We’ve seen it so often: that singular expression, a roar of determination, such ferocity — raw, almost fierce.
Few other athletes drink more of that most empowering of sports tonics — will power. For, as Sue Mott told us, Serena Williams’ “role model was less Chris Evert than Thor.”
Federer may be tennis’ prevailing icon, but Serena is the fiercest competitor in tennis and maybe even in all of sports. As one fan recently noted, “That girl has exactly the kind of chi and chutzpah it takes to win.”
So from what deep wells of intention does Serena draw from when she unleashes her often unstoppable fighting spirit?
After reading her new autobiography Serena Williams: On the Line, you would certainly think race and heritage has more than a tad to do with it. In ‘04, Williams set off on a pilgrimage of discovery to Ghana and Senegal. There she journeyed to outback villages with their poignant mix of poverty and generosity — endearing children and wide-eyed teen moms — and then made her way to those harrowing coastal castles which shipped out generations of slaves to servitude or death.
There, she noted, is a “‘point of no return’ doorway leading out to the water on Goree Island, and it’s such a creepy, eerie sight, to look out through the opening and see nothing but ocean!…[And] I walked through these big, cavernous rooms, and I could feel all of this trapped power, all of this short-circuited energy, all of these lives cut down by oppression. It was awful. There was no light, no ventilation. Incredibly, you could smell the stench of excrement.”
“Literally, only the strong survived. If you didn’t die in the castles, you probably died on the slave ships, due to dysentery or some other disease. The slave-traders didn’t want weak slaves.”
“The irony of the struggle was huge… to survive all of that…for what? To be beaten into the ground on some other continent. To be further stripped of your dignity, your individuality, your freedom.”
“I came away thinking I was part of the strongest race in human history… The very next time I held a racket … I imagined myself back in one of those dark, dank rooms of the slave castles…I drew a line that ran from Ghana to Michigan to California to Florida to Australia…No, I thought, we will not be denied. I can do anything.”
And so one of Serena’s entries in her match journal reads: “U stand on the shoulders of your parents and grandparents…Think of all they went through for U. Don’t let any girl take away your win, your destiny…This is opportunity. Yours. This is your time. At last, this is your dream. Make it happen.”
•••••
For Serena’s dad, Richard, the key part of this lineage was his mom, Julia May, who’s said to have been a Louisiana cotton sharecropper. “My mom,” Richard recalls, “didn’t believe in turning around or giving in. She wouldn’t let all the evils in hell stop her. She was a winner, a kick-ass person. She reminds me of Serena. The evil forces of hell were afraid to come her way.”
But for Serena, early childhood at 1117 East Stockton Street in Compton, California was a little bit of heaven, a near idyllic romp: cartwheels ‘n cuddlin’, teasing and tumbling. Five girls, two bunk beds, one closet, a single goal: Cosby’s Huxtable family and Sanford and Son meet Cheaper by the Dozen and the von Trapp’s Sound of Music clan: hugs ‘n tears, rollicking happiness. Sure, in hardscrabble Compton there were drugs, racial tensions, gang violence and “kids who didn’t have a lot would sometimes take what wasn’t theirs, like it was their due.” But life at home, while cramped ‘n cozy, was a free-form mix of naughty mischief and jolly love, trust and tennis. Here, Serena recalled, “There was only time for us, for tennis.”
Sure, the imposing parenting style of Papa Richard was hardly the ghetto’s answer to Dr. Spock. But, ultimately the kids “held sway.” Yes, Serena was a “goofy ugly duckling,” the runt of the litter. But (what a shock) she knew how to work it, manipulating her compliant, eager to please, older sisters and workin’ ‘Daddy’ like a charm. In seven pages of text on her childhood, we are told of her five “P’s”: pampered, princess, pet, pest, prima donna. So, Serena reported, if she lost at cards,”[I] would kick and fuss until the judge made me the winner. It didn’t matter if Venus or Lyn deserved to win.” Quite the little wild child, Serera’s childhood was crowded with mini-outrages as she busted her sisters’ piggy banks, smashed to smithereens a box of oranges, whacked her dad with a tennis ball and cheated her sister Venus on court. “Some of the stunts I pulled were off the charts,” she confessed. “But cute cuts you a lot of slack, I quickly learned, and it buys you a batch of forgiveness.”
•••••
Tennis lore tells of many fabulous families, but the Williams — who tell a tale apart — are our greatest urban legend. So savvy Father Richard sees Virgina Ruzici win $48,000 one Sunday on TV and, bingo, he turns to his wife, Oracene, and announces, “We need to make two more kids and make them into tennis superstars.”
