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In retrospect, those kinds of choices honored a truth that the rest of the world was slow to accept. Many in tennis considered it an affront to the way things are done. Everyone’s like, ‘Well, how do you play tennis for so long?’ It’s because we weren’t raised in an environment where it was something that we abhorred.” There was the infamous decision to pull Venus and Serena from junior competition so that they wouldn’t “fall to pieces” because of pressure, Richard said in 1991, and could instead focus on schoolwork. Serena explains, “A lot of people get this different story of sports fathers-especially tennis fathers, who are really overbearing. When I look at it, I see it just encompassing this whole superhero kind of thing.”
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The next, obviously, would be the Venus story, and then there’s always the story about our other three sisters, and then there’s like a mom, and then there’s the Serena story. “I think King Richard is like Iron Man and that there still are other stories around it. Serena sees it this way: “I am a dreamer, and I love Marvel,” she says. That has always been the dance that we do with the members of the Williams family, who are at once Blackness personified-the batshit, loving father, Richard the strong mother, Oracene the hair the style the family squabbles and the fierce protectiveness-and universal symbols for beating the odds. Fans knew, and that was enough for most of us. “Obviously we’re an African American family, and it’s important for people to see African American families in that dynamic … to have role modeling.” Still, she stresses again, “our family was super unique.” It is okay if Venus and Serena would not exactly classify their story as quintessentially Black. Venus is quick to point out the idiosyncratic in the universal: “I think that our family is just unique to ourselves,” she says. The Williams sisters were archetypes of the kind of deep kinship ties that are central to the Black American experience.
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Nevertheless, the display of familial Black love from Venus and Serena beaming on the evening news was crystal clear. Tennis was not an entirely foreign sport to me-a certain strata of Black elites played tennis regularly, and I played in public school for PE credits-but competitive tennis was as otherworldly as golf. “For Serena and I to explore that freedom is surreal.” “From such a young age, all we’ve done is work,” says Venus.