together, so of course I miss her.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.