Oracene replies, “I don’t want to do that.” Richard counters, “You don’t have a choice.” So, not that long after, he began to use self-improvement techniques, whims and way-outside-of-the box strategies to implement one of the most intentional, mind-boggling, follow-the-dots, no-nonsense “master plans” in sports annals. A complete neophyte, he learned from books, videos, TV and nearby pros. Daring, dedicated, fearless, he collected dozens of threadbare (yet treasured) balls in a shopping cart and crowded his clan into a yellow van. Folks soon got the picture: an on-going pilgrimage of a girl gang of six females with a proud yet pliable patriarch at the helm descending on the Lynwood and East Compton public parks. Serena explained that although there was no drug paraphernalia around, “the courts themselves were in sorry shape. There was broken glass, everywhere and there. Cracks in the cement. Weeds poking through. Soda cans, beer bottles, fast-food wrappers.” And when those oft-heard gunshots rang out, “Daddy used to say, ‘never mind the noise Meeka [Serena’s nickname], just play.’”
Richard was about to brazenly re-shape an old game. After all, Serena explained, “If your parents didn’t play, there was no reason for you to play…There’s this notion that if … it wasn’t in your blood, you had no real claim … There’s a sense of entitlement …You have to be born to it…You have to play it, at a high level, before you can teach it…that sense of entitlement probably kept a whole group of…kids from taking up the game…[But my dad] taught himself …His idea was to kind of make it up as we went along.”
So, despite the long hours, Richard made it fun. He was inventive and smart. He emphasized technique, not wins. Self-belief, the mind and the serve were key, so he had his girls toss a football everyday to master the throwing motion. Genius decisions flowed. The girls would not enter the same tournament. They withdrew from the junior tournament circuit, were given ample independence and handled their own money. Sure dismiss the guy as a svengali, but Richard bathed them in a torrent of affirmations: a constant mantra. Aim high, nothing is out of reach, have the mind of a champion, it’s your destiny to reach the very top. Plus, Richard’s (“what has this guy been smoking?”) predictions — that his unproven kids would revolutionize the game, become No. 1 and No. 2 and Serena would eventually be the better of the two — proved to be spot on.
Of course, Serena had a huge advantage over everybody in tennis history — Venus. A protector, life-long comforter and advisor, as a school kid Venus gave Serena her spending money to buy fried chicken, while she would settle for a humble homemade peanut butter sandwich. Never mind that Serena would cheat her in practice matches or blame wrong-doings on her, when Venus crushed her sister in their first tournament final she knew Serena was crestfallen so she told her, “You know what…I’ve always liked silver better than gold. You want to trade [trophies]?” Later, when Serena was floundering as an eighth grade couch potato, Venus scolded her, “you’re wasting your life,” turn off the Golden Girls and start getting a life. And remember, according to Serena, “when Venus is on her game, no one can touch her. Well…except me.” So Serena had the advantage of having a fabulous practice and doubles partner and a comfy roommate and housemate while trying to master an often cruel, lonely trade.
Still, having “so beautiful, so tall, so graceful, so perfect” Venus as your older sis was a double-edged sword: the fierce swan vs. the ugly duckling. Serena explained that it was not so much that Venus had beaten her in two Slam finals, “It’s like I had all this experience — Venus’ experience. Without V, it would have taken me longer to get where I wanted to be. And then, once I started having some success…I still looked to Venus. If she won a Grand Slam, it fired me up…If she went out early to practice, I went out early.
I don’t know where I’d get that drive, were it not for Venus…[But often] I was the little sister, clipping at Venus’s heels. And so you better believe it, Venus’s success was a powerful motivator — certainly as powerful as anything.”
Like the day when finally Venus became No. 1. Serena recalled it “was huge for Venus and the family…But underneath the sheer bigness of the moment was some more of that silent fuel that’s kept me going throughout my career. I’d always wanted what Venus had.”
But for all the many externals that fired up Serena’s will — African roots, family ancestry, immediate family support, her dad, her mom and sister — her drive ultimately came from within. This was the girl who emerged out of a “place of believing I was untouchable, unstoppable” who as a child had to win at cards; who smacked her dad with a ball; who as a win at all costs seven-year-old told a Domino’s Pizza League foe that she was ahead 5-2. Wrong: Serena was actually behind 5-2.
