For Serena Williams and Venus Williams, it’s all about power. Power is at the center of their amazing life story. I’m talking about four different kinds of power that they’ve leveraged to fuel their incredible journey to the top of tennis and the top of the world.
The first sort of power I’m talking about is on-court power. Those two women hit the ball as hard as anyone on the WTA Tour ever has. For fans it’s thrilling to watch them put everything into their shots and see the ball fly across the court like a missile. For opponents, their power has been a nightmare. It’s fueled two careers that started when they were teens, lasted over two decades, and has them both headed to the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
These sisters have two of the hardest serves in WTA history and they also have aggressive returns so whether they’re serving or returning, they put you on the defensive at the beginning of the point over and over and after a while that starts messing with your mind. That has been crucial to their decades of success.
When the veteran tennis journalist Gerald Marzorati of the New York Times wrote about Serena’s game in his great 2021 book Seeing Serena, he said, “Williams’s returning prowess often forces a server to go for more on her serve. This, in turn, can lead to faults and double faults, and, even when not, to pressure. Causing stress, incessant stress: This has been an aspect of Williams’s game, over the years, as important as any. It can’t be tabulated like rally length or service placement, but it’s clear enough to those who have watched Williams that she can undo an opponent by mentally and emotionally straining her.”
This sort of relentless pressure is critical to both sisters’ games. And if you can get past their serves or returns, then you’ve got to combat their massive open-stance strokes which employ quick, early preparation, precise footwork, a forceful rotation, a lot of strength, a lot of torque, massive racquet-head speed, and a follow-through all the way to the shoulder blade. All of that has led to the two of them winning 30 singles Slams including Serena’s six US Opens and Venus’ two. They also have 14 doubles Slams. They are two of the greatest players the game has ever seen. The Williams’s power assault has led to lots and lots of wins, but it’s also done something much deeper. It’s transformed the game of tennis.
Serena and Venus represent nothing less than a new chapter in the history of tennis. Before they began dominating in the early 2000s, the top player in the world was Martina Hingis, a great champion who was short and won through finesse and angles. The game was starting to change at that point; there were a few tall, huge hitters like Lindsay Davenport and Monica Seles, but in 1999, Serena beat Hingis to win the US Open, her first Slam, and then in 2000 Venus won Wimbledon and the US Open, her first two.
In 2002 Serena won three—the French, Wimbledon, and the US. In all of them, she beat Venus in the finals. She also won the 2003 Australian, beating Venus again and completing what was then referred to as the “Serena Slam.”
When Serena won four in a row it was clear to the other stars of the WTA Tour that they had to change if they wanted to survive in the new world order. Kim Clijsters, three-time US Open champion, once told the New York Times, “Venus and Serena raised the bar for everyone. We all had to go back to the gym. Young players saw that and now they’re hitting harder and harder.” Venus and Serena forced everyone to become bigger and stronger and more athletic. They redefined the sport. They ushered in the new power generation.”
You can see why they can hit the ball so hard when you see the Williams sisters up close. The first time I saw Serena from just a few feet away I was in the US Open interview room, sitting in the front row, waiting for her to come in and do a post-match interview after destroying some early round clay pigeon. The moment she walked in was breathtaking. All at once I took in her height, her musculature, her aura, and I thought, “That’s what Superwoman is supposed to look like.” Later that week I ran into Venus in the players’ lounge and she too seems like a superhero with her height and her length. She evokes, perhaps, the sister of the Fantastic Four’s long, stretchy Reed Richards aka “Mister Fantastic.”
Serena and their mom Oracene were sitting there in the corner without security or anything. I walked up and said hi. Oracene knew who I was and we started talking about tennis. We fell into marveling over a recent photo of Serena crushing a backhand as her biceps bulged. She remembered the shot, she knew it had gone for a winner. She also said despite the size of her muscles, she had never once in her life lifted weights.
Somehow that afternoon I grasped the sense that much of the sisters’ grit comes from their mom. It was in something she said and something in the way she carried herself. I could tell that she’s a force. She doesn’t get enough credit in the story of how this one family created two of the greatest athletes of all time.
Of course, their father Richard’s tennis acumen is critical to their rise, and we saw in the Oscar-winning film, “King Richard” how he filled his daughters with self-esteem. But it goes far deeper. The new documentary about Richard Williams called “On The Line,” follows him back to Shreveport, La., the poor town where he grew up, and talks about how his family overcome poverty and racism and the domestic terrorism of the Klan. His roots in that hellish world, and the necessity to be strong as hell in order to make it out, have made him the unbreakable visionary who helped make these careers possible. But, it’s not just him. Oracene gave her daughters a fighting spirit and that has made so much of the difference.
The Williams’ success is very much about mental strength. These two always turn it on under pressure. They never choke or shy away from the hardest moments. They don’t beat themselves. They love to rise to the occasion. They’re great at comebacks—Serena has come back from a set down in Slam matches 37 times and she has won a Slam after being down match point three times. Their undying self-belief, their endless confidence, and their fighting spirit—all those attributes bequeathed to them by their parents, is a huge part of why these legendary careers have happened.
So I told you the Williams story was about four sorts of power. The second sort of power I’m talking about is this: the power to determine the course of your life. The Williams family chose tennis as the vehicle that would push them out of the ‘hood and make them rich and give them agency over their lives. And what’s really crazy is they chose this path at a time when they did not know much about tennis.
