Tennis · 23 Grand Slam Singles Titles · Netflix: The Roast of Kevin Hart · May 10, 2026
Serena Williams's AP Royal Oak Frosted Gold Openworked: Love Means Nothing, the Watch Means Everything
Serena and Venus Williams arrived at Netflix's Roast of Kevin Hart on May 10, 2026, at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, presented Hart with a G.O.A.T. ring, and delivered the sharpest tennis pun of the evening. Serena did it wearing an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Frosted Gold Double Balance Wheel Openworked — a skeletonized, hammered-gold movement on the wrist of a woman who has spent thirty years making everything she does look effortless.
| AP Royal Oak Frosted Gold Double Balance Wheel Openworked. Source: Audemars Piguet Audemar Piquet Website |
Serena and Venus Williams at Netflix's Roast of Kevin Hart, May 10, 2026. Source: AOL youtube shorts Instagram |
▶ Source: AOL · The Express · Instagram — Netflix: The Roast of Kevin Hart, May 10, 2026, Kia Forum, Los Angeles
The Williams sisters arrived toward the end of the roast, which by that point had already featured Tom Brady earning MVP honours from the crowd with a set of precisely targeted burns. Serena and Venus brought a different energy — warm, confident, and armed with one good joke and the authority to land it. Venus opened with genuine affection: love for Hart, love for the room. Then Serena stepped to the microphone and deployed the line that any tennis player knows by memory but that lands differently when the person saying it has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles: in tennis, love means nothing. The room understood. They presented Hart with a G.O.A.T. ring — the appropriate gift from two of the greatest athletes in the history of their sport — and ushered him off the podium with the same comfortable authority they have brought to every court they have ever stood on.
Serena Williams retired from professional tennis in 2022 after a career that reshaped what was possible at the highest level of the sport. Twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles. Four Olympic gold medals. A serve, a forehand, and a competitive instinct that defined the standard for a generation of players who followed her. Since retirement she has continued building the commercial and philanthropic interests she developed in parallel with her playing career — Serena Ventures, her investment firm; her fashion line; and the kind of high-profile appearances at events like the Kevin Hart roast that reflect a public figure who has lost none of her presence after stepping away from the sport that made her famous.
“As you know, in tennis, love means nothing.” — Serena Williams, Netflix Roast of Kevin Hart, May 10, 2026
Timepiece
Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Frosted Gold Double Balance Wheel Openworked
The Royal Oak was designed by Gérald Genta and introduced in 1972 as a deliberate disruption: a steel sports watch priced above gold dress watches, with an octagonal bezel secured by eight exposed screws and an integrated bracelet that had never been attempted at that price point. It has since become the most influential luxury sports watch in history. Audemars Piguet, founded in 1875 in Le Brassus, Switzerland, remains family-controlled and independent — producing each Royal Oak in its Le Brassus manufacture with a degree of finishing that the case architecture was specifically designed to display.
The Frosted Gold finish was developed by AP in collaboration with Florentine jeweller Carolina Bucci, who introduced the ancient Florentine gold-hammering technique — in which thousands of tiny indentations are hand-applied to the gold surface, creating a texture that scatters light rather than reflecting it directly. The result is a shimmer that catches every angle of light without the blinding flash of polished gold. Applied to the Openworked Royal Oak — where the dial is removed entirely to expose the double balance wheel movement beneath — the Frosted Gold finish turns the watch into a moving light sculpture. The double balance wheel in AP's Calibre 3132 provides improved accuracy through redundancy: two balance wheels linked by a differential gear, averaging their respective oscillations.
| Reference | 15407BC.GG.1224BC.01 or ladies' variant — specific reference per spot |
| Case | 18k Frosted Gold (yellow or white); openworked dial; octagonal bezel; eight-screw case; integrated Frosted Gold bracelet |
| Movement | Calibre 3132; self-winding; double balance wheel with differential; openworked; approx. 60-hour power reserve |
| Market price | Approx. $95,000–$115,000 USD (depending on size and metal); secondary market varies |
The Architecture of Brilliance
The Frosted Gold Royal Oak Openworked is a watch that rewards looking at it from multiple angles — the hammered texture shifts as the light changes, the openworked movement reveals different gear trains and jewels depending on how you hold your wrist, and the overall effect is of a object that is constantly in motion even when it is standing still. This is, in a sense, the watchmaking equivalent of Serena Williams on a tennis court: the same action producing different results from every viewing angle, the mechanics fully visible but somehow making the output seem inevitable rather than mechanical.
The Frosted Gold technique's origin in Florentine jewellery-making — centuries-old hand-hammering applied to a Swiss sports watch that was itself a disruption of conventional watchmaking categories — is the kind of historical layering that makes a watch interesting beyond its price tag. AP took a reference that Genta designed as a provocation against tradition and applied a finishing technique from a tradition that predates Switzerland's watchmaking industry entirely. The result is a watch that holds multiple histories simultaneously. Serena Williams, who has spent her entire career rewriting what was considered possible in her sport, is a natural fit for an object that does the same thing.
Love Means Nothing
The tennis scoring system uses "love" to mean zero — no points, no advantage, the baseline from which everything is built. Serena's joke at the roast deployed that definition against Hart's opening sentiment from Venus: all this love, and in the system Serena knows best, it still counts for nothing. It is a neat joke, and it landed. But the watch on her wrist told a different story about what zero means when you start from it. Twenty-three Grand Slams began at love-all. The Royal Oak Openworked's double balance wheel began as an engineering solution to the instability of a single oscillator. Both are arguments that starting from nothing, with the right architecture, produces something extraordinary. The scoreboard confirms it. So does the wrist.
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