Serena Williams won the US Open six times between 1999 and 2014. She made her Grand Slam debut on Arthur Ashe Stadium at the age of seventeen and played what she framed as her farewell there at forty in 2022. Her ten US Open finals — across more than two decades of competitive history at the tournament — represent the most distinctive concentration of singles excellence at any Grand Slam by any player of the modern Open Era.
This is the story of how an American player whose career began with a US Open title at age seventeen turned Flushing Meadows into the defining venue of her competitive life — and what her record means for the modern history of women’s tennis.
The Six Titles
Serena Williams’s six US Open titles came across a fifteen-year span between 1999 and 2014. The complete list:
- 1999 — defeated Martina Hingis 6–3, 7–6(4)
- 2002 — defeated Venus Williams 6–4, 6–3
- 2008 — defeated Jelena Janković 6–4, 7–5
- 2012 — defeated Victoria Azarenka 6–2, 2–6, 7–5
- 2013 — defeated Victoria Azarenka 7–5, 6–7(6), 6–1
- 2014 — defeated Caroline Wozniacki 6–3, 6–3
Each title was won on the hard courts at Flushing Meadows. Five of the six were won at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the world’s largest tennis stadium — built in 1997 and opened just two years before her first US Open title in 1999. The combination of her career arc and the venue’s modern history produced one of the most distinctive player-venue relationships in tennis.
The 1999 Breakthrough at 17
What is sometimes forgotten about Serena Williams’s US Open story is its origin — she won the tournament on her first Grand Slam final appearance at the age of seventeen years and eleven months. She had not previously won a Grand Slam title in any senior capacity. The 1999 US Open final was her first major championship and the start of what would eventually become twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles overall.
The 1999 run was already historically significant before it became the start of one of the most successful careers in tennis history. Serena’s defeat of Martina Hingis — the world number one — established immediately that the young American had the game and the competitive temperament to challenge the dominant figure of the period. The straight-sets final win was completed in front of a sold-out Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd that included her family and her coach and father Richard Williams.
At seventeen years and eleven months, Serena was the fourth-youngest US Open women’s singles champion of the Open Era — behind Tracy Austin (1979), Martina Hingis (1997), and Monica Seles (1991). The combination of her youth, her immediate Slam-level success, and the specific cultural significance of her win as a Black American woman at the most prominent tennis event in the United States established her from the moment she lifted her first trophy as one of the most consequential figures in modern professional sports.
The Williams Sisters Era at the US Open
The 2001 US Open final between Serena and Venus Williams was the first Grand Slam final ever contested by sisters in the Open Era. Venus won 6–2, 6–4. The match drew extraordinary attention as the moment the sisters’ rivalry reached a Grand Slam championship stage for the first time.
The 2001 US Open final was one of the most discussed competitive moments in modern American tennis. The cultural significance of two African-American sisters competing for the most prestigious women’s tennis title in the United States — both raised by their father Richard Williams in Compton, California, both products of his vision of producing two Slam-winning daughters — produced extraordinary public attention. The match drew one of the largest television audiences for a women’s tennis match in US history at the time.
The 2002 US Open final reversed the 2001 result. Serena defeated Venus 6–4, 6–3 — her third consecutive Grand Slam title of 2002 and the third leg of what would become her “Serena Slam,” the achievement of holding all four major singles titles simultaneously, completed at the 2003 Australian Open. The 2002 US Open established her as the dominant women’s player of her era.
The Williams sisters faced each other in nine total Grand Slam finals across their careers — including four at the US Open (2001, 2002, 2008, and 2017 — the last of these actually being the 2017 Australian Open; at the US Open specifically they met in the 2001 and 2002 finals). Serena won seven of the nine Grand Slam finals overall.
Their relationship as the most successful family pairing in tennis history — their continued mutual support across decades of competitive rivalry — produced one of the most unusual narratives in modern professional sport.
