# Serena Williams Won 23 Majors. The Lists Still Can't Place Her
> Sixteen rankings hold Serena Williams: Wimbledon, the US Open, most intimidating athlete, greatest sibling duo, and the record she never broke.
*By YPB Team · Published August 5, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/serena-williams-ranked-many-ways*
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Serena Williams at the 2013 US Open. Photo: Edwin Martinez, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Serena Williams played her last professional match at the US Open on 2 September 2022, a three-hour third-round loss to Ajla Tomljanović.1 The 2026 tournament opens its Fan Week on 23 August and the main draw on 30 August,2 the fourth edition to run without her.
She won 23 Grand Slam singles titles. That total explains why her name sits on every tennis list ever compiled. It does not explain the eleven other rankings on this site that also hold it.
> Five of these sixteen rankings ask a tennis question. The other eleven had to find their own reason to include Serena Williams, and each of them found a different one.
## Serena Williams vs Martina Navratilova: the women's list
This ranking asks the plain version of the question, with fourteen names on it and no era filter.
Williams has the largest Open-era haul in the field, one major clear of Steffi Graf's 22.3 Her last of them, the 2017 Australian Open, was won in the first weeks of a pregnancy.
Martina Navratilova arrives with a different shape of career. Eighteen singles majors, 167 singles titles, and a doubles record nobody in the sport has matched.
Margaret Court is here too, holding 24, and the counter-argument for her is that most of them predate the professional era. Chris Evert, Billie Jean King and Monica Seles occupy the middle of the field, and the order you put them in depends almost entirely on how heavily you discount the 1960s.
Fourteen names, and the answer moves with how far back you are willing to count. Play it →
## Wimbledon, seven times: Serena Williams and Steffi Graf
Grass was the surface Williams held longest. She won Wimbledon in 2002, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2015 and 2016.3
Steffi Graf matched that seven exactly, across 1988 to 1996, and did it while also completing the only calendar-year Golden Slam in the sport's history.
Navratilova sits above them both on this particular count with nine, six of them consecutive between 1982 and 1987.
Eighteen champions are on the list, stretching back to Helen Wills Moody. The further down it you read, the more it becomes a list about grass-court technique rather than about career totals.
Seven Wimbledon titles each, and a third name with nine. Play it →
## The US Open: Serena Williams and Chris Evert, six apiece
New York is the tournament this article is timed to, and the one where her career both started and stopped. She won her first major here in 1999 at 17, and her last match here in 2022.
Six US Open titles came in between: 1999, 2002, 2008, 2012, 2013 and 2014.3 The last three were consecutive, and no woman repeated as champion again until Aryna Sabalenka took the 2024 and 2025 editions.
Chris Evert has the same six, won between 1975 and 1982, which is why the Open-era record at Flushing Meadows is shared rather than held.
Two women are above them both, and almost nobody names them. Molla Mallory won eight titles between 1915 and 1926; Helen Wills Moody won seven in the decade that followed. Both played an amateur tournament on grass at Forest Hills, which is roughly as similar to the modern US Open as a penny-farthing is to a road bike.
That is the honest problem with this ranking. It spans 110 years of a tournament that has changed surface, venue, scoring format and prize structure, and it asks you to compare them anyway.
Twenty-eight champions, 110 years, and four different definitions of the same trophy. Play it →
## Roland Garros: the slam that asked the most of her
Clay was the surface that made Williams work hardest. She won the French Open three times, in 2002, 2013 and 2015, against seven Wimbledons and six US Opens.3
Chris Evert's seven French Open titles are the record here, and Justine Henin's four came in a five-year window built almost entirely on a one-handed backhand suited to the surface.
Iga Świątek, Steffi Graf and Monica Seles are all ahead of Williams on the count, on a list that runs to twenty champions.
The same player who is the obvious answer on grass has five women in front of her on clay. Nothing about her changed except the ground under her feet.
Three Roland Garros titles, on a list where the record is seven. Play it →
## The WTA all-time list: 73 titles and Billie Jean King's tour
This ranking measures a career by the week rather than by the fortnight. Williams won 73 singles titles and spent 319 weeks at world No. 1.3
Billie Jean King belongs here for something that does not appear in a trophy count. She led the breakaway that created the women's tour in 1970, and the US Open became the first major to pay women and men equally in 1973.
Navratilova and Evert each won more than twice as many tournaments as Williams did, because the 1970s and 1980s calendars simply had more of them to enter.
Fifteen players are on the list, and the honest way to read it is as a question about what a tour is for. Trophies, weeks at the top, or the structure that let the next generation earn a living from it.
Fifteen players, and one of them built the tour the other fourteen were paid by. Play it →
## Roger Federer, Usain Bolt and the 21st century
Here the tennis bracket disappears and Williams is measured against every sport that ran between 2000 and now.
Roger Federer is on this list with 20 majors and eight Wimbledon titles, and the two of them overlapped for almost the whole of both careers. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are on it as well, so tennis occupies four of the twenty places.
Lionel Messi, LeBron James, Usain Bolt, Tom Brady, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles account for most of the rest. Every one of them dominated a sport with a different clock, a different season and a different definition of a career peak.