The woman who once dubbed herself as “Rebel X” explained, “You need a wild streak…a kind of irrational killer instinct. You need to put it out there that you’re reckless and unpredictable — not just so your opponents take note, but that you notice too. You’ve got to convince yourself that you’re capable of anything that you will not be denied… You’ve got to embrace the wild, rash abandon that…transforms you in the heat of a cutthroat moment…You’ve got to get to that weird place where you can’t recognize your own behavior.”
Of course, many a traditionalist also didn’t know how to deal with Serena’s behavior or her wild abandon. According to writer Devon Friedman, “The Williams didn’t try to change the country club set: they simply bypassed them…They’re intimidating the way 13-year-old girls are to 13-year-old boys — they’re taller and better looking, and you get the idea that they could beat you up if they weren’t so disinterested in your existence.” But Serena actually has wide-ranging interests that she consciously links to her will for victory. For instance, when it comes to men she says “I wasn’t usually drawn to cute guys. I was drawn to power.” And as for fashion, the Empress of the Bling Dynasty, says, “I like to look my best on court…It goes to self-esteem, and…ignites an all-important spark for some of that silent fuel I like to talk about…I felt that when there was an edge on how I looked, there was an edge to my game.”
Not surprisingly, the celeb who once informed us “I’m not [just] a star, I’m a superstar” also didn’t hesitate to let us know that when’s she’s playing well, she’s the best in the world. “It’s not even a belief. It’s more of a fact.”
Of course, Serena often suffers from walkabouts — little and large — where she may gain weight or lose her will. So she gets whipped by 14-year-old Madison Keys in World TeamTennis, is drawn away by seemingly frivolous “bright light” distractions, admits she gets bored at smaller events and withdraws from more tournaments than anyone else since Boris Becker. Of course, Serena-watchers hardly hesitated to harp. Once when unwanted pounds appeared, a cruel voice suggested that they should name the food court at the U.S. Open after her. When in ‘04 she was hobbled by a knee injury, wavering fervor and severe depression, she promptly sank out of the top ten. Critics wondered whether she was squandering her (“why isn’t she the best of all time”) talents and questioned her very professionalism. No one was more cutting than Linda Robertson who wondered whether Serena (and Venus) would “end up just like Paris Hilton, coasting on the vapors of fame. Someday the patrons behind the velvet rope will see a Williams sidling through the club’s front door at 2:00 a.m. and murmur, ‘Didn’t she used to be somebody? A tennis star? Yeah, that’s what she was.”
But no one since Jimmy Connors has used perceived slights, adversity and foes (real or imagined) to so intensely fire themselves up.
A natural contrarian, Serena wrote in her match journal: “Tell me ‘No’ and I’ll show u I can! Tell me ‘No’ because I can! Tell me ‘No’ … Just tell me I can’t win. Just tell me it’s out of reach. Come on, I’ll prove U wrong! Just tell me ‘No’ and watch what happens.”
So at big tournaments, or when she feels she, her sister, her race or her family have suffered an injustice — take cover. Anger fuels this girl.
•••••
Like so many others, Serena adored Indian Wells. It was her fave. Close to home and held at a promising time of the year, it had a sweet setting, respectful fans and more than anything it drew her family together. But then, in a flash, it happened: “The match from hell,” her ‘01 Pacific Life Open final against Kim Clijsters. As most recall, after Venus withdrew from her semi against Serena at the last minute, fans took out their anger on her. Serena recalls that there had just been a dust up in a tabloid when a Williams cousin made an unsubstantiated claim that father Richard fixed the results of his kids matches. Serena then details her version of the debacle (which, with the Seles stabbing and Arthur Ashe’s announcement that he had AIDS, has been considered among the worst moments in tennis history).
Serena contended that Venus was truly hurt, that she followed tour protocol by reporting to the WTA Trainer that she could not play, but she could not get anyone to take her seriously and the trainer, the WTA and tournament officials stalled in making any announcement. In the locker room just before the match, Serena said Venus told her,”[I] don’t know why they’re not making some kind of announcement. I told them I couldn’t play two hours ago.”
Then when she walked on court “people started booing. They were loud, mean, aggressive … pissed … I looked up and all I could see was a sea of rich people — mostly older, mostly white — booing lustily, like some kind of genteel lynch mob … Like these people were gonna come looking for me after the match… Everything I did, they booed. It was freaky. And cruel…It’s tough to ignore 14,000 screaming people…I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want to give these people the satisfaction…I could still hear shouts of Nigger… and I even heard one angry voice telling us to go back to Compton.”