The 2008–2014 Title Run
Serena’s career produced an unusual structural pattern at the US Open. After the 2002 title, she did not win another US Open until 2008 — a six-year gap that included multiple injuries, the 2003 murder of her half-sister Yetunde Price, and a period in 2006 when she was ranked outside the world’s top 100.
Her return to the US Open champion’s level in 2008 began what proved to be her most sustained period of US Open dominance. Between 2008 and 2014, Serena won four US Open titles in seven years — adding to her two early-career titles (1999 and 2002) to reach six total. The late-career titles came against opponents who were among the strongest players of their era — Jelena Janković in 2008, Victoria Azarenka in 2012 and 2013, and Caroline Wozniacki in 2014.
The 2012 final against Azarenka was the most competitively significant of these late-career US Open finals. Serena recovered from losing the second set 2–6 to win the deciding third set 7–5 in a match that contemporary observers described as one of the most tactically demanding US Open finals of the modern era. The match was Serena’s fifteenth Grand Slam title and her first US Open in four years.
The 2013 final against Azarenka — Serena’s second consecutive year facing the Belarusian in the title match — produced an even more competitive contest. Serena won the deciding third set 6–1 after Azarenka took the second set in a tiebreak. The 2013 title was Serena’s seventeenth Grand Slam championship, tying her with Roger Federer’s Open Era major championship count at that time.
The 2014 title against Wozniacki was Serena’s sixth US Open championship — equalling the Open Era women’s record set by Chris Evert. It was also her eighteenth Grand Slam title overall, tying her with Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova on the all-time list. The 2014 final marked the conclusion of what would prove to be her last sustained period of US Open dominance.
The 2011 Final Loss to Stosur
Within her broader era of US Open dominance, Serena suffered one final defeat that stands apart. In the 2011 US Open final she lost to Australia’s Samantha Stosur 6–2, 6–3 — the only Grand Slam singles title of Stosur’s career. The final was marked by a controversial moment when Serena was penalised a point for shouting “come on” before a shot had been completed, ruled a hindrance by the chair umpire, and her animated reaction became one of the defining images of that tournament. It was her only US Open final defeat during the heart of her career, and it separated her 2008 title from her 2012–2014 run.
The 2015 Vinci Semifinal — The Calendar Slam That Got Away
The 2015 US Open is best understood as the tournament where Serena Williams nearly completed the calendar-year Grand Slam — and didn’t.
Serena had won the 2015 Australian Open, the 2015 French Open, and the 2015 Wimbledon. A win at the US Open would have produced the first calendar-year Grand Slam by any player in singles tennis since Steffi Graf in 1988. The pressure on her at Flushing Meadows in 2015 was extraordinary, and contemporary media coverage built across the fortnight to a level of attention that few tennis tournaments have generated.
Serena lost the semifinal to Roberta Vinci 2–6, 6–4, 6–4. Vinci, ranked outside the world’s top 40, had never previously reached a Grand Slam semifinal. Her win prevented what would have been the most celebrated single-season achievement in modern women’s tennis.
The 2015 Vinci loss has been discussed extensively in the years since as a moment that reveals something about the specific psychological pressure of pursuing a calendar-year Grand Slam. Serena subsequently described the match as one of the most disappointing of her career, and it remains one of the most memorable upsets in modern US Open history.
The 2018 Controversial Final vs Osaka
The 2018 US Open final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka produced one of the most discussed competitive moments in modern tennis. Osaka won 6–2, 6–4 to claim her first Grand Slam title — but the match was disrupted by a series of code violations Serena received from chair umpire Carlos Ramos that became the dominant narrative of the post-match coverage.
The first code violation came when Ramos warned Serena for receiving coaching gestures from her coach Patrick Mouratoglou — a violation Serena disputed. The second came when she broke her racquet in frustration, costing her a point. The third — for verbal abuse of the umpire after Serena confronted Ramos about the coaching warning — cost her an entire game.
