“I would get stressed out,” said the superstar athlete.
Recently retired tennis champ Serena Williams has revealed the sweet reason why she did not allow her 5-year-old daughter, Olympia, to attend her matches until recently.
Williams appeared on Wednesday’s episode of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” and explained that bringing her daughter to her tennis matches would have been a major distraction, People reports.
“Well, I just was worried I’d get distracted because I would be like, ‘Wait, is she drinking? Is she doing this?’ She came to a match once, like super brief, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, is she wearing sun cream?’ It’s nuts,” Williams explained to Barrymore.
“So, I would get stressed out and be like, ‘Wait a minute, oh my goodness, I’ve got to serve. This makes no sense.’ So yeah, I’ve never really had her at matches until this summer actually,” she added.
As reported on theGrio, last month, Williams won her first match of the 2022 U.S. Open and her daughter sat courtside sporting a similar beaded hairstyle that her mother wore when she won the 1999 U.S. Open and earned her first Grand Slam title at age 17. At the time, Williams rocked white beads in her hair.
The 23-time Grand Slam champion told Barrymore that her daughter and husband, Alexis Ohanian, cheered from the stands at the 2022 U.S. Open.
“Apparently she was saying like, ‘Go Momma, I’m so proud of you,’ and I was like, ‘What?’” Williams shared. “So then she comes back after I had lost in Cincinnati, she came back and she’s like, ‘It’s OK, Momma, you just have to do what you feel,’ and I literally wanted to cry it was like, ‘Do what you feel. Do what your heart tells you.’ It was the sweetest thing ever.”
Elsewhere in her interview with Barrymore, Williams gushed about her and Alexis’ love story and recalled the first time she met the Reddit co-founder.
Meanwhile, Williams and Olympia starred in a Stuart Weitzman campaign last year, marking their first collaborative fashion ad, theGrio reported.
“Being on set with Olympia to shoot this campaign meant so much to me, and it is a moment together I will never forget,” said Williams in a statement at the time. “She is Mini Serena; she’s so cute and she’s so fun.”
Williams lost the final match of her career to Australia’s Ajla Tomljanović at Arthur Ashe Stadium on Sept. 2. The match drew 4.8 million viewers, according to CNN.
The superstar athlete told Vogue that she is “evolving away from tennis” to focus on her family.
“I always said I wanted to stop when I’m playing really good tennis and winning and beating good players,” she said at the A+E Networks and the History Channel’s History Talks in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, per Variety. “For me, it’s really about things I want to do spiritually and spending time with my daughter and family.”
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The post Serena Williams spills why her daughter didn’t attend her matches appeared first on TheGrio.
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