Serena Williams admits she tried to cash $1 million check at drive-thru ATM
Give her the money.
Serena Williams recalled when she tried to cash her first $1 million check winnings at a drive-thru ATM.
“I never played for money,” the former tennis star explained on the July 4 episode of “Hot Ones” after host Sean Evans asked her whether that story was true.
“I played ’cause I loved the sport … I don’t even know if I wanted to play to be the best, I wanted to win,” she added.
“So my tax guy, he would be like, ‘You didn’t get your money?’ and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t get that one in Zurich,’ ‘Oh, I forgot that one in Moscow,’ … I was just playing to win, and if I didn’t win, I wasn’t thinking. I was just so angry, that I wanted to find a way to get better and win the next time.”
Williams, 42, said she “never really spent a lot of money” but attempted to cash her first big check at the drive-thru of a local bank.
“I got my check and it was a million dollars. Like, OK, I’m gonna go deposit it,” she explained. “I went through the drive-thru … and the guy was like, ‘Uh, I think you need to come inside for this,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.'”
The Serena Ventures founder chalked the incident up to “lessons to learn.”
In August 2022, Williams — who shares daughters Olympia, 6, and Adira, 11 months, with husband Alexis Ohanian — announced that she was retiring from tennis to focus on her family.
After the mom of two and the Reddit co-founder, 41, welcomed their second daughter in August 2023, Williams has been candid about her postpartum life.
Last December, she revealed that she used her breast milk to help heal sunburn under her eyes.
Then in May, the tennis champ opened up to her social media followers about struggling to fit back into her denim skirt after giving birth to Adira.
