It was 1990 when the story of a father appeared in specialized tennis magazines showing two baby spinach boys aged 9 and 10 with beads in their hair and long thin legs. He says something like: «Remember them, you’ll see them again at the top of the world tennis rankings». Photos and statements together stand out and somehow find a listening ear: partly because the girls are black, grew up in Compton, one of the most violent and degraded suburbs of Los Angeles and, as they say in media jargon, they have “a good story ”. A little more, because that confident and brazen statement smacks of outsized boastfulness. Tennis is not basketball, which is learned in the slums of American suburbs – like Brazilian football on the beach of Bahia – in the streets, where a playground and a poorly made basket are denied to anyone. Tennis is still, at that time more than now, an elitist sport, of exclusive clubs, of gestures and of wealthy white people in which one bows to the Dukes of Kent when leaving the Wimbledon center. The blacks who entered the history of tennis on the men’s and women’s circuits in 1990 can be counted on the fingers of one scant hand: Athea Gibson, five slam titles before the 1960s when the Open era was still yet to come, Arthur Ashe, winner of three slams between 1968 and 1975 and Yannik Noah champion in Paris in 1983, Zina Garrison in the Wimbledon final just that year.
All photos in the report are Reuters
A STORY THAT BEGAN BEFORE THEIR BIRTH
The story of Venus and Serena Williams, according to how their father Richard, who is a good storyteller (and perhaps seller say the evil ones of the time) tells it, begins well before 1990. The year is 1979. Richard Williams sees on TV handing over a check for 40 thousand dollars to the Romanian tennis player Virginia Ruzici, he does the math and realizes that in just a few days the girl has brought home much more than her white-collar job earns her. one year. And he develops an idea: to give birth to other children (the family has three born from his wife’s previous relationship) and make them tennis players, to give them the opportunities in life that he, a black man born in Louisiana in a context of strong racial discrimination, had by a strict mother, a cotton picker who, to remove him from the risk of starting to live by her wits, put him on a train one day to look for another life, they are missing. Richard, who respects his mother who raised 5 children with an absent father, learns that life is a tough business, which gives you nothing. When the idea matures in his head he buys a tennis racket, gets a ball shooting machine and uses his free time on that court to learn and in the meantime he conceives two daughters: Venus who was born in 1980 and Serena who is 15 months younger.
THE GHETTO SEARCHED
It was 1983 when Richard decided that the family from Michigan, a relatively quiet place, had to move to what he called “The Ghetto”, in Compton, a devastated suburb held hostage by youth gangs: that’s where he wanted his two future champions to grow up. : «Get used to flattening yourself on the ground if you shoot», they will certainly not be afraid of a ball that arrives quickly or of a game that you can lose. And one of their older sisters, who remained in Compton in 2003, died from a stray bullet. Venus and Serena are about 4 years old – they don’t remember exactly – when he takes them to the field: they collect balls from the adults, while they wait for their turn for which their father sometimes has to make way for them quickly, to protect them there is a of the local gangs, one of the tough ones the Crips. In the meantime the father has written a plan, and follows it. Dozens of pages in which he has planned everything well: not only tennis, but also the education of his young stars. He repeats that balance is needed, he says that in the scale of values that he puts in the girls’ heads they come in this order: God, family, education, business and only after tennis. He documents everything he does, he has a small camera in which he films the training but in which he also teaches them to answer questions, in view of the champions they will be. He trains them to have confidence in themselves, to always believe in themselves. His wife Oracene follows him in this plan. But in those videos there doesn’t seem to be the tense climate of the stories of many master tennis fathers, especially in the training phases, of which Father Agassi represents, after the release of Open, autobiography of André Agassi, the quintessential. The girls smile while they train, they seem to enjoy playing and Richard has an encouraging, non-harsh way of correcting.
THE LEAP IN QUALITY
A convincing and stubborn family entrepreneur, when Venus was 10 years old she decided it was time to make the leap in quality and change pace. The Williams family moves to Florida, dad Williams knocks on the door of the Rick Macci Academy in Boca Raton, Macci is one of the best coaches on the American youth scene, he realizes he has talent in his hands to the point that he agrees to train the two girls for free in exchange for a percentage of future earnings: he risks a lot of money, finds their father a job, gives the family a house and works with Venus and Serena who, when there are points up for grabs, even during training, transform , hungry for results. But her father doesn’t want to feed them to the youth circuits, where there are avid parents, he wants to raise them as professionals so that they can make their debut in the tennis that matters in due time, in the meantime he protects them, at the cost of arguing with journalists if he understands that a question risks exposing them in a way that is inappropriate for two still growing girls, undermining their trust. In the meantime, however, he has made them into characters before even starting: an enormous pressure that the outside world and even the world of tennis, which have seen many small tennis players made on the table burn out quickly and badly, views with suspicion.
