NEW YORK (AP) — Serena and Venus Williams are teaming up again at the U.S. Open.
The sisters will play doubles at the tournament after receiving a wild card Wednesday into the event they won twice.
Serena Williams returned to tennis this summer after a four-year absence, and the sisters were set to play at Wimbledon before Serena had to withdraw after injuring her knee in her singles loss. They played in the Cincinnati Open, losing in the first round.
The Williams sisters won the 1999 and 2009 U.S. Open doubles titles and are 27-7 in their nine appearances. They last played in 2022, losing in the first round in what was expected to be Serena's final match in Flushing Meadows.
Serena, 44, played with Carlos Alcaraz in mixed doubles Tuesday, winning one match before losing in the quarterfinals. Venus, 46, is entered in the women's singles event.
The Williams sisters teamed to win 14 Grand Slam doubles titles along with Olympic gold medals in 2000, 2008 and 2012. They shared the No. 1 ranking in women's doubles for eight weeks.
Serena opted not to compete in singles at the U.S. Open, where she won six of her 23 Grand Slam singles titles. But she felt good enough to accept wild cards into both doubles events.
She and Venus won their first U.S. Open doubles title the same year the younger Williams won her first singles championship there. The height of their dominance as a team would come about a decade later.
They won the Australian Open and Wimbledon in 2009, before picking up their second title in Flushing Meadows later that summer. They won in Australia again in 2010 and then picked up the French Open title, making the sisters the holders of all four major trophies at the time.
The first round of the women's doubles tournament begins Sept. 3.
See AP’s full tennis coverage here
Serena Williams, left, and Venus Williams, right, both of the United States, wave to the crowd at the end of a women's doubles match against Marta Kostyuk, of Ukraine, and Peyton Stearns, also of the United States, at the Cincinnati Open tennis tournament, Monday, Aug. 17, 2026, in Mason, Ohio. (AP Photo/Kareem Elgazzar)
Serena Williams, left, and Venus Williams, right, both of the United States, wave to the crowd at the end of a women's doubles match against Marta Kostyuk, of Ukraine, and Peyton Stearns, also of the United States, at the Cincinnati Open tennis tournament, Monday, Aug. 17, 2026, in Mason, Ohio. (AP Photo/Kareem Elgazzar)
Serena Williams, left, first bumps Venus Williams, right, both of the United States, during a women's doubles match against Marta Kostyuk, of Ukraine, and Peyton Stearns, also of the United States, at the Cincinnati Open tennis tournament, Monday, Aug. 17, 2026, in Mason, Ohio. (AP Photo/Kareem Elgazzar)
SALISBURY, Md. (AP) — “Rocky Raccoon checked into his room, only to find Gideon’s Bible.”
Paul McCartney explained those famous lines in the song by The Beatles, saying these Bibles “were in every hotel in America.” He’d never seen something like that in England.
For more than a century, countless have found it in the bedside drawers of American hotel and motel rooms. It has become a symbol of America’s roadside culture and Protestant tradition. It’s mentioned in lyrics, films, Broadway shows.
“The Gideon Bible is a peculiarly and amazingly American object,” says Lori Anne Ferrell, author of “The Bible and the People.”
It began with Gideons International, an organization of evangelical business and professional men founded in 1899.
One of its members, working on a railroad expansion project, gets off the train in the town of Superior in western Montana, and checks into a hotel. He asks the owner if he can place a Bible at the front desk. She responds with a more ambitious proposal: Place a Bible in each of the hotel rooms.
The group says that it has distributed more than 2.5 billion Bibles worldwide since that day in 1908. It was the year that Ford Motor Co. began manufacturing the Model T, the first low-priced car that introduced motoring to the masses.
“All of a sudden, we have the road culture, the interstate culture, we have motels, and we have, for the first time, people leaving home,” Ferrell says. “There’s a story about America with the Gideon Bible that you can’t tell with any other Bible because it’s distributed everywhere, and it represents the movement of people across the country.”
Gideon Bibles have been distributed in prisons, military bases, hospitals, even the White House. In a 1971 ceremony, the group presented its 100 millionth Bible to President Richard Nixon.
“It’s an expression of biblicism — the idea that the Bible it’s from God to you. And it’s all you need … and that biblicism is a deep element in American culture,” says Timothy K. Beal, author of “Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith.”
Over the years, its distribution in schools faced challenges. Its presence diminished as the number of U.S. hotels that offer religious materials in their rooms dropped.
Still, it remains the religious book that quietly seeks to provide comfort in the most secular of settings — and that, even with the advent of the TV and Wi-Fi, sits in motel nightstands across America and endures.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.
A Gideon Bible sits on a table in Phoenix, Sunday Aug. 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
FILE - A bible sits on a stained mattress on a pile of debris outside a damaged motel from Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Fla, Jan. 23, 2019. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)
A Gideon Bible sits on a table in Phoenix, Sunday Aug. 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