The match’s competitive narrative was effectively subsumed by the umpiring controversy. Osaka’s performance — winning her first Grand Slam title at age twenty in straight sets against the most successful player of her era — was overshadowed by the dispute. The trophy ceremony was conducted with Osaka in tears, and Serena’s gracious public response — embracing Osaka, asking the crowd to celebrate her — produced one of the most poignant moments in modern Grand Slam tennis.
The 2018 final raised broader questions about umpiring consistency in women’s tennis compared with men’s tennis, with subsequent analysis noting that male players had committed comparable violations without receiving similar penalties.
The 2019 Final and the Late-Career Chase
The 2019 US Open final between Serena and Bianca Andreescu produced a landmark moment in Canadian tennis. Andreescu, then nineteen and competing in her first US Open, defeated Serena 6–3, 7–5 to claim her first Grand Slam title and become the first Canadian player to win a Grand Slam singles championship.
Serena’s loss in the 2019 final — her fourth US Open final defeat — came in the context of her pursuit of a record-equalling twenty-fourth Grand Slam singles title, which would have tied Margaret Court’s all-time mark. Each US Open from 2018 onward was framed as a potential opportunity for that twenty-fourth title, but each produced its own disappointment.
Serena did not return to a US Open final after 2019. Her 2020 tournament ended in the semifinals (a loss to Victoria Azarenka), and her 2021 tournament was cut short by injury.
The 2022 Farewell Tournament
The 2022 US Open was Serena Williams’s farewell tournament. She announced beforehand that she would be stepping away from professional tennis, with the US Open as her final Grand Slam appearance of that era. The announcement transformed the tournament — and the attention on her early-round matches — into an event that transcended ordinary professional sport.
Her opening-round win over Danka Kovinić produced one of the most highly attended evening sessions in US Open history, with celebrities, fellow athletes, and cultural figures filling Arthur Ashe Stadium. Her second-round win over world number two Anett Kontaveit was one of the most surprising results of the tournament and extended the public attention through her most competitive farewell performance.
Her third-round loss to Ajla Tomljanović — 7–5, 6–7(4), 6–1 across three hours and five minutes — ended her run, with the packed Arthur Ashe crowd standing for the closing games in one of the most emotional public moments in the tournament’s history.
Williams returned to competitive tennis in 2026, but the 2022 US Open endures as the emotional close of her championship era, and the venue that had opened her career gave it its defining farewell.
The 10-Final Record and Statistical Profile
Serena’s US Open career produces a statistical profile that has no equivalent among Open Era women at any single Grand Slam:
- Six singles titles (Open Era record, shared with Chris Evert)
- Ten singles finals (most by any Open Era woman at the US Open)
- One of the highest match-win totals of any woman in US Open history, with a winning percentage well above 85 percent across more than two decades of appearances
- First US Open title at age 17 years and 11 months (fourth-youngest Open Era US Open women’s champion, after Austin, Hingis, and Seles)
- A 15-year span between her first US Open title (1999) and her last (2014) — among the longest title-to-title intervals at a single Grand Slam in Open Era history
- Additional deep runs beyond her ten finals, including the 2015 (vs Vinci) and 2020 (vs Azarenka) semifinals
- Four US Open finals losses (2001 to Venus Williams, 2011 to Sam Stosur, 2018 to Osaka, 2019 to Andreescu)
In the Open Era, only Chris Evert has matched Serena’s six US Open titles, and Steffi Graf is next with five. Only the pre-Open amateur era produced higher totals. Serena’s six stands as the modern Open Era benchmark, shared with Evert.
The 23 Grand Slam singles titles Serena accumulated across her overall career establish her as the most successful women’s Grand Slam champion of the Open Era — a total behind only Margaret Court’s 24, which includes amateur-era titles.
Why Arthur Ashe Stadium Suited Serena’s Game
The specific qualities that made Serena Williams the defining champion of the US Open’s modern era reflect a fit between her game and the Arthur Ashe Stadium environment that no other tournament could match as precisely.