All this started when Richard Williams, who was not a fan of tennis, saw a WTA Tour professional on TV getting a $40,000 check and thought, “I’m in the wrong business.” He studied the game—legendary coach Vic Braden’s videos were critical—and he created a plan to get his daughters to the pros. In “On the Line,” Richard says, “If they make the right decisions they will transcend living in a poor area.” It’s amazing that his plan worked out so perfectly. I mean, if anyone is an example of how, in America, almost anyone can make it, it’s the Williams sisters. They made it from the bottom to the top. They have lived the American dream of cultivating a talent, carving a path, and becoming wildly successful. They now they live in mansions that fit in Architectural Digest after growing up in one of America’s roughest ghettos.
The spectre of “growing up in Compton” and all that symbolizes—poor Black children in a crime-ridden ‘hood—has been a huge part of the Williams family legend. Of course, the story’s a teeny bit more complicated than that symbol suggests. The Williams family moved to Compton by choice specifically for the impact it would have on their tennis—Richard has said that he knew that if he lived in Compton his mortgage would be low enough that he would be able to spend less time working at his security business and more time on the court with his daughters. But the symbol of being from Compton has helped propel them—the story of two cute Black sisters from the ‘hood who were promising tennis stars was too great for sports marketers to deny.
When Venus was just 15, before she had won a single tournament, she had a $12 million deal with Reebok. A couple of years later Serena had a $13 million deal with Puma. A few years later Richard told Reebok they had to make Venus the best paid woman in sports history and Venus got a new $40 million deal with Reebok.
Because of tennis, the family was able to set themselves up for life. Yet as important as tennis was to their future, they always approached the sport in their own way. As juniors, they skipped the national tournament circuit, an unheard-of move. As pros they made space for outside interests, which is also rare. In a world where top players are obsessed with tennis and have little else in their orbit, Venus and Serena have insisted on having full lives—Venus has long had one foot in the fashion and design world and now she has a fashion line EleVen and an interior design firm called V Starr Interiors that did gorgeous work on Serena’s place in Miami. And Serena has Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on companies with founders from historically underrepresented backgrounds. What’s more, Serena is making being a mom look fun. I can’t get enough of the photos and videos of her and her scrumptious mini-me, Alexis.
Which brings us to the third sort of power in the Williams story: the power of love. The sisters’ success is a family success—Serena and Venus don’t get to their level without having each other. They say steel sharpens steel which means these two had the perfect partner to play with every day. But that’s not just about the pace and weight of the balls coming at them, it’s about the endless support they gave each other as they worked through Richard’s endless boot camps and survived cold shoulders in their early days on the tour and dealt with boos after they got to the mountaintop.
These two love each other so much—in Marzorati’s book he writes, “When they played practice points against each other in the park in Compton, Serena would ‘hook’ her—call balls out that Venus had clearly hit in—and Venus would say nothing.” If that’s not love what is? But that’s just kid stuff. It’s critical that as they got higher and higher in the world of tennis, and the pressure mounted on them to be as great as the hype, and to overcome whatever negativity was thrown at them, and to be their best every day because everyone was bringing their “A” game to compete against them; through all of that they had each other to lean on.
Tennis is lonely. If you’re playing singles, you’re out on the court by yourself, and if you make it to the tour you’re probably traveling the world by yourself. But Serena and Venus always had each other as well as a whole family that was dedicated to them and the dream of becoming the best.
The fourth and final sort of power I have to talk about is the power of Unapologetic Blackness. By that I mean being unafraid to be your Black self. And in a world where that’s not prized it takes courage and confidence to do that. Being your true self can unleash you to be the best you because it liberates you from having to work at hiding an important part of you. The Williams sisters have always seemed liberated—from their earliest days on the national stage they were comfortable in their skin. They always seemed proud to be Black and the self-esteem that emanated from them made millions of Black Americans immediately proud of them—lots of Black people who had not been fans of tennis started tuning in to watch the Williams sisters dominate. They knew that being proud to be Black in the overwhelmingly white world of tennis is a revolutionary act and they wanted to revel in that.
We can’t forget that in their early years the Williams sisters were not accepted by some tennis fans and some in the establishment. They were considered abrasive—but they were there to unseat the leaders of the tour. They were considered untrustworthy—there were loud rumors that Richard was orchestrating their career and deciding pre-match which one of his daughters would win. You know that’s a conspiracy theory because some people believe it even though there’s zero evidence. Yet, there were some ugly moments because of that belief which means the Williams sisters were fighting against… rumors.
Sometimes the sisters also seemed to be fighting against a crowd that wasn’t really happy to see them succeed. As they rose, the older tennis fans remembered Arthur Ashe and how they had loved him, but what they didn’t realize is that Ashe had grown up being taught to be accommodating. He was from the South and just to be able to play in whites-only country clubs he had to know how to make white people comfortable. The Williams sisters came up in a different time, a time when more and more Black people were uninterested in placating white people.
When I say the Williams sisters were unapologetically Black I mean they demanded that the tennis world accept them on their terms—they came straight out of Black culture and went into tennis wearing beads, talking confidently, doing a little crip walk after winning Wimbledon, dressing in bold body-conscious ways that sometimes shocked the world. They haven’t changed—but the world around them has. We’ve become more accepting, more tolerant, more body-positive, and we in the tennis world have fallen in love with the Williams sisters—they’ve gone from tolerated to beloved. From counterculture to the sun around which the game orbits. And they’ve inspired a generation of Black players which means the pro game now looks a lot more like America.
When I was growing up I often heard the phrase “tennis is for everyone,” a call to people young and old to try our great sport. I also heard “anyone can succeed in America,” which spoke to the democracy of opportunity in this country and the way that this is a place where there are many ways to succeed. I also heard “Black is beautiful,” a cri de Coeur to value the many shapes and colors of Black faces and bodies. The Williams sisters have embodied all three of those notions and they have not only changed our favorite sport, they have changed our country.
A version of this story appears in the official 2022 US Open tournament program.