The comparison is unresolvable and that is precisely why it is worth having. There is no shared unit between a 100-metre final and a five-set match, so what the ranking really measures is which sport you grew up watching.
Four tennis players in twenty, and no shared unit between any two sports on the list. Play it →
## Best American athlete: Serena Williams vs Michael Jordan
Thirty-one names sit on this one, and most of them come from sports that stop the country on a Sunday.
Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Babe Ruth, Jim Brown and Joe Montana represent basketball, football and baseball. Williams and Tiger Woods are the two entrants from sports played individually on a court or a course.
Her case rests on the fact that American tennis in her era was, for practical purposes, the Williams family. She and Venus took 30 major singles titles between them, while no American man has won one since Andy Roddick's 2003 US Open.5
Michael Phelps and Jesse Owens complicate the list from a third direction, since both built their claim inside a single fortnight held every fourth summer.
Thirty-one Americans, and two of them played an individual sport. Play it →
## Ali, Pelé and Jesse Owens: fourteen names, one tennis player
The all-time version of the athlete question is shorter and much harsher. Fourteen places, no century filter, no sport quotas.
Muhammad Ali, Pelé, Babe Ruth, Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe carry the historical half of the list, and several of them are there for what they meant outside sport as much as for what they won inside it.
Williams and Roger Federer are the only tennis players who made the cut, which is a striking omission rate for a sport with a 150-year professional history.
Simone Biles is the one other woman on the list. That fact says less about the athletes than about who wrote the sports canon, and it is the kind of imbalance a ranking makes visible in a way a paragraph cannot.
Fourteen athletes across every sport, and two of them played tennis. Play it →
## Four Olympic golds, and Michael Phelps has twenty-three
Williams won gold in the doubles at Sydney 2000, Beijing 2008 and London 2012, and the singles gold in London as well, which completed a career Golden Slam.3
Four Olympic titles would be the summit of almost any career. On this list it is well down the field.
Michael Phelps has 23 golds and 28 medals in total. Larisa Latynina has 18 medals, Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt have nine and eight golds, and Paavo Nurmi has nine from the 1920s.
The reason is structural rather than a judgement on her. Swimming and athletics hand out several medals per Games to the same competitor, while tennis offers one singles title every four years, so a tennis player can dominate a decade and still finish with four.
A career Golden Slam, on a list where the leader has 23 gold medals. Play it →
## Clutch: the second serve and the two-minute drill
This ranking is about what a competitor does when the match is one point from over.
Williams faced match points in tournaments she went on to win, and the shot she reached for at 4-5 in a deciding set was usually a first serve hit harder than the one before it.
Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Joe Montana make up most of the rest of the sixteen, all from sports where a teammate can carry a bad night. Tennis has no such option, which is either the strongest point in her favour or an unfair advantage in the comparison.
Sixteen athletes under pressure, and only some of them had teammates. Play it →
## Mike Tyson's list, and the one tennis player on it
Twelve names are on the most-intimidating ranking. Eleven of them are boxers, linebackers, enforcers and centres.
Mike Tyson, Sonny Liston, Marvin Hagler, Lawrence Taylor, Dick Butkus and Bill Laimbeer built their reputations in sports where physical intimidation is a legal tactic.
Williams is the twelfth, and the only one whose sport forbids contact entirely. What put her there was the fastest serve in the women's game and a habit of opponents describing the match as lost in the locker room beforehand.
Being on this list is not obviously a compliment. It is one of the few rankings here that measures a reputation rather than a record.
Eleven contact-sport athletes, and one player from a game with a net in the middle. Play it →
## Muhammad Ali's list: the one nobody asks to be on
Trash talk is a discipline with its own history, and Muhammad Ali is the reason it has one.
Conor McGregor, Floyd Mayweather, Charles Barkley, Deion Sanders and Richard Sherman follow the Ali model of building an event by talking before it.
Williams belongs to a different category on this fourteen-name list. Her entries are on-court exchanges with officials during matches rather than promotion booked in advance, which makes her the only person here who arrived by accident.
Thirteen people who chose this reputation, and one who did not. Play it →
## Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe and a $111 million fund
This ranking asks what an athlete changed once they stopped being only an athlete.
Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut is the reference point, and Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar carry the rest of the historical weight.
Williams founded Serena Ventures in 2014 and closed a $111 million inaugural fund in March 2022, backing companies led by women and people of colour.6 She also finished with $94.8 million in career prize money, the most any woman has earned in sport.3
Fourteen names are on the list and they were changing very different things. Robinson broke a colour line, King won a pay structure, and the modern entries are mostly building institutions with their own money.
A colour line, a pay structure, and a venture fund, on the same list. Play it →
## Venus and Serena Williams: fourteen doubles majors, no final lost
Every other ranking here holds her name on its own. This one holds two.
Venus and Serena Williams won 14 Grand Slam women's doubles titles together and never lost a major doubles final.3 They also took three Olympic doubles golds, in Sydney, Beijing and London.
