Would You Take Serena Williams Or Tiger Woods? Good Question

Here’s one of those debates for the ages, or at least for the moment: Is Serena Williams the most dominant athlete ever?

She’s close. She’s awfully close.

She ranks among the elite of the elite with Michael, Flo-Jo, Tiger and the rest as she hustles toward the door as a professional tennis player, but let’s get the obvious out of the way.

Billie Jean King won The Battle of the Sexes over Bobby Riggs. You had Steffi Graff doing the unprecedented by spending 377 weeks ranked No. 1 in the world. Oh, and barring a Williams miracle next month at the U.S. Open, she’ll leave the tour with one less grand slam title than Margaret Court’s record 24.

Nevertheless, Williams is greater than King, Graff and any other women’s tennis player who ever breathed.

Everybody knows it.

Vintage Serena used rocket serves to spook opponents, and nobody did better than Williams ripping groundstrokes with a forehand or a backhand.

She also added brain to her brawn.

Which brings us closer to that debate, especially since Williams has complemented her grand slam victories with 73 career singles titles and 23 career doubles titles. Not only that, but according to Forbes, she is 90th among self-made women with a net worth of $260 million.

Williams announced Tuesday in Vogue magazine what has been inevitable for a while: She’s retiring at nearly 41. She hasn’t won a major tournament since the Australian Open five years ago, and she lost earlier this summer at Wimbledon during the first round to somebody named Harmony Tan.

Prior to that, Williams hadn’t played an official singles match of any kind since she damaged her right leg in June 2021 on the slippery Centre Court grass at Wimbledon during the opening set of her first match.

Somebody (OK, me) urged Williams to retire before the Tan match, but she ignored my advice.

Then Williams hugged what I said after she lost to that 115th ranked player in the world, and she also realized Not-So-Vintage Serena would be just fine spending more of her time running her firm called Serena Ventures, which features 60 startups that Forbes said raised an inaugural fund of $111 million.

Now about the candidates for most dominant athlete ever, and let’s add another name to those of Michael, Flo-Jo, Tiger and now Serena.

Hank.

Even beyond his 755 career home runs, Hank Aaron was baseball’s all-time best player. He had more homers than Babe Ruth, and he owned a higher career batting average and more lifetime RBIs and total bases than Major League icons such as Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Barry Bonds.

Still, Aaron told me for my book called “The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King” that Tiger Woods was peerless in the history of athletes.

“As great as Jim Brown was, and as great as Michael Jordan was, and as great as anybody you’d want to keep mentioning, I don’t know of anybody who was as great at his sport as this man is now,” Aaron said of Woods, with 15 major titles to trail only Jack Nicklaus’ 18. “I mean, (Tiger) is totally incredible. He’s phenomenal.

“I don’t know of anybody who has ever played any sport who was able to concentrate as much on perfection at all times as Tiger Woods.”

Jordan comes to mind.

The five-time winner of the NBA’s most valuable player award was the primary reason the Chicago Bulls grabbed six world championships.

Then you had Muhammad Ali, known as The Greatest, partly because he grabbed the heavyweight boxing title on three different occasions, but mostly because he could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

You’ve also had others who crushed their competition more often than not, ranging from Brittney Griner and Michael Phelps to Florence (Flo-Jo) Griffith Joyner and Mario Andretti to LeBron James and Mia Hamm.

Vintage Serena was among them.

Consider this: $94 million. That’s how much prize money Williams has pocketed during her career, and as Forbes calculated, that’s more than twice as much as any other female athlete in history.

Now that’s dominating.