Tennis superstar Serena Williams is one of the highest-paid athletes in the world and has raked in more than $84 million over the course of her career, according to Forbes. But she’s been careful about how she spends her money.
In fact, after earning her first million, Williams didn’t touch any of it — she deposited it directly into the bank and walked away.
“I remember, I went through the drive-through to deposit my check and they were like, ‘I think you need to come in for this,'” she recalls in an interview with Uninterrupted, a media company owned by LeBron James and Maverick Carter.
Williams says that, for her, tennis has never been about getting paid. She’s always played for the love of the game. In fact, she used to forget to collect her paychecks at all.
“When I first turned pro, you had to go pick up your check,” she says. “I never, never picked it up, so at the end of the year, the tournament directors would literally hand me the check because I would never go get it.”
