Twitter honours Serena Williams with a GOAT emoji for her final tournament
Serena Williams will play her last tournament at the US Open, after 27 years of professional tennis, and for that, Twitter is honouring her with a special emoji and various hashtags.
The 23-time Grand Slam winner has mixed feelings about ending her tennis career.
“It’s the hardest thing I could ever imagine,” she said in a Vogue cover story earlier this month.
“I hate that I have to be at this crossroads… I don’t want it to end, but at the same time I’m ready for what comes next.”
“I haven’t really known how to feel. Because I’ve been doing this since I was born, literally,” she told Times.
Williams is only the second woman to get the goat (Greatest Of All Time) hashmoji treatment, following Simone Biles, who got hers ahead of the 2021 Olympics last year.
While Biles’ goat was for doing the splits, Williams was photographed mid-service, wearing one of her signature multi-layered tennis skirts.
For the tennis legend’s “hashmoji,” Twitter launched a special goat with a tennis skirt and racquet.
The emoji will appear in any tweets that include the following hashtags: #Serena, #SerenaWilliams or #ThankYouSerena.
23 grand slams. 4 gold medals. 27 years of dominance
There's only 1 #SerenaWilliams#ThankYouSerena #Serena pic.twitter.com/OeyqSNrFGJ
— Twitter Sports (@TwitterSports) August 29, 2022
Williams – who is arguably the greatest tennis player of all time – occupied the singles world No. 1 spot for 319 weeks and finished as the year-end No. 1 five times throughout her career.
Her 23 Grand Slam singles titles are the most won by a player in the Open Era and the second-most of all time behind legend Margaret Court’s 24 titles.
The U.S. Open is expected to be Williams’ last competition before she retires, which she announced earlier in August.
The six-time U.S. Open champion started her quest for a seventh with a 6-3, 6-3 victory over Danka Kovinić in the opening round of the 2022 edition on Monday.
Her greatness goes beyond tennis, as she is one of the most accomplished athletes in sports history and on a short list of all-time legends such as Tiger, Michael and LeBron, who are instantly known by a single name.
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