Serena Williams Took On A Phone Thief. And Won.

Word to the wise: Don't mess with a record-breaking tennis pro.

A word of warning to any potential iPhone-stealers: Don’t mess with Serena Williams.

An unstoppable torrent of energy on the tennis court, Serena’s grit and determination extends to whatever she does: designing clothes, securing sponsorship deals and er, retrieving phones from ‘petty thieves’.

The tennis pro shared a Facebook post earlier this week where she revealed that a ‘delicious meal’ in a Chinese restaurant nearly ended in disaster when a man slid up to her table and grabbed her iPhone from her chair.

Serena said she’d been watching the suspicious-looking man from ‘the corner of her eye’ because he had been hanging around ‘too long’ and sure enough, before she knew it, he’d pocketed the phone and hot-footed it out the door.

A lot of people would have left it there putting it down to bad luck or an unfortunate experience, perhaps. Some might even leave the whole phone-retreival thing to the police. But not Serena. She said her ’superhero senses’ kicked in, and without thinking she bolted out of the eatery after the assialant. 

'I weaved my way in and out of the cozy restaurant (leaping over a chair or two)...He began to run but I was too fast...those sprints came in handy', she said.

And once Serena caught up with the man, she kept her cool to make sure the situation didn't escalate further. 

Recalling the incident, she writes: 'In the most menacing yet calm no nonsense voice I could muster I kindly asked him if he accidentally took the wrong phone. He stumbled on his words...and eventually he said "Gosh you know what I did! It was so confusing in there. I must have grabbed the wrong phone."'

She received a standing ovation when she returned to the restaurant, well naturally.

Following the incident, the tennis ace shared an amusing photo of herself with her body superimposed onto a superhero costume and left some inspiring words for others: 'Always listen to your superhero inner voice. Always keep your things close! Fight for what's right. Stand for what you believe in! Be a superhero!… I just showed every man in there I can stand up to bully's and other men. It was a win for the ladies!'

Game, set and match once again for Serena, then.