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http://sport.guardian.co.uk/tennis/osm/sto...2070697,00.htmlSerena holds court (part two)
Read part one of this article here
Gaby Wood
Sunday May 6, 2007
Observer Sport Monthly
Isha Price's first memory of her little sister Serena is seeing her coming home from the hospital after she was born and wishing she was a boy. 'But we got something that was even more precious,' she says now. 'We were able to form a fantastic sisterhood, that we still have.' The five girls - Yetunde, Isha, Lyndrea, Venus and Serena - have always been extremely close, so close that they bristle when they are referred to as 'half ...#8209;sisters'. There's nothing 'half' about the way they relate to each other, Isha explains.
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As the youngest, Serena was always the most mischievous, the most fearless, the most princess-like. She also modelled herself very precisely on Venus. 'It's pretty funny when you think about it in retrospect,' Isha says, laughing. 'If we went out for dinner as a family, we used to try to have Serena order her food first, because otherwise she was gonna get exactly what Venus got. But she would order first, and if it wasn't what V had, then she'd change it. It was ridiculous.'
She remembers the moment when that stopped. It was 1996; they were all in Paris for the French Open and both Venus and Serena were competing. 'I'll never forget this. She had read this book. Actually, Venus had read the book first. We were sitting down at this Chinese restaurant, and Venus was telling us about this book, it was a book of personality tests, like if you're introvert you use the letter I, if you're an extrovert you're an E. We were talking about what our choices were. Serena did the little test herself, and her letters were exactly like Venus's - now this had been going on for so long it wasn't even on purpose. And we were like: you are so wrong! You are so not an introvert, you're an extrovert! And she was like, "No, I don't really like to talk to people." But when she really did some self-analysis, she started to figure, "You know what? I might not be just like Venus ..." '
Serena remembers the moment when she became herself as being slightly later - at the age of 18 or 19. But the effect was the same: 'I realised that I liked different things. And it was OK: I thought, "We're different people. I don't have to do everything Venus does." I was able to move on after that.'
The two players have a motto when it comes to tennis: 'If you can't do it for you, do it for me. And die on the court!' So when Serena did it for Yetunde, who died from a shot to the head from a gang member when she was in a car with another one ('a classic case,' Serena says now with some understatement, 'of being in the wrong place at the wrong time'), she was stretching their pact to include all the sisters. After a protracted series of trials, including a mistrial and a hung jury, Yetunde's killer was convicted last year. Late in our interview, Serena reveals that on the night of Yetunde's death, she was the only person who could be contacted. 'I got a call at like three in the morning ... So now I always have my phone on and if someone calls me late I get really scared. Or if a friend's coming over, I'm always thinking something bad's gonna happen.' Contrary to what her name suggests, she says, she is 'so not calm. I'm the most panicked person in the world. It's weird. I guess I have to get over it.'
Isha, now the eldest of the remaining siblings, says they each carry a different burden in relation to their sister's death. 'I'm not sure it ever goes away - there's a part of me in the pit of my stomach that always falls, whenever something reminds me of her. It's difficult for me to speculate how it's affected Serena long term. Does she still grieve? Absolutely. We all do. Has it been a positive influence in some way? You know, I think the dedication of the match to her is demonstrative of the fact that Serena's trying to use it as an incentive to propel her forward.'
In April 2006, Serena attended the sentencing of her sister's killer, Robert Edward Maxfield, who was jailed for 15 years. She stood before the judge and said the murder was 'unfair to our family. Our family has always been positive and we always try to help people.' What did she mean about the help? I ask her.
'I was just saying that we've always tried to be a positive role model for people that come from a ghetto,' she explains. 'You can make something out of your life. You can start at zero and come out and have something. It's not about having money, it's about having pride and about upping your community. You see so many inspirational black people, but who do these people look up to? The rappers? Who, granted, are great people, I don't have anything against rappers, but some of the role models that African-Americans have aren't the best role models.'
'Yetunde, I did this for you': that, it seems, was the happily ever after line, the end of the ghetto Cinderella story. It isn't the end, of course - Serena will go on, and has already - but everything after that point surely constitutes a sequel. Because the Australian Open triumph alone looks so unassailable, with Serena as the glorious avenger of her sister's death, doing with that win what she was said to have done with her life: translate the violence of the streets of Compton into pure, magnificent talent. Myth or truth, her cultural significance should not be underestimated.
Her comeback, Isha says, sends a message 'for African-American women, for African-American people, for women, of any colour. I think that for too long we have been disjointed, and if everybody were able to realise the power that we have, we could really cause some incredible change in society as a whole - but we still have a long way to go. In America - the country that is supposed to be the land of the free - I think it speaks really loudly to the type of child that my mother raised - she's been recognised by some extraordinary cultural icons, from Oprah Winfrey to Sidney Poitier. I think they recognise her efforts in just trying to be a good human being - despite culture, despite race, despite gender.'
