The legendary former tennis star Serena Williams says that she once tried to cash a $1 million check at a drive-thru ATM.
Her story is hilarious.
Williams’ $1 Million Story
“I never played for money,” Williams, 42, revealed while appearing on “Hot Ones” last week. She said this after host Sean Evans asked her if this story was true.
“I played ’cause I loved the sport … I don’t even know if I wanted to play to be the best, I wanted to win,” she explained.
“So my tax guy, he would be like, ‘You didn’t get your money?’ and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t get that one in Zurich,’ ‘Oh, I forgot that one in Moscow,’ … I was just playing to win, and if I didn’t win, I wasn’t thinking,” Williams added. “I was just so angry, that I wanted to find a way to get better and win the next time.”
Wouldn’t that be nice to leave million-dollar checks laying around all over the planet!
Williams went on to say that she “never really spent a lot of money.” She then confessed that she tried to cash her first big check at the drive-thru of a local bank.
“I got my check and it was a million dollars. Like, OK, I’m gonna go deposit it,” she recalled. “I went through the drive-thru … and the guy was like, ‘Uh, I think you need to come inside for this,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”
Williams chalked up this experience to simply being “lessons to learn.”
You may laugh, but if I was given a $1 million check with my name on it, I’d lose my bearings too!
Related: Tennis Icon Serena Williams Praises Caitlin Clark, Defends Her from Her Haters
Williams’ Retirement
It’s been nearly two years since Williams retired from tennis after the 2022 U.S. Open. At the time, she said she was leaving the sport to focus on building her family.
“These days, if I have to choose between building my tennis résumé and building my family, I choose the latter,” Williams wrote in a personal essay for Vogue.
Williams has been married to the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian since 2017.
“In the last year, Alexis and I have been trying to have another child, and we recently got some information from my doctor that put my mind at ease and made me feel that whenever we’re ready, we can add to our family,” she explained. “I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete. I need to be two feet into tennis or two feet out.”
Related: Serena Williams Announces She Is Donating Her ‘Super Soldier’ Breast Milk
Williams Didn’t Want To Retire
Williams went on to make it clear that retiring was not an easy decision for her.
“There is no happiness in this topic for me. I know it’s not the usual thing to say, but I feel a great deal of pain,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads.”
That is an unusual answer, and it seems more realistic than the usual feel-good responses we get when major athletes retire.
Williams went on to add that she keeps “saying to myself, I wish it could be easy for me, but it’s not. I’m torn: I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next.”
Williams became pregnant with her second child soon after her retirement. She and her husband are now parents to two daughters: Olympia, 6, and Adira, 11 months.
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