Serena conceded that not only were TV and sponsors all set for the big match, but she too would be upset if she had a ticket and had gone through the hassle of showing up. Still, she asked “how can you justify treating a child so badly?”
Serena asserted there was a racial component. If Chris Evert had to withdraw from a semi against her sister Jeanne, “nobody would have booed Jeanne the next day. Nobody would have suggested that the sisters were conspiring … Nobody would have booed some blonde, blue-eyed girl.”
Serena said that you can contend race wasn’t involved, but she wouldn’t buy it “because I was the target. Because you don’t know what it’s like to have all of this entitled vitriol raining down on you. These privileged, entitled people were up in my face … because they were denied their entertainment the day before.”
Serena kept thinking of racial pioneers like Althea Gibson and Zina Garrison. She prayed to be able to persevere and thought of the Biblical passage from Ephesians that implores one to “take up the large shield of faith with which you will be able to quench the fiery darts and burning missiles of the wicked.”
Serena fought back her tears and played through her shock to score a brave 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 win. She concedes that towards the end of the match, fans began to feel bad about how they treated her and “the mood of the stadium turned a little bit.” Still she feels she was made out to be a scapegoat and the WTA or tournament officials, no matter how shocked they may have been, could have stepped forward to explain the confusing circumstances and to calm the vein-popping crowd. After all, we were “just a couple kids, trying to do our best.”
Since then Serena and Venus have dismissed suggestions of reconciliation, of turning the other cheek, of reaching out and loving thy enemy like Mandela modeled in South Africa. Instead, they see their ongoing boycott of Indian Wells as doing something right, as taking a stand as a small part of “the ongoing fight for equality … No, I won’t go back … [and] give these people validation. I will not stand down. It’s a point of pride” and setting a positive example “because somewhere some little girl might be watching.”
Ultimately, Serena took comfort in Martin Luther King’s stance that “However difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
•••••
Indian Wells was not the only time when Serena used an in-your-face slight to fire herself up. In’02 NFL star linebacker Lavar Arrington (who in the book she simply refers to as so-and-so) dumped her after a love affair. A shocked Serena sprung into action. Never before has a scorned lover used being dumped as such a motivating force to gain sports dominance. “This guy tore my heart in half,” Serena explained. “Then he ripped those pieces and stepped on them and backed his car up over them. And the worst part was he left me thinking it was me. He left me thinking I was ugly…[So] I decided tennis would be my salvation…I wanted So-and So to regret how he treated me. I wanted him to see me everywhere.” She was “determined to stay in this guy’s face, to be a constant reminder of what we had, to rise above his shabby treatment…it was all about lifting myself from the dirt he left me lying in.”
Serena admitted she was “playing for the wrong reasons.” Still, she ran off an astounding “career-stamping” streak, winning four slams in a row — the ‘02 French, Wimbledon and U.S. titles and the ‘03 Aussie. Serena concedes that the winning streak was a big payback: revenge the motive. It was all about picking ourselves up, “our will, our drive, our purpose.”
But winning streaks eventually waver and Serena’s career soon began to free-fall. Inexplicably, her beloved older sister Yetunde was killed — apparently an innocent victim of a late-night Compton drug gunfight. Crushed and distraught, Serena confided, “There were no words of comfort, no pieces of scripture…that could swallow up the hurt.” The loss would set her adrift into a fog.
Then in ‘03, when out dancing in high heels, she injured her knee and had to have hobbling surgery. She gained weight, but not insight. She not only felt pressure to perform for Nike, she was not able to face her grief, admit her foibles or de-construct her pain. At the ‘04 U.S. Open she infamously endured a series of maddening calls against Jennifer Capriatti, including what Nick Bollettieri claimed was “the most abominably unfair call in the history of tennis.” The error led to the introduction of electronic line-judging, but did little for Serena’s judgement. The mightiest mountain of confidence in the game was crumbling before us as she fell in a tearful mess in the third round of the ‘06 Aussie Open and her ranking tumbled to No. 139. Tennis was now a (“which way to the coal mine”) job, not a passion. “My drive, my sense of mission and purpose, my desire to be the best…[all] had fallen away without me fully realizing it, and it wasn’t clear if I’d ever get them back,” a confused Serena confided. “Every competitive bone in my body was broken — only I didn’t have the self-awareness or strength of character to see that anything was wrong.” Here was a lost and gloomy soul stuck in a dreary funk who was “deeply and utterly depressed.”
