Venus and Serena and Richard Williams

People who love to play tennis have been glued to the TV sets during the past weeks to watch the world’s top players slug it out in Wimbledon in England. The other day, everyone watched the legendary sisters Venus and Serena Williams of the United States vie for the singles champion’s Venus Rosewater Dish. Serena, to her own surprise, wrested the No. 1 trophy from her older sister.

The unbelieving Serena, 28, fell to her knees on the grass. It was her sixth year of attempting to grab the final and the crown from her sister. She had beaten Venus in the 2002 and 2003 finals. Venus had won Wimbledon in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2008. This time, Serena shattered her ate’s attempt to become the first woman since Steffi Graf (who is Andre Agassi’s wife now) to win Wimbledon three years in a row (1991-1993).

She said that during the match, she wasn’t thinking that she was fighting her sister. It was a match between two Williams players.

Serena has won a title in all four Grand Slam tournaments. She has won 28 singles championships, 11 doubles championships, and a Gold Medal at the 2000 Olympics. In 2002, she won the Italian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Those 2002 titles made her Associated Press’ “Female Athlete of the Year,” “Best Sportswoman of the World” by EPE News Agency of Spain, one of BBC’s “Sports Personalities of the Year,” and was nominated for the Sport’s Illustrated’s “Sportsman of the Year Award.”

Both sisters have won doubles championships. And both are considered icons — in and out of the courts. They have established their own fashion houses. And their television reality show, with the title “Venus and Serena For Real,” has won high ratings and good reviews.

Credit for the making of the two women champions goes to their father, Richard Williams. According to Ebony Magazine, a magazine for and about Black people in America, for nearly 15 years, an unknown father stood on a crumbling tennis court in Compton, Calif., and told his little daughter Venus that she was going to be one of the best tennis players in the world.

This was a bold prediction, says the article, “For the father was a neighborhood tennis coach and he knew that the odds of this happening were astronomical. After all, no black person had dominated the game of tennis since Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon in 1975, and no Black woman had won a major tournament since Althea Gibson won the US championships and Wimbledon in 1957 and 1958.”

Father Richard’s prediction came true. To the consternation of the tennis establishment and the delight of tennis fans, young Venus and her younger sister, Serena, climbed to the top of professional tennis. The journey was capped off in 1999 by Serena’s US Open win, in which she beat No. 1-seeded Martina Hingis in straight sets.

Now Venus and Serena are “the darlings of tennis,” ranked high on the tennis world map, and the Williams family — Richard, his wife Oracene, and his daughters — is the No. 1 family in tennis, according to Tennis magazine.

Says the Ebony writer: “During their meteoric rise, Venus and Serena have quieted detractors who panned their father’s style and language. They said Richard Williams was arrogant, that he served from the mouth and that he hurt his daughters’ chances, not only by criticizing the racism and the stuffiness of the people who run tennis, but criticizing the game itself. “Education is power, not chasing around some tennis ball,” Richard always told them.

From his home in Florida, Richard, 65, said that from day one, people attempted to tell him a “better” way to raise his daughters to be champions. He stuck to what he believed in, and managed to raise his daughters not only to be great tennis players, but also intelligent, mentally strong young women.

Richard said his family and the African-American community helped him cope during the toughest times. “If I didn’t have my wife and my kids by my side, I would have never been able to do anything. Then I had Black people — my people — who were so high on what we were doing. Every time I was criticized by those people who thought I was doing things the wrong way, there were Blacks who told me I was doing it the right way.”

But it wasn’t easy, he said. He recalled the time Venus competed in a tennis tournament in the Southern California area. She was not a household name, and all the other players knew was that she was Black and poor. “I overheard some people say we shouldn’t even be there. They are from Compton (a ghetto) they said. ‘What are they doing here. They can’t play.’ People would pick at us all the time. They should be glad that I am a good man because if I wasn’t a good man, I would have picked up a stick and knocked the hell out of somebody. There comes a time when you get tired of people picking on you.”

The criticism received by the family, who are of the Jehovah’s Witness Church, brought them closer together. “Over a period of time, we gained so much confidence in what we were trying to do. . . The only thing that would matter in the end was what we thought. We didn’t care what people thought. The only thing that would matter in the end was what we thought. And it worked out beautifully.”

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