Serena’s signature qualities — the most powerful serve in women’s tennis history, an aggressive return game that punished opponents’ second serves, exceptional power on both groundstrokes, and the competitive psychology to manage the pressure of major championship moments — found their most complete expression at the US Open. The Flushing Meadows hard court surface — initially DecoTurf, then Laykold from 2020 — produced conditions that rewarded the combination of power and aggression that Serena’s game brought.
The Arthur Ashe Stadium atmosphere was a particular fit for Serena’s competitive personality. The packed, vocal New York crowd — the largest tennis venue in the world — produced an environment where her intensity and emotional expressiveness were amplified rather than constrained. The cultural specificity of New York gave her competitive achievements a backdrop no other Grand Slam venue could provide.
The night session culture at the US Open particularly suited her game. Her matches under the lights of Arthur Ashe — with the closed roof from 2016 onward adding acoustic intensity — produced some of the most distinctive matches of her career. And the tournament’s position as the final Slam of the calendar suited her career structure, arriving when her seasonal preparation had typically reached its fullest expression.
The Cultural Significance Beyond Competitive Results
Serena Williams’s significance at the US Open — and in tennis more broadly — extends substantially beyond her competitive achievements. She is, alongside her sister Venus, the most culturally significant tennis player of the modern era. The combination of her competitive dominance, her identity as a Black American woman at the highest level of a historically white sport, her fashion presence and brand-building, her advocacy work, and the significance of her family’s story produced a figure whose impact cannot be measured purely by trophies.
The 1999 US Open title carried specific cultural weight. Serena was the first Black American woman to win the US Open singles title since Althea Gibson in 1958 — a forty-one-year gap that reflected both the broader exclusion of Black women from elite tennis across the mid-twentieth century and the significance of Serena’s breakthrough.
The Williams sisters’ cultural presence at the US Open — the family box at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the visible support network that accumulated around their matches, the media attention their appearances generated — created a cultural moment with no precise parallel in any other Grand Slam’s modern history.
Her commercial impact was equally significant: her presence consistently produced higher television audiences, attendance, and revenues, and the broader prize-money gains across women’s tennis in the modern era were substantially driven by the commercial value she and Venus brought to the sport.
The Modern Era’s Defining US Open Champion
What does it mean to be the defining champion of a Grand Slam tournament’s modern era? It means the player whose competitive performance most completely shaped the tournament’s identity across a specific historical period — whose game, results, and broader cultural significance changed how the tournament is understood.
For the US Open, that role belongs unambiguously to Serena Williams. Her six titles between 1999 and 2014 — combined with the ten total finals, the 2015 calendar-Slam pursuit that ended at the Vinci semifinal, the 2018 controversial final, the 2019 record-chase loss to Andreescu, and the 2022 farewell — combine to make her the player whose performance most completely shaped what the modern US Open means.
For Wimbledon, that role belongs to Roger Federer; for Roland Garros, to Rafael Nadal; for the Australian Open, to Novak Djokovic. For the US Open, Serena’s role is distinctive in a specific way. Her Open Era title count is matched by Chris Evert’s six — but what sets Serena apart is not the number alone but the cultural and historical weight she brought: her status as the first Black American US Open women’s champion since Althea Gibson, her role in the commercial transformation of women’s tennis, and the symbolic arc of a career whose debut title and farewell both took place at the same venue.
The modern US Open is Serena Williams’s tournament. The records support it, and the broader cultural significance she brought makes the relationship between Serena and Flushing Meadows the most distinctive of the four signature player-Slam connections of the modern era.
The player whose Grand Slam career began at Arthur Ashe Stadium at age seventeen and whose 2022 farewell came there at age forty established Flushing Meadows as the venue most associated with her competitive identity. Her name will be the reference point against which every future US Open champion is measured.
Part of the US Open series. Related: The US Open Guide — Format, Hard Courts, Draws, and Prize Money · Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open — The Defining Champion · Roger Federer at Wimbledon — The Defining Champion · Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros — The Defining Champion
