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The legendary American shared some interesting insights into her life as a teenager: pressure, travel, expectations and mental health, which will be chronicled in the docuseries In The Arena: Serena Williams.Mental health, the stress of travel, expectations and pressure: these are all factors that a tennis player has to live with, even if you are the best in the world, even if you are Serena Williams. The former legendary American champion attended the Tribeca Festival, where the premiere of the docu-series In The Arena: Serena Williams took place. Interviewed by the Associated Press, the American revealed all the difficulties she faced when she was a teenager who was already taking up tennis, with a busy schedule and the media attention already focused on her and her sister. The expectations, the pressure, the travel. How did Serena experience this?“It wasn’t like you were on tour and you took a break and you had a couple of years off. It was every week. So it was a grind and it’s really nice to see a different side, a real side of what happened behind the scenes. I saw those eight episodes in the docuseries, but I’m just excited to see them again tonight. In my position and growing up as a teenager and as a 14 year old, I had to be careful to stay sane, and be in the press so much and do everything that. I used to travel the world every year,” she revealed.
The American could have played her first official match on the WTA Tour at the age of 14, but the WTA put a stop to everything, preventing the Oakland tournament from assigning her a wild card so as not to add further weight to an already difficult path as a predestined in itself.
“I was so intense on the court, I always wanted to be perfect, which obviously isn’t possible. If I could go back, I would tell myself to breathe deeply and relax more. I think it would have helped me a lot. The journey has been incredible, but I was really very young when I started playing tennis on the Tour and became a professional player. I don’t know if this precociousness changed me or shaped me as a person.Now I’m trying to figure out who I really am away from the cameras. I have been in the spotlight 24/7 for 27 years. It’s different now, but the time has come to understand how all this has affected me. Most people only see the victories in a Grand Slam tournament, the finals, but they don’t focus on the training and everything behind it. All that intensity that I’ve always brought out is now directed at my daughters,” she said, in an interview with ET.
