On her own podcast this February, Serena Williams was asked to name an athlete who competed for the love of it rather than the attention. She said Michael Jordan. Then she said Kobe Bryant, who had been dead six years by that point, before naming herself. Her sister Venus sat beside her. Nobody at the table asked why Bryant’s name came before her own.
There is no photograph of Williams and Bryant standing together alone. Not at the Olympics, not anywhere else either of them ever appeared in public. What exists between them instead is a short list of specific moments, spread across fourteen years, that starts in London in the summer of 2012.
Table of Contents
Before 2019
Williams and Bryant were both part of the United States Olympic team that summer. She won gold in singles and doubles. He won gold with the men’s basketball team. A photograph taken during the Games shows the two of them at a McDonald’s with LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala and James Harden, a group shot from a larger celebration.
Nothing public passed between them again for three years. Then, on June 6, 2015, the day Williams beat Lucie Safarova to win the French Open and her twentieth Grand Slam singles title, Bryant posted on Twitter: “the goat @serenawilliams at it again #samebeast.” He never explained the post, and the tweet doesn’t mention tennis or the tournament at all.
2019
The record between them thickens twice in 2019.
Bryant was writing a children’s novel called “Legacy and the Queen” through his company, Granity Studios, about a young tennis player trying to win a tournament in a fictional kingdom. Before the book came out that September, he called Williams. He described the conversation publicly a few weeks after its release, at the Orange County Children’s Book Festival.
“We sat on the phone for like an hour and we just talked,” he said. “We talked about technique, we talked about practice, we talked about the emotional struggles of being a young athlete. I think a lot of times as athletes, we feel like being sensitive is a weakness.”
“Legacy and the Queen” went on to become a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. It is dedicated to Bryant’s four daughters. Williams isn’t part of the finished book. She’s part of how he described writing it.
Then, on September 7, the same day Williams walked out for her US Open final against Bianca Andreescu, Bryant posted the same message across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at once:
“Serena Williams, let’s do this today. The queen of tennis as a muse to legacyandthequeen. Always an inspiration to the next generation. Let’s goooo!”
Williams lost the match, 6-3, 7-5. There’s no record of Bryant being at Arthur Ashe Stadium that day. Whatever he offered her that day arrived as a post, not an appearance.
January 2020
Bryant died on January 26, 2020. He was 41. The helicopter he was in, headed to a youth basketball game, went down near Calabasas, California, killing him, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, and seven other people on board.
Five days later, Williams posted a tribute on Instagram. She named every family who had lost someone that day: the Bryants, the Chesters, the Altobellis, the Mausers, the Zobayans. “Your legend will live on,” she wrote, closing with a line from the Book of Romans.
A public memorial followed on February 24 at the Staples Center. Vanessa Bryant spoke. So did Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Geno Auriemma, the UConn coach whose program Gianna had hoped to join. Williams wasn’t one of the speakers. She marked the day from a distance, sharing a video on Instagram with a single word for a caption: “Forever.”
That August, on what would have been Bryant’s 42nd birthday, Nike released a short film of Williams and her daughter Olympia on a tennis court. Its caption read: “Kobe taught us to be better. A better scorer, better mentor, better father, better champion.”
What came after
What continued past that belonged mostly to Vanessa. In the spring of 2024, Williams launched her own beauty brand, WYN Beauty, and soon after sent Vanessa a gift box from the line. Vanessa sent something back later that year, a custom Kobe Bryant sweatshirt and a pair of Nike shoes. Williams filmed herself opening the package for her followers and thanked the family by name.
Two years earlier, in a long Vogue essay about her retirement that covered the people and choices behind her career, Williams never mentioned Bryant once. Nearly four years after she played her last professional match, his name still came up on its own, on that podcast in February, with no anniversary or occasion attached to it.
Asked what separates real competitors from people chasing attention, this is what Williams said:
“The best athletes, like the Jordans and the Kobes, and the Serenas, are people who really love it. They don’t do it for fame, they don’t do it for anything.”
She put herself last, after both of them.
Common questions about Serena Williams and Kobe Bryant
Were Serena Williams and Kobe Bryant close friends?
They shared a documented relationship built on a handful of public moments across about fourteen years: one lengthy phone call, several social media posts, and a continued friendship between Williams and Bryant’s widow, Vanessa, since his death in 2020. There is no public record of the two of them ever meeting one-on-one, outside of a larger group setting.
Did Kobe Bryant write about Serena Williams in his book?
Bryant called Williams for advice while writing “Legacy and the Queen,” a 2019 novel about a young tennis player, and later described that call publicly at a book festival. The book itself is dedicated to his four daughters, not to Williams.
Did Serena Williams speak at Kobe Bryant’s memorial?
No. Williams was not among the speakers at Bryant’s February 24, 2020 memorial at the Staples Center. She marked the day with a tribute video posted to Instagram instead.
