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Serena Williams has enjoyed a fruitful career as one of the world’s best athletes and possibly the greatest women’s tennis player that’s ever lived. Along with her prowess on the courts, Williams is also a style icon and graced the cover of New York magazine’s fashion issue.

Williams’ New York magazine profile opens up with a focus on the tennis star working on the HSN network hawking clothes and perhaps not that comfortable with the position she was placed in. While on a break between her time on air, Williams, 33, shares some inner thoughts about her career and life after she leaves the game.

From New York magazine:

She is a 33-year-old woman who won her first major at the tail end of the previous century, a simpler era you will recall for its consequenceless Napster-facilitated intellectual-property theft and the looming threat of Y2K. By now, her shoulder should be shredded, her elbow a constant wail of hurt. Instead, she spends her days bageling 20-something moppets who have never known the game without her. The last time a man as geriatric as Serena won a grand slam was 1972. She has won three in the past six months. Her 16-year run is, in the words of Sports Illustrated, “one of the most sustained careers of excellence in the history of athletics.”

“I didn’t think it would last this long,” says Serena, on break from the HSN grind.

“Not to suggest that your career is over — ”

“But even if it was over,” she interrupts, “it’s a really long career.”

Throughout the piece, there seems to be a theme of leaving behind her impressive and history-making career in lieu of new challenges. Williams doesn’t seem to be one to rest on the back of past successes and that drive will hopefully extend into fashion. The profile also goes deeper into the relationships she has with her sister, Venus, and her father, Richard.

Read the rest of Serena Williams’ New York magazine profile by following this link.

Photo: New York Magazine/Norma Jean Roy