Tennis has evolved. On the evidence of one night at Wimbledon, so has Serena Williams

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — It was just one match. It was on the most rarefied court in professional tennis, against a young player still figuring out who she is, because that’s what 20-year-olds like Maya Joint are doing at this stage of their lives.

It was Serena Williams’ first competitive singles match in nearly four years.

All of that makes Tuesday night on Centre Court an imperfect environment in which to render a judgment on whether the sport has evolved too far beyond where it was for Williams, at 44, to hang not just with the new generation of stars, but also the rest of a talented WTA Tour that gets deeper by the day.

Barry Cowan, a British tennis commentator and former player, said Monday that he watched Williams practice with Zeynep Sönmez of Turkey the other day. Sönmez, 24, is the world No. 51. She’s a solid player but hardly has a reputation as a big hitter. Cowan said he was stunned to see that Sönmez was hitting a bigger ball than Williams.

A few tennis generations ago, Williams and her sister Venus changed the sport with their thumping power. They were the standard. Come Tuesday, the tennis world knew that Williams would bring her unmatched presence onto the court. But would her game possess the substance necessary to still be competitive after all those years away?

It would. Joint, who edged her out 6-3, 6-7(6), 6-3 will attest to that.

“I went in expecting, thinking that she’d bring her best game that she brought when she was at her peak, because you need to prepare for the hardest possible match,” Joint said in her news conference.

“I think she played really well.”

For elite athletes who return to the sports arena in their 40s, the exact arena they once ruled can have a big impact. The pace of evolution in skiing never concerned Lindsey Vonn, another 40-something who came out of retirement to compete, and briefly became the fastest skier in the world once again before wrecking her leg in a violent crash at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. The times that skiers were recording in the competitions she used to dominate hadn’t moved much during her five-year absence.

For Williams, tennis presented a more complicated riddle. There weren’t any simple metrics available to provide judgment. There was only one way to find out — play. And play she did, for nearly two-and-a-half hours and three gritty sets, in the arena she used to rule.

She showcased a nifty topspin lob in her first service game. She evened the first set with a 121 mph ace. She laced those unmistakable frozen-rope backhands across the court with precision.

She didn’t appear to have lost an ounce of her competitive juice. Does anyone transform the grunt of a shot into a visceral scream of celebration better than Williams? Those “Come on!” fist-pumps were as revved as ever.

It wasn’t enough, because given the circumstances and the weight of the moment, Joint played about as perfect a match as someone could play. She asked questions that Williams didn’t have answers to. She hit to spaces that Williams couldn’t reach and got to balls that Williams’ opponents used to watch zip past them.

In some ways, what Williams experienced for stretches Tuesday evening was a microcosm of what Naomi Osaka, Bianca Andreescu and other former Grand Slam winners have been living with the last couple of years during their returns from lengthy layoffs. The game they trained to play, the one Williams dominated for the better part of two decades, rewarded players who were best at taking over the middle of the court, digging in their heels and pumping the ball through the corners.

But tennis moves fast. Now, pretty much everyone can stand and deliver. Players who succeed now — even players who struggle for a season like Joint — can get themselves in and out of corners and lance winners off their back foot.

They hit open-stance backhands to gain an extra split-second to get back to the center of the court. They jump on first serves that don’t hit the right spots and crunch returns to the back of the baseline. They break sidelines with fierce angles. They move, some better than others, but the good ones can all move.

Can Williams do all those things well enough to win matches? Maybe. At least some of them, sometimes.

She scrambled across the baseline some Tuesday night. One sideline-breaking backhand, late in the second set as she fought to push the match to a decider, was right out of the Coco Gauff playbook.

In the second-set tiebreak, she caught up with a nasty return on her forehand with three quick steps and stroked a deep winner down the line. She saved a match point, and cracked big shots in big moments. And even after four years away, her serve remains one of the sport’s great weapons, the ultimate pressure valve that rarely lets her down. Her shots have plenty of weight — when she needs them to have it.

Williams likely won’t ever dig balls out of the corners like Gauff or Świątek or even the modern version of Aryna Sabalenka. No one has everything. What those players would give to be able to consistently serve like Williams does.

The sport has moved and evolved, just as it always does, and Williams’ days of winning titles are likely behind her.

And yet, in her first match back after a four-year absence, in an imperfect lab against an imperfect-of-late opponent, Williams showed enough to make plenty of people believe she can evolve back into the sport in her own way if she wants to, just as she chose to evolve away from it four years ago.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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