The competition is real. Bob and Mike Bryan won 16 men's doubles majors and spent 438 weeks as the No. 1 pair. Peyton and Eli Manning have four Super Bowl rings between them, and Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko held heavyweight world titles simultaneously while refusing to fight each other.
What separates the Williams sisters from all of them is that they were also each other's biggest obstacle. They met in nine Grand Slam singles finals, including four in a row between 2002 and 2003, so every doubles title they won together came from a partnership that had to survive being taken apart every few months.
Fifteen duos are on the list, from the Sedin twins to the Gasol brothers. Most of them shared a team; very few had to beat each other for a living first.
Fourteen doubles majors together, and nine Grand Slam singles finals against each other. Play it →
## Niki Lauda, Ben Hogan and a maternity ward
Williams gave birth to her daughter Olympia on 1 September 2017 by emergency caesarean. Within 24 hours she recognised the symptoms of a pulmonary embolism, asked for a CT scan and a heparin drip, and was told she was confused by the pain medication. The scan found multiple clots in her lungs. Further surgery followed, and she spent the first six weeks of motherhood unable to get out of bed.4
The following July she reached the Wimbledon final.
The rest of this eighteen-name list is built from comparable ordeals in other sports. Niki Lauda raced again six weeks after the 1976 Nürburgring crash that had a priest read him the last rites. Ben Hogan won six more majors after a bus hit his car head-on in 1949. Monica Seles came back to win a Grand Slam title after being stabbed on court, and Mario Lemieux won an NHL scoring title in the same season he finished radiation treatment.
There is no way to rank these against each other honestly, because the injuries are not comparable and neither are the sports. What the list does instead is put them side by side and let you decide which return was least likely.
A racing crash, a bus, a knife, and a delivery room. Play it →
## Margaret Court's 24, and the four finals that followed
Every list so far has been a version of what Serena Williams achieved. This one is about what she did not.
After the 2017 Australian Open she needed one more major to match Margaret Court's all-time record of 24. She reached four more Grand Slam finals chasing it and lost every one: Wimbledon and the US Open in 2018, then Wimbledon and the US Open again in 2019.3 She retired on twenty-three.
Dan Marino is the closest match on this twenty-name list. He held the passing records of his era across seventeen seasons and never won a Super Bowl. Barry Sanders retired 1,457 yards short of the NFL rushing record while still the best back in the league.
Pete Sampras, Phil Mickelson, Karl Malone, Ted Williams, Stirling Moss and Elgin Baylor fill out a list of careers that were, by any normal standard, complete. Each of them is remembered partly for a single missing item.
That is the strange arithmetic of a great career. Her total is the second-largest in the history of the sport, and it is also what qualifies her for a ranking about falling short.
Twenty careers that ended one item short of the thing they were chasing. Play it →
## Sixteen questions, sixteen different reasons
A tennis ranking can place Serena Williams by counting trophies. The other eleven had to decide first what they were actually measuring: a surface, a decade, a country, a temperament, a family, a recovery, or a record that got away. She qualifies for all of them, and for entirely unrelated reasons each time.
She becomes eligible for the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2027, five years after her last match, and turned up unannounced at Newport in August 2025 to introduce Maria Sharapova at hers.7 The induction will settle exactly one of the sixteen questions above.
The other fifteen get decided slowly, by readers picking between two names and then two more, which is [the head-to-head method](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison) behind every ranking on this site. If someone you follow keeps appearing on lists that have nothing to do with each other, build the ranking that puts them there and see who they run into.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Federer vs Nadal vs Djokovic — 16 Lists That Split Them](/articles/federer-vs-nadal-vs-djokovic-ranked) — the men's version of the same 20-year argument
- [Jannik Sinner: Best in One List, Last in Another](/articles/jannik-sinner-ranked-many-ways) — what the post-Big-Three era looks like
- [Tom Brady: 199th Pick, 7 Rings, 15 Different Lists](/articles/tom-brady-ranked-many-ways) — the other American who is on every athlete list
- [How Head-to-Head Voting Works](/articles/how-head-to-head-voting-works) — why two options at a time beats a leaderboard
Sources
US Open (official) — Serena Williams v Ajla Tomljanović, third round, 2 September 2022: usopen.org (checked 2026-08-05)
LTA — 2026 US Open schedule, Fan Week from 23 August and main draw from 30 August: lta.org.uk (checked 2026-08-05)
Wikipedia — Serena Williams: Grand Slam singles and doubles titles by year, Olympic golds, 73 WTA titles, 319 weeks at No. 1, career prize money, and the Grand Slam finals played after 2017: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-05)
ABC News — Serena Williams on the emergency caesarean, the pulmonary embolism and the six weeks that followed: abcnews.go.com (checked 2026-08-05)
ESPN — no American man has won a Grand Slam singles title since Andy Roddick at the 2003 US Open: espn.com (checked 2026-08-05)
Bloomberg — Serena Ventures raises a $111 million inaugural fund, March 2022: bloomberg.com (checked 2026-08-05)
NBC News — Serena Williams at the International Tennis Hall of Fame induction of Maria Sharapova, and her own 2027 eligibility: nbcnews.com (checked 2026-08-05)
