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Serena Williams returned to singles competition on Tuesday for the first time since 2022. And despite losing to Maya Joint in three sets, her return was a big victory for ESPN.
Williams’s Round 1 match on Tuesday delivered ESPN its biggest Day 2 Wimbledon rating on record, the network announced Friday. According to ESPN, Joint’s three-set win over Williams drew 1.8 million viewers, peaking at 2.1 million viewers.
The match also helped drive ESPN’s most-watched first round ever.
Williams’s return to competition started earlier in June in the form of doubles, partnering with 19-year-old Victoria Mboko at the HSBC Championships in London on June 9. The duo won its first-round match, but was forced to withdraw ahead of the double quarterfinals due to an injury to Mboko. Williams played doubles again the next week at the Berlin Open with Karolína Muchová, but the duo lost in the first round.
As Wimbledon approached, buzz grew that Williams would be making her singles return via wild card entry. Ultimately, the 44-year-old did just that, but after losing to Joint, her agent announced Williams had injured her right knee in the match.
That injury has put Williams’s status into question, as the 23-time Grand Slam champion was slated to re-team with her older sister Venus in the Wimbledon ladies’ doubles draw next week. In a social media post earlier this week, Serena indicated she will still try to play in the doubles draw, with organizers pushing the sisters’ match to July 4 in order to give her extra time to recover. As of Friday afternoon, the match was still on the schedule for Saturday.
“I’m incredibly thankful for the wild card – and even more grateful my daughters got to see that it’s never too late to chase something you love,” Williams wrote on Instagram following the match. “I tweaked my knee late in the first set, but I’ll be doing everything I can to be ready for doubles.”
Williams’s final US Open appearance in 2022 against Ajla Tomljanović remains ESPN’s most-watched tennis broadcast ever, averaging 4.8 million viewers and peaking at a record 6.9 million.
