The tale of Venus and Serena Williams has been told many times. Now they get to be the ones to tell it.
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Story by Tressie McMillan Cottom and Photograph By Renell Medrano; Styling By Samira Nasr
Venus Williams made her professional tennis debut in 1994. Her sister Serena followed her in 1995. That is more than 20 years of Williams sisters not only dominating the world of tennis but also starring as main characters in the Venn diagram of sports and pop culture. Between them, they have 48 Grand Slam titles (including 14 shared women’s doubles titles), several fashion lines, a venture-capital firm, and an interior-design company. Venus is now 41, Serena is 40, and neither has yet retired—a rare two-decade streak of physical authority for any athlete. This rise to power would be atypical for anyone, but for two Black girls from Compton, California, it’s legendary. It is the stuff of movies, and, indeed, this past year Venus and Serena executive-produced King Richard, a film that tells the story of their early years through the lens of the fierce love of their father, played by Will Smith.
“I don’t think people even thought about what happened before we turned pro,” Venus tells me. “This isn’t a movie about tennis,” Serena adds. “This is a movie about family.” We are speaking on a winter day over Zoom. Venus is in transit, and Serena is at home in Florida. Venus is in loungewear, and Serena is Team Camera Off. (It’s two years into Covid and I empathize.) It’s a measure of control and assurance toward the media that has characterized the sisters since their careers began. If you’d been part of other people’s stories your whole life, wouldn’t you jump at chances, big and small, to exert your own control?
The story I grew up hearing about them could have been called “Those Williams Sisters.” That is how we talked about them in the 1990s, before the world domination and the record books. They were those girls with the beaded braids and big smiles who acted like someone at home loved them.
“From such a young age, all we’ve done is work,” says Venus. “For Serena and I to explore that freedom is surreal.”
Tennis was not an entirely foreign sport to me—a certain strata of Black elites played tennis regularly, and I played in public school for PE credits—but competitive tennis was as otherworldly as golf. People did not do that for a job. Nevertheless, the display of familial Black love from Venus and Serena beaming on the evening news was crystal clear. The Williams sisters were archetypes of the kind of deep kinship ties that are central to the Black American experience. Venus is quick to point out the idiosyncratic in the universal: “I think that our family is just unique to ourselves,” she says. “Obviously we’re an African American family, and it’s important for people to see African American families in that dynamic … to have role modeling.”
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Still, she stresses again, “our family was super unique.” It is okay if Venus and Serena would not exactly classify their story as quintessentially Black. Fans knew, and that was enough for most of us. That has always been the dance that we do with the members of the Williams family, who are at once Blackness personified—the batshit, loving father, Richard; the strong mother, Oracene; the hair; the style; the family squabbles; and the fierce protectiveness—and universal symbols for beating the odds. Serena sees it this way: “I am a dreamer, and I love Marvel,” she says. “I think King Richard is like Iron Man and that there still are other stories around it.
The next, obviously, would be the Venus story, and then there’s always the story about our other three sisters, and then there’s like a mom, and then there’s the Serena story. When I look at it, I see it just encompassing this whole superhero kind of thing.”
On Serena: Norma Kamali one-piece; Cartier High Jewelry earrings and necklace. On Venus Williams: Sara Cristina one-piece; Panthère De Cartier earrings.
Still, armchair critics on social media grumbled that the film focuses too much on one man—their father—at the expense of the women themselves. There is a lot to critique, but that Richard’s story is foundational to the legacy of Venus and Serena is not up for debate. Understanding Richard the way the family wants us to understand him corrects the record about not only what Venus and Serena have achieved but also what their achievements mean—placing them in the rhythms and cycles of Black familial love by choosing to focus on the dynamics between Richard, Oracene, and their daughters. The film’s director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, says that is not an accident: “Richard’s story was sort of a window into the lives of two people that we all feel like we know.”
I was struck by how often moments of everyday tenderness—the kisses, the calming refrain of “I love you”—were threaded throughout the film. “It looks like y’all did that every day,” I tell them.
Serena explains, “A lot of people get this different story of sports fathers—especially tennis fathers, who are really overbearing. And that wasn’t necessarily my dad. Everyone’s like, ‘Well, how do you play tennis for so long?’ It’s because we weren’t raised in an environment where it was something that we abhorred.” There was the infamous decision to pull Venus and Serena from junior competition so that they wouldn’t “fall to pieces” because of pressure, Richard said in 1991, and could instead focus on schoolwork. Many in tennis considered it an affront to the way things are done. In retrospect, those kinds of choices honored a truth that the rest of the world was slow to accept. Serena tells me about being reluctant to tell her father about injuries because he would insist she rest. “He’s always like, ‘Take your time. You’ll be okay. Don’t play.’ ” Another Richard-ism:
“My dad always told us to plan ahead,” Serena says. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s a dictum that the sisters have applied not just to tennis but to imagining life beyond it.
“We never planned to just only play tennis and just only be tennis players,” she says. “We planned to do more.” And she’s quick to point out that Venus is the real family planner. “I’m an unbelievable planner,” Venus boasts. “I usually plan the health retreats.”
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“Okay, wait a minute,” I say. “Y’all do a health retreat as a family?”
“We’ve always been focused on health,” Venus says. “When I started to have issues with my health”—she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, Sjögren’s syndrome, in 2011—“my whole family, from my dad down, all joined into living a more plant-based lifestyle. The support is always there.” Serena adds, “We don’t celebrate holidays at all”—they were raised as Jehovah’s Witnesses—“but we definitely like to just always figure out ways to … what does Lyn call it?” she asks Venus, referring to their sister.
“The Fellowship,” Venus says.
“Yeah, the Fellowship. Lyn says, ‘Let’s get the Fellowship together.’ ”
That family dynamic is a large part of why King Richard works, both by typical biopic standards and as a counternarrative to the way media has written the Williams sisters’ story.
The story goes that Richard and Oracene Williams groomed Venus and Serena for tennis greatness from hardscrabble public courts in Compton. This was the 1980s, when the city was working-class, overpoliced, and fighting the scourges brought about by poverty. Compton’s national reputation was unfairly branded by music that emphasized the area’s violence. Even with that caveat, it was not an easy place to raise a family of five Black girls. In addition to Serena and Venus, the family included Yetunde, Lyndrea, and Isha Price, Oracene’s daughters from a previous marriage. The oldest, Yetunde, was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Compton in 2003. Having her portrayed in the film has been bittersweet. When Serena showed the movie to her four-year-old daughter, Olympia, she says, “We made sure to take out the stuff that was not kid friendly,” but she was surprised that “it was really more about her saying to me, ‘Tunde.’ She never met my eldest sister. She says she understands that Tunde isn’t around. That was interesting for me in a sad way, but she at least knows her a little bit better.”
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