Arnold Rampersad is the biographer of Jackie Robinson, the baseball star who broke the sport's colour bar, and the writer Ralph Ellison. Professor of English Literature at Stanford University and co-author of Arthur Ashe's poignant memoir, Days of Grace, Rampersad believes that the Williams sisters' broader cultural impact is less felt than it might have been had they been less self-sufficient. They might have cared more about endearing themselves to the mainstream, he suggests, as Tiger Woods has done.
'As black Americans trying to reach out to white Americans, they had to show that they wanted to be loved, whereas white players could just go ahead and they would automatically be loved. It is a big burden. But they made their bed, as it were. They decided they would rather either be true to themselves, or live out a kind of racial politics quietly. They've never made racial politics an advertised thing, but they advertise it to me, certainly, in their body language. I once saw Venus - maybe she was with Serena - go up to a group of kids after a match. The kids were begging for autographs and clearly the girls were in a hurry, but they gave autographs only to the black kids. I thought that was incredible.'
He remembers an incident, decades ago, when Arthur Ashe saw his daughter in the stands, playing with a white doll. 'Arthur rushed to quietly take the doll from his daughter because people would be upset that she was playing with a white doll. I thought that absolutely ridiculous, but you can see in Ashe's case a hypersensitivity to the feelings of an audience - black or white - on the subject of race in particular. He wanted to please whites, and he wanted to please blacks. I don't know if the Williams sisters want to please anyone at all. In some respects, they're like black jazz musicians, like Miles Davis, who turned his back on the audience.'
Race has inevitably been an issue. Early on, Richard Williams accused a white player of bumping into Venus on purpose in a racially motivated attack when they changed ends during a match. In 2001, when Serena played Kim Clijsters in the final at Indian Wells, she was booed by the entire crowd. This, too, has gone down in history as a racist incident, since neither of the Williams sisters has ever played there again in protest. While it's pointless to rule out a racial element to the scene in Indian Wells (Serena says she looked up to see all white faces and ended the match in tears), the ostensible reason for the crowd's displeasure was that Venus had pulled out of the semi-final against Serena only minutes before it was due to begin. Venus claimed injury, Serena walked through to the final and the audience, who felt cheated out of a match, assumed it was a fix.
She says she 'can't imagine' what earlier African-American players had to go through - Arthur Ashe in the Sixties and Seventies, or Zina Garrison in the Eighties, 'and I don't even want to think about Althea Gibson, because she was in the Fifties'. Serena adds: 'When I first came on tour there was some trouble, but not really. I've been really blessed to not have too much, at least in my face. I mean, I don't know what goes on behind closed doors. We're a young country - slavery's been over 130 years, and I would be naive to think that in just so short a time, things can do a 360.' Her mixed-doubles partner James Blake, whose father is African-American and who played tennis in Harlem as a child, tells me admiringly that Serena 'has taken race - as Arthur Ashe called it, a burden - and not let it be a hurdle in any way'.
Still, just over a month ago she had a racist heckler in the stands in Miami. 'Hit it into the net, like any negro would,' he was heard to say, before being escorted out. It took Serena a while to realise what he was shouting. She laughs a little when she tells the story. 'In the beginning, he was saying, "foot fault, foot fault", and I thought he was helping me out. I'm trying to make sure I didn't foot fault. Talk about seeing the glass as half-full! I took the positive, I was like, "OK, thank you! I'm gonna move back." Then when he said the negro thing ... three games later it clicked. But,' she concludes cheerily, 'he ended up helping me!' And what better revenge could there be than that?
Though Serena has said in the past that she feels she is 'a black player 100 per cent', she now says she thankfully does not have cause to think about the subject very often. 'Sometimes I'll be like, "Yeah, I'm black, whassup?" But I think it's incredible that I don't have to think about it. We've come such a long way.' She does believe, though, that some of her phenomenal mental strength derives from her long-term heritage. 'I think it's innate,' she reflects, 'it comes from my history, as an African-American, and what we went through as a struggle of the people. I just think that we became really strong. Because to endure what slaves went through, what everyone went through, is incredible.' Then she giggles, her teeth sparkling as she grins. 'I also like to believe I'm a princess in Africa, and that I have to go back and claim my fortune!'
There is another source of Serena's psychological strength: her religion. All the Williams girls were brought up as Jehovah's Witnesses and all of them, she tells me, remain devoted to their faith. (Serena even goes door to door when she has time.) Not only that, but their best friends are Witnesses too. 'It's fun,' Serena explains of this arrangement, 'because you get to relate to somebody and at the same time you know you're not going to be living a promiscuous life.'
Her sister Isha tells me, when I marvel at how supportive they are of each other, that 'sometimes we do have a very me-against-the-world mentality, and I don't know how healthy that is. We feel like it's us against the world and we don't care about what anybody else is doing as long as we're OK with each other.' It confirms, to a certain degree, Arnold Rampersad's point about their closed world - their at times alienating self-sufficiency. But whether this is to do with the tightly knit family or with their religion - whether the two things can even be separated - is unclear. I ask Serena whether her faith has made it hard for her to trust other people and she breaks into broad, cackling laughter. 'No!' she says, 'I don't trust people as it is! So it doesn't really make it any harder.'
