The Number 1

To SERENA WILLIAMS, dominance comes naturally. The challenge? Creating the life of a parent within the legend of a champion.

- Laura Brown

As I’m writing the introduction to this story, the news breaks that Serena Williams has pulled out of the French Open with a pectoral injury.

She’s getting an MRI, and the prognosis is uncertain: Williams could be OK in two weeks, or she might not be better in time for Wimbledon, which starts soon. Sports injuries—and in Williams’s case, tightly calibrated comebacks (after the birth of her daughter, Alexis Olympia, last year)— can turn on a dime.

But that’s what badasses do; they keep at it. And Williams, of course, has badass in her bones. She first picked up a racket when she was 3 and has been serving, literally, ever since. Men’s champion Roger Federer recently called her the greatest player of all time.

I caught up with Williams earlier in the summer, when she was in New York promoting her HBO documentary, Being Serena. She was resplendent in a tropical-print Gucci coat, eating quite the oddest collection of food I’d ever seen on one plate (crab ... and cake). Because, yes, she is a champion, a mother, a wife, and an inspiration, but Serena is really ... Serena.

LAURA BROWN: Here’s my question. Big one. In your HBO docuseries, Being Serena, we see you take a pregnancy test and then leave it for two hours. How on God’s green earth do you take a pregnancy test and forget about it?!

SERENA WILLIAMS: [laughs] Because I didn’t think I was pregnant! Honestly, I thought it was impossible. I had not seen Alexis [Ohanian, Williams’s husband, the co-founder of Reddit] in, like, four weeks. So I literally took the test just to shut my friend up.

LB: But then you left it there. You were so convinced?