As seen on Vanity fair;
Last
January, on the eve of the Australian Open, Serena Williams handed her
fiancé, Alexis Ohanian, a paper bag containing six positive pregnancy
tests. It was just the latest surprise in an unlikely pairing: the
world’s greatest tennis player and the geek co-founder of Reddit. From
their first date—a magical six hours in Paris—to their plans for the
baby’s arrival, this is the full love story.
This is a love story.
It wasn’t seamless, starry eyes at first light.
There was a discovery,
unexpected and shocking.
There were moments of really getting pissed and
the standard irritation that comes when one half of the whole kept
leaving the suitcase in the hallway.
But there were also moments of
unplanned intimacy that is the only true kind of intimacy in a love
story, soft touches and laughter and absurdity, because you need
absurdity in a love story, since love is slightly absurd anyway, a
feeling that, like eternity, is indefinable.
Which leads us, on the surface at least, to the seemingly mismatched
pairing of 35-year-old Serena Williams and her fiancé, 34-year-old
Alexis Ohanian.
She is the beyond remarkable tennis player, although all
superlatives are pointless.
He is in the high cotton of high tech as the
co-founder of the Web site Reddit, which has 234 million unique monthly
users. They became engaged last December, after first meeting roughly a
year and a half earlier, then found out in January that Serena was
pregnant. They will be married in the fall after the birth of the baby.
With 23 grand-slam wins on the women’s pro tennis tour spanning nearly
three decades—from her first, at 17 years old, in September of 1999,
to her latest, at 35, in January of 2017, and the most in the open
era—Serena is in the heart of every conversation concerning the best
athlete of her time.
“If I were a man, then it wouldn’t be any sort of question,” she told me.
She may well be right, a society still
conditioned to believe that men are better than women in everything
except the superfluous.
Alexis, on the other hand, had never seen a tennis match until he met
Serena, in May of 2015 in Rome.
He knew so little about the game that
the photo he excitedly posted on Instagram of her playing her first match in the Italian Open showed her foot faulting.
Serena plays a sport that requires the mental focus of instantaneously
letting go of losing points and moving on because there are a lot of
excruciating ones no matter how great you are, continual regrouping and
re-inventing: dwell on them, you lose confidence; lose confidence and
you lose.
She is also superbly conditioned, given that a female tennis
player may run about three miles in a match without the luxury of coming
out of the game because you feel winded or lost too much money gambling
with teammates the night before on the charter and would rather mope on
the bench.
Alexis’s athletic history amounted to the level of a very gangly
defensive tackle for Howard High School in Ellicott City, Maryland, far
more interested in science fairs and programming and building Web sites.
His skill at tennis is not one of potential; when Serena offered to give
him a lesson, he turned it down so he could tell his friends that he
once turned down a lesson with Serena Williams.
Serena has been romantically linked in the past to such rappers as Drake and Common.
Once, when she and Alexis went to a movie in San Francisco,
he got up from his seat to get popcorn, earning the admiration of the
kid at the counter.
“Yo, dude, that wasn’t Serena Williams, was it?”“Come on. Me? Really?”“You’re right.”
Before we get to how Serena and Alexis actually met, or a better sense
of who he really is, or her reaction to the pregnancy and how she told
him, it’s probably wise to spend a little time with Serena Williams to
give our love story some context.
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