PROFESSIONALISM
A pressure which, however, Venus Williams managed without problems on 31 October 1994 in her first outing on the professional circuit, without a single point in the rankings, defeating the number 57 in the world. She’s just 14 years old, she runs a lot, hits hard and on the pitch she looks like she’s having fun. A year later, father Williams demands that Macci leave the Academy to follow his daughters. Macci doesn’t agree, he loses but doesn’t sue. Perhaps he understood that having trained them was an investment that in fact their fame will pay him handsomely. Venus will need three years to mature and show what she is really worth by reaching the final of the US Open at 17 years old. In the meantime, world tennis looks at the Williams family, their frank ways, their confidence which in the father sometimes seems self-assured and in the daughter a self-confidence devoid of apparent shyness, like a foreign body: there is something sanguine in that way to play that they are not used to. When Serena also appears on the circuit and burns the stages more than Venus and in 1999 manages to win that US Open at just 18 years old which will be only the first of the longest trail of Slams in the history of tennis, the novelty is even more evident .
Look with suspicion
That father who brazenly negotiates mind-boggling sums from sponsors, who shows neither the diplomacy nor the aplomb to which tennis is accustomed, who talks loudly and gets excited, until the moment comes for everyone to jump on the winners’ bandwagon, it is seen and told with many distances: one wonders if he isn’t a manipulator, if he didn’t push them too soon, if he doesn’t even accidentally rig the games in which the two play against each other, where neither of them performs as happens when beyond the network there is someone else. To that defamatory accusation, when cheating is insinuated into big tournaments, Venus responds offended on behalf of the family and the father explains that perhaps the parent was just doing the right thing if two sisters don’t find it natural to hit each other on the pitch simply because they love each other in life. The issue exploded brutally at Indian Wells in 2001 when Venus withdrew before the semifinal with her sister, officially due to injury: Serena paid the price. When she takes the field for the final the public stages an infernal bedlam of boos and boos, the entrance of her father and Venus into the stands is greeted with a shower of insults, which the father does not hesitate to define as racist. At that time Venus was number 3 in the world, Serena number 7 and in that white fort in the middle of the desert America was booing two American citizens as much as it could and cheering for the young Belgian tennis player Kim Clijsters. The sisters boycotted the tournament for fifteen years. The Williams family is cumbersome for tennis, but they are changing it despite tennis: the story really went as dad Richard said on those first covers of 1990. Not only have we really seen them on top of the world for decades, and if it’s true that Venus at twenty became the first black number one in history with five Wimbledon titles in her career, Serena with her power and her hunger became the strongest tennis player in history: 23 slams alone. The forty thousand dollars that her father had dreamed of became 49 million or so in prizes alone for Venus and 94 for Serena, without counting the sponsors.
HOWEVER YOU JUDGE IT AN OSCAR-WORTHY STORY
The two have also changed the image of tennis: Venus’ height, 1.85, the weight of her ball, the agility of her run have given impetus to a different way of playing; Serena with her explosive physicality, which she never hid behind the classic dress that the old guard liked, choosing instead deliberately showy solutions, represented much more than the redemption of her neighborhood as her father wanted when he said: I want when the kids see them of Compton think that we can all get there if we put our heart into it. Serena is the little girl who was barely 10 years old when, in front of a camera, when someone asked her which player she wanted to look like with a disarming smile and a gap between her upper incisors, she responded by shaking the beads in her hair: «I wish that one day they wanted to be like me.” No sooner said than done. They tried for decades to ask the Williams sisters how cumbersome their father was but they always only replied that they were happy with him. That he was the father they wanted. And that he taught them to have fun playing and not to waste the money they earned, because too many athletes end up broke. He will perhaps remain a controversial father, we will never really know if that obsession to plan was right, if it went too far and to what extent it exceeded the limit. No one, not even those who lived that life, will ever have proof. But neither of the two daughters has ever denied him even for an instant and Serena, who left tennis in 2022, has shown that she knows how to win again even as a mother after the birth of Olympia in 2017. After retiring at 41, in 2023 she gave light Adira. And if the results count a little, the girls from the ghetto to the top of the world have had their redemption. And mother Oracene, even though she later separated from Richard, never missed a match for her daughters. No one can doubt that it was a winning family. Maybe even very outside the box. But you are on top of the world by definition.
The story premiered on Canale 5 on 8 May 2024 and became a film in 2021 entitled A Winning Family – King Richard with Will Smith in the role of Richard Williams for which he won the Oscar for leading actor.