Weary and consumed by “an aching sadness,” she was “disinterested in the world around — and in tennis above all.”
Having trouble even walking and desperate to heal, she retreated and became a hermit who rarely left her apartment. Resentful of tennis, for months she didn’t pick up a racket. For weeks she didn’t speak to her mother or to Venus — such a dark period. The family finally came to L.A. for an intervention and Serena began daily therapy sessions.
At last Serena admitted “[I] wasn’t honest with myself about how I was feeling, what I was thinking. In truth, I’d never been honest with myself about stuff like this — and this right here was the root of my troubles.”
So Serena realized that “[I] couldn’t even make myself happy, so of course there was no way I could make anyone else happy.” Her job was not about the externals: pleasing her sponsors, being No. 1 or the emblem of her family. Her job was to face her own demons and rise above.
“And then,” Serena recalls, “a weird and wonderful thing happened…[a switch] finally flipped in a positive direction. It flipped to where I chose tennis. This was a first for me — and a real breakthrough … When I was a kid, I’d never made an active or conscious choice where tennis was concerned. It was always like tennis chose me…[It was] a given. I came to it by default, and it took reaching for it here when I was down and desperate and miserable, for me to fully embrace the game.
I chose tennis at last…It might seem like a small shift…but it was all the difference in the world…It signaled that my game was there for me whenever I was ready for it, on my terms…I realized that I wanted to do what I do best…I really wanted to play. I just needed to recover…[So now] all I can do is reach for what I know and know that in the reaching I might find my true self.”
And so, alas thank God, we had our true Serena back: proud, prowling, intense. The not exactly modest wondergal who — in a single affirmation — could put the game, the girl and the cosmos all in their exquisite place.
“UR Queen,” she wrote. “U have been waiting for this moment. This moment has been waiting for U. For billions of years, this energy has been building up in you for this moment, this tournament. It all happens now!!!! Release and go…Relax & focus. U don’t have to be perfect. Just be strong, and brave.”
The Confessions of Serena Williams
All of us have plenty of skeletons deep in our closet. But recently, Serena opened up and confided a few of her deep (or not-so-deep) dark secrets.
1: There was a “dark period” in her mid-career when she was virtually an apartment-bound hermit who didn’t even speak to her sister, mother or dad.
2: Serena admitted that she had not been honest about her feelings and that was the root of her emotional troubles.
3: During this period, she was having daily therapy sessions (which, in part, focused on her not always having to please others) – an intervention that proved successful.
4: The most successful part of her career came when she was “a woman scorned.” Translation: she was beside herself when the NFL’s Lavar Arrington dumped her and she went on to win four Slams in a row just to spite him and prove what a good thing he was missing.
5: The major physical setback of her career, a knee injury that required surgery was not the result of a mishap in practice as she always claimed. Rather it came when she was dancing in high heels at a club.
6: Oh-so-sadly, Serena had quarreled with her beloved sister, Yetunde, the day before she was murdered.
7: When her opponent Anne asked her what the score was in their Dominos Pizza Junior League match, seven-year-old Serena said Anne was losing 5-2, when she was really winning 5-2.
8: As a cute kid and the baby of her clan, she admits she suffered from the five P’s: pampered, princess, pet, pest, and prima donna.
9: When Serena was young, she admitted she was more than mischievous: smashing her sisters’ piggy banks, smashing a crateful of oranges at a practice session, bashing her dad with a ball, and stealing her sister’s garlic bread from “Hungry Howie’s” restaurant in Florida.
10: When a local paper published the first-ever story on the Williamses, Serena tagged along as her dad went throughout the neighborhood collecting papers from neighbor’s lawns, while 13-year-old Yetunde unsuccessfully tried to drive the family van and ultimately creamed many a vehicle.
11: As a kid Serena was so anxious to play tournament tennis like Venus, that she secretly applied to enter a tournament on her own behind her father’s back.
12: When eight-year-old Serena became a couch potato, preoccupied with The Golden Girls on TV Venus confronted her, saying “You’re wasting your life,” get off your butt.
13: Serena became outraged by an article in the New York Times by Selena Roberts in the mid-’90s that claimed Serena didn’t stand much of a chance, that families only produce one star. It became a huge motivating factor.
14: Serena laughingly admitted that she was jealous that the gorgeous Wimbledon trophy, the Venus Rosewater Dish, is named after her sister.
15: Michelle Obama reminds her of herself.
16: Serena’s secret ethos is “Relax & focus. U don’t have to be perfect. Just be strong and brave.”
