Venus Williams, the supercool prodigy who made her Wimbledon debut this week, may be the star but her father calls the shots. That’s all right though – he’s not one of those tennis parents-from-hell
TENNIS:Richard Williams
OKAY, Venus Williams thought, yawning on the inside. Let’s deal with it. “Know what?” she said to the dozen middle-aged white strangers sitting on rows of chairs in front of her, holding notebooks and tape recorders. “Before I came here I was going to make a list of the questions I would not answer. Unfortunately I didn’t make that list. I guess I was watching a movie on TV or something. But that would certainly have been one of the questions I would not answer.”
Venus Williams, not quite 17 years old, off the plane from Florida only a couple of hours earlier on her first visit to England, had been asked if it was true that, while playing tennis as a child on the courts in her black neighbourhood of Los Angeles, she had been forced to flee from gang-war gunfire.
“All right,” she said, politely suppressing the twitch of exasperation. “One time we were practising on the court in East Compton Park when someone raised up and started shooting. I don’t know what they were shooting at. The courts were right by the street. We all just dived for cover. I guess I was eight or nine.”
This is not an experience shared by many of her new peers on the women’s pro tour, and it is among the factors making Williams a story, a symbol, and a commodity. It lifts her out of the space created by her talent alone. And it is why we were there to meet her on her first morning in London, before she had time to do more than slip her rangy 1,83m frame into the custom-made silver- grey tennis outfit that is the symbol of her “six-figure” clothing endorsement contract.
Williams had worn that outfit in Paris two weeks earlier, when she made her major tournament debut at the French Open, beating a tough and experienced Japanese woman, Naoko Sawamatsu, in her first match on clay before falling in another long and attritional three-setter to an even more savvy local favourite, Nathalie Tauziat, in the second round.
At the end of that match, before she flew back home to Florida to prepare for her Wimbledon debut, Williams gave what appeared to be her characteristic press conference performance. Punctuating a charming teenage haziness with a bluntness both disconcerting and disarming, she loaded her replies to the usual banal questions with a deadpan irony rare, to say the least, among tennis pros.
Could she describe the match? How she won the first set, and what happened after that? “I won the first set, I lost the next two.” What was going through her mind, especially when she was losing the second and third sets? “Got to win.” In the first set, had she pulled herself together when she realised that she was three set points down? “I think I realised it. Yeah. Uh- huh.” She thought she was in a little bit of trouble? “Yeah, it was trouble. It’s not a position that everybody likes being in. I don’t know too many people who like being down set points or match points.”
How had the experience of her first Grand Slam tournament compared to her expectations? “That’s a weird question. Of course, I didn’t know both my matches would turn out like this. I certainly don’t want to struggle in each match. I certainly don’t imagine struggling and going three sets. I don’t imagine doing that.”
Journalists, groping for the standard sports-prodigy story, tend to forget that a teenage girl may not have had time to dream. Not about tennis, anyway, if she has been encouraged to develop an attitude in which life is more than just a ball game. So it is possible that she may also be disinclined to go along with the obsessive analysis of failure which is another journalistic convention in such circumstances.
She was 17 last week, yet she has played barely two dozen tournaments in her entire career and has won nothing since the age of 10. By the time they turned 17 the likes of Steffi Graf, Monica Seles and Gabriela Sabatini were battle-hardened winners. Martina Hingis, who won this year’s Australian Open and is now the world’s number one, is still only 16; the next contender, Anna Kournikova of Russia, is a year younger.
The recent history of such young women tennis players has been studded with casualties. Andrea Jaeger appeared in the early 1980s, burned briefly as a 15-year- old, reached a world No 2 ranking, earned $1,4 million in prize money, and was consumed by the flame. Distressed by locker-room jibes at the expense of her undeveloped physique, she got into the habit of changing into her kit in public lavatories. Now she is living in the basement of a mountain chalet in Aspen, Colorado, caring for children with terminal diseases.
Jennifer Capriati, thanks to rules bent at the behest of her sponsors, was allowed to make her pro debut before her 14th birthday, already burdened by a million dollars’ worth of contracts. She won the 1992 Olympic title, but within a couple of years the headlines were about soft drugs and shoplifting. Her career was effectively over, buckled by the pressure of other people’s ambitions. And then, at last, the rules were changed to protect the innocents.
There is a big generational shift going on in women’s tennis. Sabatini has retired, Seles may never recover from the terrible stabbing incident of four years ago, Conchita Martinez is in eclipse and Graf’s reign may have been finally ended by injury. Into the vacuum step three very disparate young women: Hingis, the spoilt little princess; Kournikova, the ice maiden; and, perhaps, Venus Williams, representing not only a very different set of cultural references but also a contrasting approach to achieving success.
