At 44, after expanding her family, entering the business world, and losing 15 pounds, the greatest tennis player in history is returning to the courts in the singles tournament and in doubles with sister Venus; Get ready, it's going to be a spectacleTzippy Shmilovitz, New York|Serena Williams never retired from tennis. She “stepped away” from it to “evolve” and grow beyond it, but she never said the word “retirement.” Perhaps because she never really wanted to retire.From the farewell essay she published in Vogue in August 2022, in which she announced she was “evolving away” from tennis, it was clear she was doing so not because she had turned 40, but because a 40-year-old woman cannot keep playing at that age if she also wants to raise a family. She cited as an example her close friend Tom Brady, who played uninterrupted until age 45 while his wife gave birth to two children. Serena also wrote that she had founded a venture capital firm, built a family and wanted to expand both. But nowhere in the essay did it feel as though the greatest tennis player of all time had truly made peace with the idea that it was over.GallerySerena Williams: She didn't want to retire(Photo: Paul Harding/Getty Images)Nearly four years later, on Tuesday 44-year-old Serena will step onto Centre Court at Wimbledon. It will be her first Grand Slam tournament since the 2022 U.S. Open, where she lost in the third round and reached a point in her career that included 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most by any player in the Open Era, along with 14 women’s doubles titles and two mixed doubles titles. In all, Williams won 73 singles titles and earned about $95 million in prize money alone in a career that made her one of the greatest icons in sports history.In the first round, Serena will face Maya Joint, a 20-year-old Australian ranked No. 53 in the world, who drew the thankless task of trying to win a tennis match in which everyone will be against her through no fault of her own. Serena will also play doubles with her sister, 46-year-old Venus. All of it will be a spectacle worthy of Wimbledon, a tournament Serena has won seven times. The only question is what it will look like and how long it will last.In the four years since she did not retire from tennis, Serena Williams did exactly what she said she would do. She devoted herself to her venture capital firm, Serena Ventures, which invests in companies founded by women and minorities. Together with her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, she also expanded the family with 2½-year-old Adira, younger sister to 8-year-old Olympia. During that time, she did not disappear completely, but as the years passed, it seemed even Serena Williams had understood that life moves on. She had not.In December, Serena’s name appeared on the list of players in the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s anti-doping testing pool. The ITIA is an independent body established in 2021 by the major tennis organizations to protect the sport from corruption. That was enough to ignite speculation, and Serena quickly took to X to write: “Omg yall I’m NOT coming back. This wildfire is crazy.” It sounded definitive enough, but she should not have been believed.From saying 'I'm not coming back' to confirming a come back(Photo: AP)No one enters an anti-doping testing pool just for fun. It requires players to agree to random testing and to report their whereabouts every day in case a doping officer knocks on the door at 6 a.m. and asks for a urine sample. Serena entered the pool because she knew she had to be in it for six months before being cleared to compete. On February 19, three days before completing that six-month period, Williams posted a mysterious TikTok showing her practicing serves, which she said she was doing for the first time since 2023. In an interview on NBC’s “Today,” she no longer denied that a comeback was possible, though she still did not confirm it. Eventually, she did.Serena is returning to play simply because she can. Venus has continued playing regularly, and even if she is no longer a title threat, she remains competitive here and there and, more than anything, appears to truly enjoy playing without pressure. Serena has 23 Grand Slam titles — her last came at the 2017 Australian Open, where she beat Venus in the final — one fewer than Novak Djokovic and Margaret Court. She believes that even today she can compete with the top players on the women’s tourShe has returned before from serious injuries to win Grand Slam titles, won the Australian Open while pregnant and reached four finals after the birth of her first daughter. But she was not 44 then.Serena Williams’ comeback will also bring to Wimbledon the hottest health trend in the U.S. over the past two years: drugs that mimic the hormone GLP-1, a natural hormone produced in the gut and released into the bloodstream in response to eating. Its main role is to regulate blood sugar levels and control hunger and satiety. It is used in diabetes medications, and people who take GLP-1 drugs report a significant reduction in “food noise,” the part of the brain that constantly thinks about food. Reduced food intake can lead to significant weight loss.GLP-1-based weight loss injections(Photo: Mohammed_Al_Ali / Shutterstock.com)Once it became clear that these drugs — Ozempic is the celebrity among them, but it has many siblings — could help with weight loss among people who do not have diabetes, what always happens in America when a trend explodes happened: everyone jumped on it, even though the drugs are very expensive. If Hollywood stars and athletes are taking them and suddenly becoming thin, it is only natural that Joe next door would break into his savings to buy a few injections.Serena Williams was among the first celebrities to enter the world of GLP-1 drugs and certainly the first major athlete. Last summer, she said she was injecting Zepbound, one of the newer-generation drugs. At the time, Williams had been away from professional tennis for nearly three years. She dismissed talk of a comeback and was busy being a business and pop culture star no less than she had been on the court.She also earns a few dollars as a brand ambassador for Ro, one of the many companies now making a great deal of money selling the drugs. Her husband sits on the company’s board. Last year, Serena appeared in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show and then in an advertisement for Ro, in which she injected the drug into her arm and said she “moves better” and “feels better.” Another Ro ambassador is Charles Barkley, who, as viewers of the NBA Finals could see, now looks like Baby Barkley.That physical transformation was a very significant factor in Serena’s decision to return to tennis. She will arrive at Wimbledon after losing 33 pounds and told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that she decided to use the medication after trying every other way and failing.“I keep working out hard, eating right, but after two pregnancies I just couldn’t lose the weight I wanted,” Williams said. “I couldn’t beat the weight. It was the only opponent I couldn’t beat.”She added: “I wish I had done it years ago. It would have made such a big difference for me and for my career. The pressure on my joints caused by excess weight kept me from winning many more Grand Slam titles, and that is a regret that haunts me.”GLP-1 substances are not on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited list, but over the past two years they have been part of the agency’s monitoring program, meaning the status could change as more information emerges about the drugs and their effects. For now, GLP-1 medications are completely legal and are not classified as performance-enhancing drugs. But no one knows whether that will remain the case. In any event, Serena does not have much time left to try to do something — one more thing — that no one has done before.Margaret Court, Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Kim Clijsters all won titles after giving birth, but there is no precedent for a woman in her mid-40s returning to the tour and truly making an impact. Martina Navratilova returned to singles in 2002, eight years after retiring. She was 45 and won one match at the grass-court tournament in Eastbourne. She later made another comeback, but advanced past the first round in only one of the five tournaments she played. She did, however, reach the late stages of many doubles tournaments and won three mixed doubles Grand Slam titles, including the 2006 U.S. Open with Bob Bryan, when she was 49.But Serena Williams is not coming back to win a doubles title, even if that would be nice. She loves tennis deep in her gut, wants her daughters to see her play and has always felt that even her enormous career was not quite enough.So now she is making one more attempt to hold on to the sun before it sets. In the worst case, she will finally be able to make peace with the end of this chapter in her life and move on. Being the greatest player in history is not a bad place to land.