Just Williams - style, grace, volunteers for America
The camera loves them, but in different ways. And they know it and play to it. This is Serena Williams on her website, cool in digital, sophiticated, knowing, stunningly beautiful. Venus takes a different avenue, more gamin, sports girl, the Amazon. They are new age icons both of a generation and beyond and this year in their tennis they have both shown a depth of character that has re-asserted their standing against what it might be said has been an onslaught of eastern European power players. Wimbledon. The Olympics. The Us Open. The Williams sisters have won the ones that mattered.
Barack Obama may be the most visible of black men on the planet these days, but should he achieve his goals he will find that the high ground in the American and even world psyche has already been snatched from him by two twenty somethings from a Los Anegeles slum. They are the American dream.
Old footballers used to aspire to owning a pub; old cricketers to after dinner speaking; ex tennis players to bashing a few balls at a holiday resort club, (Sue Barker, excepted who apart from being a BBC presenter, is also now a trained GP) but the Williams sisters have harnessed the millions of sponsorship money pouring into the global tennis game into something cogent and tangible. Serena gave $100 for every ace she served to victims of Hurricane Katrina. The list of causes they support is long. On one campaign for sick children the pair played each other to raise $400,000.
It is a pantheon of modern black culture that might trace its roots back to the youthful Cassius Clay’s struggle to be recognised as Mohammed Ali; to Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s raised black glove protests at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, to those Marvin Gaye lines “a change is gonna come”. The result is these two brilliant athletes, enthused by their sport, by their country and by their own femininity.
Where other black icons may have been tainted and compromised in the struggle for black equality, the Williams sisters have probably already sealed a unique status. Short of doing an OJ Simpson – and perhaps not even that – their reputations are sacrosanct. Even the plaudits seem to shrink in the face their achievements and fame. In 2001 America Ladies Home Journal cited Venus as one of the 30 most powerful Ladies in the USA. You could say that rather like a Grand Slam, Venus has probably won that one by now.
And in the media bubble that is modern tennis, they move, slowly, deliberately into the realms of fashion both as models and also designers will surely ensure their continued transfer from brilliant young athletes into mainstream USA business and respectable wealth. In other examples perhaps even into politics although unless North Korea’s Kim Jong-il or Iran’s President Ahmadinejad are thinking of taking up tennis, perhaps not? Venus to be the first black woman president? This is after all America we are talking about.
No matter, they have already achieved greatness and don’t need to be knocking on doors. Yet the conundrum of tennis is that despite the fame, despite being in the richest country in the world, despite the climate, despite being such icons, their legacy has not truly transferred into the ghettos to bring out a generation of other American tennis stars.
In 2003 their personal fortunes was then estimated at £200million. At age 26 and 28, even with the credit crunch that figure can probably be quintupled.
They came from the crime ridden suburb of Los Angeles known as Compton, where their elder half-sister nurse Yetunde was shot dead five years ago in a drive-by killing - the single horrific note of tragedy in the family.
Ironically, sadly their father Richard had been quoted as saying that he wanted to live in Compton because it was rough and would give the girls the kind of ghetto toughness they might need to become champions. Those fanciful often quoted sound bites about how the young girls practised to the sound of gunfire in their neighbourhood, ring that much more emptily now. But it was the children he fathered with Yetunde’s mother Oracene that were destined for tennis greatness led by elder sister Venus and the move to Florida, albeit Yetunde was herself said to be a more than capable player.
Venus has other businesses now, a sportswear label called EleVen; an interior design business V Starr Interiors. They are photographed with legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
Serena is getting sassy. Her photograph on the web site has her flanked by hunks, some half naked. Another banner has her subtly pictured twice, her image transferred left to right, a T shirt emblazoned with the word ATHLETE. The risquey caption says “Are you looking my titles?” She writes a blog that is breathless teenage stuff. She is still star struck and charmingly coquettish. She says wants to be an actress (and she has enough guest appearances to be easy with the cameras.
But the cameras love both girl in very different ways, Venus as the all action sports girl who looks like she has taken time out from the Marines; Serena, like a boxer fighting to maker her weight.
The two most eligible black girls in the world could of course be a tricky proposition in the marital stakes. Don’t stay home much, a domineering father, not much good in the kitchen, a steely determination to get their own way plus a bank balance that will require some pre-nuptial agreements…Venus has been dating the golfer Hank Kuehne whose career has been nose diving ever since, albeit due to injury rather than other distractions.
Serena has had short public flings with director Brett Ratner, who she defended on a TV chat show when accused of dating a small fat man, but then broke up when he went on a drinking party to New York. And actor hulk Jack Long.
Serena went very publoic on her blog when thery broke up. Only real men need apply.
