“We were trying to get him to move and get out of there,” she said. “He kind of refuses and he looks at us. And he says, ‘Is there really a rat here?'” So she changed tactics: “‘No, we just don’t want you sitting there. We’re going to use this table.'”
Reader, this was not a meet cute.
But something about Ohanian convinced Williams, perhaps his proclamation that in his native Brooklyn he saw rats all the time. Williams then invited him to join them, which is when Ohanian had the first idea that she was in fact that Serena Williams, undeniable tennis legend.
But, as he admitted Vanity Fairhe had “never watched a match on television or in real life. It was literally sports – even if ESPN would announce tennis updates, I would just walk away…I really had no respect for tennis.”
Which was okay, because when Ohanian said he was at the tech conference to speak, a sought-after personality thanks to the creation of Reddit, Williams claimed he was very familiar with the networking site, having browsed it that morning.
