Canadian tennis player Victoria Mboko is about to share a court with one of the sport's all-time greats. Mboko, who goes by Vicky, revealed that she will be playing doubles alongside Serena Williams, a partnership she described as amazing and more than a little surreal. Speaking from a car, she called it breaking news even as she was still trying to process it herself.
Mboko's rise has been swift. The last time she spoke at length, she said, was right after she won the National Bank Open, a breakthrough she likened to a fairy tale as her career began to skyrocket. She is now ranked ninth in the world and has two WTA titles to her name, a climb that, she admitted, she is only starting to get used to.
Even amid all of that, the news about Williams caught her off guard. I think I just keep on surprising myself every month, she said, describing a run of exciting developments that keep arriving one after another. Playing alongside Williams, she suggested, was on a different level entirely from anything she had expected.
The invitation came in the simplest of ways. Williams, Mboko said, texted her while she was at a tournament in France, on the morning before a match. The message showed up on her phone as maybe Serena, the automated label for an unknown number, and at first she thought it could be anyone. She quickly figured it was Williams asking to play doubles, and, as she put it, how could she decline that, before adding the contact right away.
The first person she told was her father, whose reaction was more muted than she expected. He was kind of nonchalant about it, she recalled, saying only, oh wow, that's pretty cool. For Mboko, it was rather more than that, and she soon shared the news with the rest of her family as the excitement sank in.
That family is central to how she handles moments like this. Mboko comes from what she calls a big tennis family, and she said she draws comfort from people who have known her since she was a baby and who know exactly who she is. In a sport where players spend so much time alone, having them around, she said, brings a little extra support in her corner.
As for her mindset on court, Mboko keeps it simple, treating every match as all or nothing because there is always something on the line. She said she feels honored to play alongside someone she considers the greatest woman's athlete of all time, and is eager to learn from the depth of Williams's experience. We will see, she said, when asked what she might teach Williams in return.