Serena and Venus Williams walked back onto Arthur Ashe Stadium as a doubles team with the past at their backs and a full house roaring them forward. They left it with another sting delivered by the same player who has made a habit of disrupting their storylines.
Australian Maya Joint, alongside partner Hao-Ching Chan, came from the brink in a dramatic 6-3, 6-7 (6-8), 7-6 (10-7) first-round win that turned nostalgia night into a nerve-jangling upset.
This was no ordinary doubles match. First-round pairs do not usually get the Ashe night session. The Williams sisters do. Ten Grand Slam appearances together, two titles in New York, 14 major doubles crowns overall, three Olympic gold medals — when they share a court, the sport still stops to watch.
For a while, it looked like the script would hold.
Joint, who had already spoiled Serena’s singles return by beating her in the first round at Wimbledon on Centre Court, walked into another cauldron and again refused to play the supporting role. After dropping a tight second set in a tiebreak, she and Chan surged ahead 4-1 in the decider, striking cleanly, returning aggressively, and quietening a crowd that had come to celebrate the sisters’ reunion.
Then the match flipped.
Serena and Venus, who had delayed their Grand Slam doubles comeback after Serena injured her knee and withdrew from Wimbledon, dug in. They clawed back in the third set, feeding off the noise, the memories, and their own muscle memory as a team. Soon they had erased the deficit and dragged the contest into a deciding 10-point tiebreak.
What followed felt like a farewell tour highlight reel in the making.
The sisters raced to a 5-0 lead. The stadium rose with them. Every point they won sounded like a celebration of everything they had been — dominant, defiant, unbeatable when it mattered most. A dream comeback win, under the lights in New York, suddenly felt inevitable.
Then the tension tightened.
Both Serena and Venus double-faulted in the breaker, the kind of tiny cracks that become fault lines at this stage of their careers. Joint and Chan seized on them, ripping through 10 of the last 12 points. The Australian refused to flinch, Chan matched her composure, and the noise inside Ashe shifted from expectation to disbelief.
From 0-5 down in the match tiebreak to a 10-7 win. From backdrop to headline, again.
For the Williams sisters, the loss sits heavy. Their doubles record in New York now stands at 27-8 across 10 appearances, a ledger that speaks to a long era of dominance. Yet their recent chapter together has been brutally unforgiving: a match-tiebreak defeat in Cincinnati, now another in New York, and the lingering question of how many more nights like this they will chase.
This was supposed to be the joyful return, the one postponed by Serena’s knee injury, the one that followed her stepping away from tennis in 2022 after 23 Grand Slam singles titles and what many believed was their last shared major match. Instead, it added another layer of heartbreak to a comeback that has offered more pain than payoff.
Venus’s own campaign in New York had already taken a hit with a first-round singles exit. Now the doubles loss with Serena deepens the sense of a closing window, even as the crowd still treats every appearance like an encore.
For Joint, the pattern is striking. Two consecutive Grand Slams, two first-round wins over Serena on the sport’s biggest stages — Centre Court at Wimbledon in singles, Arthur Ashe Stadium at the US Open in doubles. She has become the unlikely recurring figure in the late-career story of one of tennis’s greatest champions.
The Williams sisters once strode through women’s doubles as an unstoppable force, sharing the No.1 ranking, stacking majors, and turning finals into processions. On this night, they were mortal, fighting, and ultimately undone by a younger pair who refused to bow to sentiment.
If this is not the end of their doubles journey, it felt close enough to make everyone in Arthur Ashe wonder how many more chances there will be to see Serena and Venus together under the lights, chasing one last perfect finish.
