Serena Williams Recounts Trying to Deposit $1 Million Check at Bank Drive Thru

On 'Hot Ones,' the retired tennis champion remembers not cashing in early-career winnings because she wasn't thinking about the money.

July 8, 2024

Paras Griffin / Getty Images for ESSENCE

Serena Williams unsuccessfully tired to deposit $1 million dollars at a drive-thru ATM, but chalked it up to not being used to playing tennis for money.

The retired 23-time Grand Slam champion was the latest guest on Hot Ones, where around the 11:30-minute mark of the video below, host Sean Evans quizzed her on whether the rumor was true.

"Yeah, those are all true," the mother of two confirmed. "I never played for money, I played 'cause I loved the sport. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to win."

She continued, "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."

Once she received her first million-dollar check, Williams slipped up and tried to deposit it at an ATM. Williams admitted that she'd "never really spent a lot of money" but that she was "so serious" about wanting to have it deposited.

"I got my check, and it was a million dollars. Like, okay, I’m gonna go deposit it," she jokingly recalled. "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, okay.'"

Agreeing with Evans, Williams concluded that it was one of many "lessons to learn," but she's come a long way since then, starting her own venture capital fund, Serena Ventures, in 2017.