The jury is still out on Williams’s father, Richard, who has guided every aspect of her life and career. He and his wife, Oracene, have certainly taken elaborate steps to protect the fourth of their five daughters from premature exposure to the highest level of competition. Although he encouraged all five to play tennis, and recognised championship quality in two of them – Venus and her sister Serena, a year younger – before their fifth birthdays, he seems to have kept them away from a total immersion in the game.
“Don’t get tied up in this,” he claims to have told Venus in an attempt to limit her time on the practice court, “or you’ll be like the rest of them. You’ll be a dummy and a fool.”
In common with Stefano Capriati and Peter Graf, he has a career plan in his head. But it is a radically different one, which is perhaps not surprising since it was dreamed up by one of five children born 50-odd years ago to a cotton-picking single mother in Shreveport, Louisiana. Before helping his children find their way through their lives, Richard Williams had to invent his own.
“My mother was my dad, my psychiatrist, my hero, the greatest person who ever lived,” he says. After leaving school and home he moved via Chicago to Los Angeles, where he arrived as a 20-year-old without qualifications. He slept rough while working in a car-wash, but eventually started a successful security business in Watts and married Oracene, a nurse. He played keen basketball, gridiron football and golf, but he seems to have the business of sport in refreshing perspective.
“I want my daughter out of tennis by 23, 24 years old,” he told the New York Times. “Actually, I prefer retirement at 19, but she says: `No, Daddy, 23, 24.’ When she retires, she should spend the first six months of the year travelling round the world, and the next sixth months at junior college. Do that for two years, and then go full time to college. By 26, she can graduate college and then start setting her businesses up. By 30, 31 she’ll be set, and by 35 she can give me a grandchild.”
His insistence on keeping his daughters at a distance from the pro circuit is backed up by his incisive assessment of Capriati’s fall. “She was a great kid at 14,” he has said. “At 15, she lost her smile. At 16, there were problems.” At 17, Venus’s wide, languid smile is very much intact, the product not just of her southern heritage (Oracene’s family is from Mississippi) but of the unbroken beam of parental approval which, the family’s critics say, has replaced conventional technical and career guidance.
“I can make the decisions until she’s 18,” her father remarked. “At 18 she can make her own decisions to hurt her body.” Meanwhile his daughters may play tennis four or five times a week, he says, but they don’t neglect to have fun. “They eat ice-cream and hot dogs, they go to the movies and they go to the beach, just like other girls of their age. They can start worrying about physical preparation when they’re in the top 10.”
For a while, like most young players in her position, Venus was tutored at home. Now, however, she attends a private school, where her grades are said to be excellent. She is learning Chinese, and has guitar lessons. Her first stated ambition was to become an astronaut. Later she expressed a desire to study archaeology. Now she wants to be an architect. “It’s important to study now,” she said in London last week, “because in the coming years I’ll probably want to play a lot more tennis and be home less. So now’s the time to work on my education.”
The deal was that she could enter Wimbledon this year if she kept up an A-plus average in school. “When they’ve finished their tennis careers,” her father said, “I don’t want a couple of gum-chewing illiterates on my hands.” For all his apparently enlightened attitudes to the balance between education and sport, however, there are hints that there may be a little bit of the Don King instinct lurking in Richard Williams’s soul.
The benign side of it, at least. He is certainly not reluctant to talk up their potential. Venus, he says, will be the world No 1 before she is 18, and the only one capable of taking it away from her is her own sister, since Serena is said by the family to possess the raw aggression Venus lacks.
She has practised for barely six hours on grass in her entire life, never mind played a competitive match (not much grass in Compton, and little more in Florida, where the family now lives), but in principle the surface should suit her serve-and-volley game, which is built on mobility and power.
In Paris the requirements of the clay courts, emphasising the chess-like virtues of concentration, patience and accuracy, swiftly illuminated the shortcomings which, some say, will never be overcome unless she puts herself in the hands of a more objective and knowledgeable coach than her father, someone who can help her build the “competitive foundation” that the application of his theories has allegedly failed to construct.
This is unlikely to happen, even though Richard was a conspicuous and surprising absentee from her first Grand Slam appearance in Paris. Nor will he be present in the players’ box at Wimbledon, where, as at the Stade Roland Garros, she will be accompanied and supported by her mother and younger sister.
“My father is at home,” she explained in France, “because he said he wasn’t going to start a second career as a parent in the stands, his head going this way and that way watching the ball.” In London last week she said that this time he was too busy with his commitments to coaching underprivileged children.
Did she mind his absence? “I don’t want him to do anything he doesn’t want to do. Yes, I missed him in Paris. But my mother’s here. She tells me the same things.” Her father watches her on television, and they talk on the phone. “He tells me things. You know, bend your knees. Basic stuff. He does a really good job.”
There is certainly no suggestion of a rift. Like her free-associative playing style, like her so-far unstressed mental attitude, this seems to be another example of the unconventional approach that has taken Venus Williams so far.