Neal Collins tennis
Richard Williams is not your typical dad. He boasts that, when Venus and Serena were barely big enough to peer over the net, he paid neighbours to yell racial insults at his girls while they played.
“You can’t wait for a situation to happen to get ready for it,” says the rags-to-richest father of five who has put together a fortune estimated at 120-million from the earnings and endorsements picked up by his daughters. “I taught them how to handle problems and solve them, to walk through them and not around them.”
They certainly walked through their early problems at Wimbledon this year. Serena, seeded fifth, destroyed Hungary’s wonderfully named Rita Kuti Kis 6-1 6-0 in 40 minutes on Monday. Defending champion Venus took out Japan’s Shinobu Asagoe 6-2 6-3 on Tuesday.
And every so often the cameras would pan around to big, bearded daddy Richard, plotting clandestine triumphs for his clan. With his daughters just a Jennifer Capriati breakdown away from global domination, the man from the Louisiana backwoods might be expected to sit back and enjoy his moment and his millions.
But Richard Williams, at 59, has plenty of plotting left in him yet, most of it fascinating, all of it controversial.He is currently being followed about by a British documentary crew filming the story of the Williamses, while Fox TV is shooting a feature-length documentary about his life which will be released later this year.
Williams wants to go further than that. He wants to produce his own cinematic autobiography about the family’s rise from downtown Compton, where gangster shoot-outs disturbed the family knock-ups. He attends film classes four times a week at home in Palm Beach.
“Everyone wants to make a film about me, so I figured I’d make one myself. I couldn’t figure out my camcorder, so I knew I had to take classes,” he says. But who’ll write the script? Who do you think? Richard, who taught himself tennis coaching by watching copious videos, has written three books outlining the rise of his daughters, though he has yet to find a publisher.
Then there’s the sports drink. When Richard isn’t watching his daughters earn millions, he’s mixing a concoction in the family garage in Florida. When he gets it right, he’s going to call it Smash, and it’s going to take on the giants like Gatorade and Lucozade because: “I’m making it. That’s the difference.”
Amid allegations that he wanted 100 000 for each of his girls to help the British tennis association promote tennis in the inner cities of England,Richard says, in the latest edition of Newsweek: “People can criticise me and complain about me, but nobody wants to see a tournament that Venus and Serena aren’t in. We breathed life into this game and people dislike us for it.
“But they picked the wrong family to tear apart. It’s funny to me that people think I’m controversial. I used to always be worried about my nose being too big and making me funny-looking. But my mother would tell me that’s what makes me special.
“I’ve been called the N word and told I’d be skinned alive if it were 20 years earlier. The Women’s Tennis Association is a close-knit community that tends to embrace its own. But then we never planned to be a part of them either. We’re a part of ourselves.”