A comeback at Wimbledon is crazy … then again, it’s Serena Williams

Give Serena Williams credit for this much: There’s a better chance her singles return at Wimbledon ends in a first-round defeat than a miracle run deep in the draw.

Wimbledon’s decision to award Williams the final singles wildcard Sunday was, of course, a no-brainer. She’s a seven-time champion, arguably the best women’s player of all time and will generate a massive amount of buzz for the tournament.

If she wanted a wildcard, she was going to get a wildcard. And while she offered cagey responses over the past few weeks about whether she would try singles, the idea she’d spend six months in the drug testing pool to regain her WTA eligibility and endure hundreds of hours of training just to play some doubles wasn’t remotely believable. Come on.

Now it’s really happening. Nearly four years and another pregnancy after playing what was supposed to be her final match at the 2022 U.S. Open, she’s doing this again at age 44.

It’s audacious, it’s absurd, it’s totally Serena.

Tennis players are notoriously terrible at retirement. They burn out, get old, become less competitive with age, but the grind is such a part of them that many find it hard to live without it. And there’s always that little kernel of what-if doubt colliding with championship ego: How good is this new generation really?

Most of the high-profile comebacks have been short-lived and not particularly successful. The game moves on, the competition gets better and the impact of age becomes apparent.

Logically, “But it’s Serena” shouldn’t apply. But it’s Serena, and it’s Wimbledon. If she can do it at all, she’ll do it there — on a surface that doesn’t require the physicality of hard court and where the greatest serve in the history of the women’s game can still win her points without having to do anything else.

Catch the right draw and an opponent freaked out by playing Serena Williams on Center Court and who knows. For someone who has done what she’s done, with even a little competitive drive left in the tank, that’s enough to convince her of what’s possible.

But there’s risk, too. Not legacy-altering risk because nobody will remember or care if all this amounts to is a losing few matches and reversing course. The risk is that it goes badly, she looks old and overwhelmed and leaves with a worse taste in her mouth than she’s had since retiring the first time.

After all, she’s 44, hasn’t played an official singles match in four years. Her preparation has consisted of a couple doubles matches that showed she still has her racket skills (no surprise there) but didn’t tell us anything about her movement or competitive stamina.

At the pro level, doubles is a vastly different game from playing singles against women in their physical prime. And Wimbledon is a heck of a place to jump back into the pool.

Excitement will be high, but expectations should be low. With tens of millions of fans who idolize her but don’t necessarily understand the realities of the sport, good luck getting that message to stick.

And it’s still not totally clear why Serena is doing this or what she thinks she can accomplish. At the beginning of the comeback a couple weeks ago, she talked about wanting her daughters to see her play. That’s reasonable but probably not the full story. There’s been talk around hawking a weight-loss drug she has a financial stake in, and a film crew is following her around because every athlete these days needs a definitive documentary.

But at the end of the day, it’s hard to imagine Williams would put herself out there like this unless she thought there was an opportunity to do something unique. Maybe not winning a 24th Grand Slam — surely she doesn’t think that’s in the realm of possibility anymore — but a quarterfinal? A semi? Does she see enough weakness in the women on tour now where a 44-year old with more Slam-winning experience than the entire top-35 combined can elbow her way into the mix?

It’s a fascinating experiment with risk on both sides. If Williams proves capable of still winning high-level matches at this stage with almost no relevant tournament preparation, it will not reflect well on the depth and quality of the WTA Tour. If she gets dusted off the court, there will be perhaps a bit of embarrassment for an all-time champion and plenty of second-guessing about whether she should have tried this at all.

Maybe Williams is so confident in her game and the work she’s put in to get back in shape that doesn’t believe the worst-case scenario is a possibility. Maybe she doesn’t care.

The odds would say what she’s trying to do at 44 years old is almost impossible, but it took a measure of ambition most of us can’t comprehend to become who she is.

The results probably won’t satisfy whatever drove her to come back in the first place. But after going through all this just for one more shot at Wimbledon, failing to try at singles may have been even worse torture.