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Weird Things Everyone Ignores About Serena Williams’ Marriage

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A poolside prank in Rome turned into a Grand Slam-winning marriage nobody saw coming.

Long before Serena Williams walked down the aisle in New Orleans, she was trying to get rid of the man she’d eventually marry. In May 2015, Williams and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian crossed paths at the Cavalieri Hilton in Rome, days before the Italian Open, in a meeting so unlikely that neither one had any idea who the other was. Three years later, that awkward poolside run-in has produced a daughter, a wedding attended by Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian, and a marriage that survived a medical scare few people knew about at the time.

• Williams and Ohanian met poolside at Rome’s Cavalieri Hilton in May 2015 — she tried to scare him off with a fake rat warning; he told her he was from Brooklyn and wasn’t going anywhere.
• Williams won her 23rd Grand Slam singles title at the 2017 Australian Open while roughly eight weeks pregnant, months before she publicly confirmed it.
• Their daughter’s birth on September 1, 2017, involved an emergency cesarean and pulmonary embolisms that left Williams bedridden for six weeks before the couple married that November.

A Poolside Standoff in Rome

Williams was dining by the pool at the Cavalieri Hilton with her group when Ohanian sat down nearby in an otherwise empty area — close enough to annoy her. Williams and her friends tried to run him off by claiming there was a rat crawling around, a classic move to clear out an unwanted table neighbor. Ohanian didn’t budge, telling her he was from Brooklyn and rats weren’t exactly a deterrent. Neither had a clue about the other’s world: Williams had never heard of Reddit and bluffed her way through the conversation, while Ohanian, by his own admission, had never watched a tennis match in his life.

A Grand Slam Won in Secret

The relationship moved fast enough that by January 2017, Williams was roughly eight weeks pregnant when she took the court at the Australian Open — and won it, claiming her 23rd Grand Slam singles title without a soul outside her circle knowing she was carrying her daughter. The pregnancy only became public months later, and by accident, after Williams posted a photo to Snapchat in April 2017 that gave it away before she’d planned to announce it herself.

She won her 23rd Grand Slam roughly eight weeks pregnant — and the tennis world had no idea until a Snapchat slip gave it away months later.

The Proposal Back at the Same Pool

Ohanian didn’t propose in some random location — he went back to the exact spot in Rome where the rat story had played out. In December 2016, he got down on one knee at the same poolside table at the Cavalieri Hilton where Williams had once tried to make him disappear. It was a full-circle move that turned an annoyance into the setting for an engagement.

A Delivery That Nearly Went Very Wrong

Their daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., was born on September 1, 2017, but the delivery was anything but routine. Williams needed an emergency cesarean section, followed by pulmonary embolisms that left her bedridden for six weeks as she recovered. It was a serious enough scare that it reshaped how the couple approached the months leading up to their wedding just over two months later.

A Beauty and the Beast Wedding in New Orleans

Williams and Ohanian married on November 16, 2017, at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, throwing a “Beauty and the Beast”-themed wedding that drew a guest list stacked with celebrities, including Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian. Coming barely ten weeks after Williams left her six-week bedridden recovery behind, the wedding stood as proof of how quickly the couple’s year had moved — from a chance meeting by a pool to marriage, motherhood, and a medical scare, all inside roughly 30 months.

Ohanian still brings up the rat story whenever he talks about how they met — mostly because it’s the one detail that proves neither of them had any idea what they were starting that day in Rome.