Mainly, Serena feels it keeps her out of trouble. 'You go out and you see people smoking weed,' she offers by way of example, 'and you're like, "OK, well I know I'm not gonna do that because I don't think God would be very happy if I did that." I mean, I've never been around coke, and I never want to, and honestly I'd probably freak out,' she squeals, 'because I think that's something that's only seen on TV and doesn't really happen in the real world! I would just freak out. But some people are around that - apparently! - and I think they can't make the right decisions because they don't know what they should do.'
Serena says she has never doubted God - if she has a crisis of faith, it consists more of wondering whether God will forgive her. Like all Jehovah's Witnesses, she doesn't celebrate birthdays or Christmas, and she reads the Bible in her spare time. At the moment, she's rereading Genesis. 'Genesis is so much fun,' she smiles, 'you get to read how God made the Earth in seven days ... But I wonder, like, were dinosaurs ...? I don't get it! Maybe when He made part of the Earth on the first day, maybe that's when the dinosaurs lived. You know, it made me think, "I don't know," 'cos dinosaurs were here. And the cavemen were here. When?'
Suddenly, I think she may be having an existential crisis before my eyes. I ask Serena how she reconciles those things - the dinosaurs and the Creation myth - and she shakes her head blankly, asks me what I mean. Well, I say, at what point do you think maybe the Bible isn't entirely accurate? 'No, I believe in the Bible,' she says emphatically. 'I was just thinking, if you think too hard, you'll go nuts!'
I ask her how her faith feels about having money, if they are supposed to live in a Christ-like way. 'I think times are different,' she says in response. 'I believe in the Bible but I also believe in being smart. I'm not about living poor. I don't think God's gonna punish me because I'm well off, because I've earned every dollar. I've worked since I was literally two years old. We used to deliver phone books with my dad because he wanted to instil a strong working habit in us. And I work hard, let me tell you, I sweat every day. I work hard for my money and I deserve what I have.'
Some time ago, Serena said she didn't believe in sex before marriage. She is famously silent on the subject of her love life - James Blake once told me that she 'dates some pretty big guys', but the only boyfriend anyone officially knows about is the film director Brett Ratner, whom she dumped in front of the cameras in her reality TV show because he had been out partying with P. Diddy and his cohorts. I ask her if she still subscribes to the idea of not having sex before marriage.
'I'd definitely take the fifth!' she says, laughing uncomfortably as she asserts her right to silence.
I ask her if she's single.
'I don't know. I don't think I'm single.'
You don't think so?
'No.'
You're not sure?
'I'm sure, but ... I don't like to talk about that.' She smiles shyly, and looks away.
And then, a little later, she bursts into a fit of laughter she immediately regrets.
'Seriously,' she says through the giggles, 'I'm not Britney Spears! Oh God, did I just say that?!'
By now, we have moved inside. We are curled up on a large tapestry sofa and Serena is munching pretzels from a bag. From time to time, one of her dogs comes up and licks one. 'You need to lose some weight, you know?' she says to Lorelei, a very small white Maltese. 'Look at me: are you gonna do it?' She kisses the dog: 'I love you!'
For a while, we chat about random things - the fact that she's happy with her body but, if she ever wanted to have work done, she would get Ashlee Simpson's surgeon to do it; the poems she used to write when she was younger; the names she has picked out for the three children she hopes to have ('Julia Roberts already stole one of my names, though - Phineas. I was so mad!'); the skirt and jeans she wants to buy online as soon as I leave.
How will she know when it's over? I ask her eventually. Her father always said they should retire at 23 or 24 - Serena is 25 now and she has just made this phenomenal return. How did she know that she wasn't really finished?
'You know,' she muses, 'hopefully I'll just know. I think I heard Sampras or someone say you wake up and you don't want to go to practice. I don't want to go to practice now!' she laughs. 'But I mean, you genuinely don't want to go. Apparently there's a difference.'
Serena says she never read the open letter Chris Evert addressed to her, but there was one question in it, I tell her, that I've been wondering about, too: 'Do you ever consider your place in history?'
'I don't,' she says, shaking her head. 'I think when my career is over, then I'll look back, I'll look at everything that I've done and I'll probably drop to my knees and be like, "Wow, how did I accomplish all that?" But this keeps me hungry. If I thought, "Oh, I'm historic," my head would be crazy. Honestly, at the end of the day I come home to my dogs and my sister. I have friends, and I cry when I see movies, and I watch reality TV ...'
She shrugs, and I think: 'Who needs fairy tales, after all, when such a great story can be as simple as this?'
'I'm Serena,' she says, 'And that's all I am. I've never considered history.'
Read part one of this article here