{"id":178410,"date":"2025-08-27T00:51:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T00:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/178410\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T00:51:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T00:51:09","slug":"venus-williams-to-play-us-open-doubles-with-leylah-fernandez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/178410\/","title":{"rendered":"Venus Williams to play US Open doubles with Leylah Fernandez"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Aug 26, 2025, 06:39 PM ET<\/p>\n<p>NEW YORK &#8212; <a data-player-guid=\"bb2deb63-4fce-9e10-80e8-e16590139fb3\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=403\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Venus Williams<\/a>&#8216; run at the 2025 US Open isn&#8217;t over just yet.<\/p>\n<p>One day after <a href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/tennis\/story\/_\/id\/46075719\/venus-williams-falls-karolina-muchova-3-sets-grand-slam-return-2025-us-open\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">losing a competitive three-set match<\/a> to No. 11 seed <a data-player-guid=\"cc2cea69-f75c-09ea-f698-55b98e0a5b97\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=3039\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Karolina Muchova<\/a> in singles, the 45-year-old Williams was awarded a wild-card entry into the women&#8217;s doubles draw with 2021 US Open runner-up <a data-player-guid=\"4c9a7ff1-2feb-b4ab-fb3f-9fc7d9fd3f9f\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=3641\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Leylah Fernandez<\/a> on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday night, Williams, a seven-time major champion and former world No. 1, made her 25th US Open main draw appearance &#8212; the most by any player since the Open era began &#8212; as a wild card, thrilling a capacity crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium.<\/p>\n<p>Williams, the oldest person to play singles at the US Open since 1981, made her return to pro tennis last month at the Citi Open after a 16-month absence. She defeated <a data-player-guid=\"b21248a4-7e25-349b-a6ad-de1d40febaac\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=5848\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Peyton Stearns<\/a>, then ranked No. 35 in the world, to become the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/tennis\/story\/_\/id\/45800257\/venus-williams-age-45-dc-open-oldest-woman-win-tour-level-singles-match-martina-navratilova\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">second-oldest woman to win a tour-level singles match<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Editor&#8217;s Picks<\/p>\n<p>2 Related<\/p>\n<p>Williams also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/tennis\/story?_slug_=venus-williams-loses-1st-round-cincinnati-open-bouzas-maneiro&amp;id=45922414\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">played at the Cincinnati Open<\/a> earlier this month and in the US Open mixed doubles tournament last week with <a data-player-guid=\"59785389-c37d-e25a-2d8d-2b92f427085e\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=2952\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Reilly Opelka<\/a>, losing in the first round. This is the first major Williams has competed in all three events (singles, women&#8217;s doubles, mixed doubles) since 1998 Wimbledon.<\/p>\n<p>Williams told reporters she was &#8220;very proud&#8221; of how she played against Muchova, and said she was pleased with the progress she had made in a short amount of time. However, she had said she wasn&#8217;t planning on entering any other tournaments this season, as she didn&#8217;t want to play outside of the United States.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Can someone move a tournament here? I don&#8217;t know that I&#8217;m willing to travel that far at this stage in my career to go play,&#8221; she said Monday night. &#8220;I love playing. The level of my game has come up so much since D.C. I tried as hard as I could to throw off any rust, but at the end of the day, there&#8217;s only so much that can really be accomplished in three or four matches.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Williams, who won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles and three Olympic gold medals alongside sister <a data-player-guid=\"cc4fbfff-5162-cb94-e0aa-500d3227a300\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=394\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Serena<\/a>, will now play with Fernandez, a 22-year-old from Canada, for the first time. They face the sixth-seeded pair of <a data-player-guid=\"e0597cfa-62e2-948c-2a0e-0b88a6ed6cd7\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=2478\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Lyudmyla Kichenok<\/a> and <a data-player-guid=\"acd768a7-1316-6793-4bf9-4c138b4714b8\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=3077\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ellen Perez<\/a> in the first round.<\/p>\n<p>Other duos receiving wild cards include Americans <a data-player-guid=\"282e9816-0563-ac66-b043-d79fadc302ee\" href=\"http:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=3913\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Hailey Baptiste<\/a>, Williams&#8217; doubles partner in Washington, D.C., and <a data-player-guid=\"589ea89f-c2dd-9b65-1871-f2fa0ad66dfd\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=3406\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Whitney Osuigwe<\/a>, and the team of <a data-player-guid=\"a8380f35-489f-3578-b295-8c4350e1bc70\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=8393\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Clervie Ngounoue<\/a> and <a data-player-guid=\"fb4a5abc-e29b-3269-bcec-2da93f349e66\" href=\"https:\/\/www.espn.com\/sports\/tennis\/players\/profile?playerId=14311\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Iva Jovic<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>ESPN Research contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aug 26, 2025, 06:39 PM ET NEW YORK &#8212; Venus Williams&#8216; run at the 2025 US Open isn&#8217;t&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":178411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[62,1464,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-178410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115097992161702357","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}