Serena Williams is targeted by journalists. She’s 16 years old. She has just won a match at the 1998 US Open. She and her sister Venus –a year older– are the contenders for the tennis throne. “Blackie & Blackie”, they call them, a derogatory catchphrase towards an Afro-descendant. The Williamses, raised in the ghetto of Compton, California, delve into “the white sport.” At the press conference, a journalist points out to Serena that the origin of the word “ghetto” actually derives from Eastern Europe, not from the black community in the United States, as she had slipped. The discussion grows. And the journalist takes out a dictionary and reads the etymology of the word “ghetto.” Serena takes a few seconds, flashes a smile, and dismissively replies: “It’s your information, I have mine.”
The following year, in 1999, Serena will win her first US Open. She is, with 73 singles titles within four different decades on the women’s circuit (WTA), the most successful Grand Slam tennis player in the professional era that began in 1968, men included. She adds 23 – one of the record of the Australian Margaret Court –, the last one of her the 2017 Australian Open, when she won it two months pregnant with her daughter Olympia. This Monday she will debut against the Montenegrin Danka Kovinić in the first round of the US Open 2022, her last tournament. Because she announced that, at 40 years old, her “evolution” – not retirement – is far from tennis. With Muhammad Ali, Serena Williams is perhaps the greatest black athlete of all time. Not only to transform the game, now more powerful, but to exceed it.
Leave tennis, detailed in an essay published in the magazine VogueBecause she wants to be a mother again. Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I do not think it’s fair. If I were a man, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be playing and winning while my wife does the physical work of expanding our family. I definitely don’t want to get pregnant as a tennis player again.” Serena almost died giving birth to Olympia. She cesarean section, thromboembolism, hematoma, more than six weeks of rest. She shed light: she exposed that black women in the United States are three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth. When she returned to tennis, with clots, she wore a stretchy, one-piece black suit. she called him Black Panther. “He always wanted to be a superhero,” she quipped. They wanted to ban it. And Serena delivered a jiu-jitsu coup: she pushed for regulatory changes, such as dress code and extended postpartum leave, that she had to agree to by the WTA.
In 2001, at 19, three years after that journalist explained to her what a ghetto is with a dictionary, Serena won Indian Wells in California. Before the final there had been an unfounded rumor: that “the Williams family” had fixed a match. Boos. Richard Williams, her father, received racist insults. Serena heard them. She cried on the way home with the trophy in her hands. Indian Wells, wrote SL Price in Sport Illustrated, “became the open wound of the WTA Tour, revealing tensions in a sport that had heralded itself as a pioneer in racial and sexual equality.” Serena did not play Indian Wells again until 2015. Before she corrected the essay with which she would announce the return three times. She shared it with her father and her sisters. She had seen a movie about Nelson Mandela. “I was raised to forgive people,” accepted Serena, a Jehovah’s Witness like Richard. “And I felt like I wasn’t doing what I was taught.” In 2006 she had traveled to Africa for the first time: she had visited the dungeons of the slaves in Ghana. Returning to Indian Wells was a political action in the face of white police brutality against black citizens. «She had gone to Indian Wells as a teenager, and it was difficult. She thought she shouldn’t have to deal with those things,” he said. Fast forward to 2015 and we still have young Black men murdered. Someone had to do something. And I thought there was something bigger than me and tennis. I needed to go back and speak out against racism.” She enrolled in a civil rights history class in the United States: “I was disappointed in how little I knew compared to how much I thought I knew.” And in a talk with students she said she was intimidated by the example of black activists in the 1960s, like the Black Panthers. Black Panther.
If Serena was criticized for colorful clothes, she added glitter and pearls (she even played in a ballerina tutu). If she questioned the braids in her hair, she turned up the extravagance of the look. If he heard that his body was “too masculine”, he worked his leg muscles even more. One coach went so far as to say that he didn’t want the players to look like Serena, that her butt was big and that she had the “wrong” body. “The Williams brothers,” said Shamil Tarpischev, president of the Russian Federation, in 2014.
«Serena’s career – highlighted the writer Caira Conner in The Atlantic– feels different not just because of what she’s accomplished, but what she’s endured: comments about her body, her race, her attitude, her anger, her wardrobe, her femininity.” Fashion designer, businesswoman, TV presenter and actress, Serena is one of the two women among the 50 richest athletes in the world according to Forbes. 78% of its investments cover companies founded by women and blacks. She returned to Africa from time to time: he financed the construction of two schools in Kenya. But the “core” of it, she said, is tennis.
Serena always competed as if she denied the existence of defeat. Win or win. Mariana Díaz Oliva is one of the six Argentines who faced the youngest of the Williams, in the second round of Roland Garros 1999. She won 6-3 and Serena 6-4. «When we started to rally, he threw very strong balls, he didn’t let me get into a rhythm, he wanted to intimidate me. Afterwards, the game was even. At one point we ended up at the net and I win a point and shout it out. And he looks at me with a face of hatred, like the boxer who is going to kill you. Later, when changing sides, I trembled,” recalls Díaz Oliva, a commentator on ESPN, and points out: “Women’s tennis changed, it stopped being just showy, it took it up a notch: no one served that hard, no one came to the race and he threw so fast, no one returned the ball with such power. Today, after Serena, almost all tennis players are athletes. And she always fought for the rights of women, for economic equality and exposure ».
Richard, her father, had written a 78-page book for “champion daughters.” He hid birth control pills from Oracene. He decided that his daughters should grow up in Compton, because “champions come out of the ghetto.” And he paid gang members to intimidate them in training, to make them “badder” before entering the circuit. It’s the story of the movie King Richard (2021), played by Will Smith. But Serena moved to Haines City, Florida at age nine to attend a tennis academy. She hardened her character, specifically when her mother Oracene told her that white people would never fully accept her. “You’re racist!” Serena reproached him. “I just want you to be aware,” her mother returned. Richard had been a victim of the Ku Klux Klan: he limps because as a child he was stabbed with an ice pick.
Serena inspired thousands. Coco Gauff – 18 years old, No. 12 in the ranking, finalist of the last Roland Garros – said that he plays because he saw “someone like me who dominated tennis”. “Being a predominantly white sport, it helped a lot. He made me believe,” he added. Kendrick Lamar, the world’s greatest rapper, was born in the Compton ghetto where Yetunde Price, the Williams’ older sister, was shot to death in 2003. Kendrick chose Serena as his sportswoman. “She – she said – she has always been true to herself and to her place of origin. She represented her community and her fight. The energy that she has of hers to overcome the obstacles that she’s had in her personal life and see through her dreams and still get to where she wanted to be, that’s what separates Serena from everyone else. the rest “. In The Heart Part 5released in 2022, Kendrick Lamar starts off: “As I get older/I realize life is a perspective/And my perspective may differ from yours.”
