Will Smith has won a Golden Globe for playing the father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams in King Richard. The movie raises two questions. One: Why are we getting a biopic that focuses on Richard Williams, rather than the true champions, Venus and Serena? Two: Did Richard really go that far to make his daughters into Grand Slam winners? The answer to the second question is yes. In fact, Richard went further than the movie shows.
Most people would know the famous story of Richard watching TV in 1978, seeing Virginia Ruzici win the French Open and earn more than $20,000 prize money, then turning to his wife Oracene and suggesting they have more kids and make them tennis players.
Venus, Serena and Richard Williams
Oracene already had three children from her first marriage (Richard had five from his first marriage, although he didn’t have any contact with them) and she didn’t want more. But Richard was determined. “So I used to take her out on dates, and I’d hide her birth-control pills,” he told Today. “That’s how Venus came.”
Wanting a second baby, Richard convinced a friend to steal Oracene’s purse when she had her pills inside. “And I’d calm her down, and that’s how Serena came.” In 1980, when Venus was born, Richard and Oracene were living in a nice home just a block from the ocean in beautiful Long Beach, California.
Serena Williams and Venus Williams Tell Will Smith Why They Waited to Be EPs on King Richard film
Richard, who owned a private security firm, decided to move the family to Compton, a part of Los Angeles notorious for its crime and gangs, because he felt it would give his daughters “a fighter’s mentality”.
“How much easier would it be to play in front of thousands of white people if they had already learned to play in front of scores of gang members?” he pointed out in his 2014 book Black And White: The Way I See It. Oracene was against the move, worried for her children’s safety, but Richard said he was going to move without her. Eventually, she followed. Venus was not quite three and Serena not quite two.
Richard wanted the two girls to become “rough and tough and strong”, but even he started to wonder if he’d made a mistake by moving to Compton, where the family were “trapped in the middle of daily gun battles and shootouts”.
“A little black girl was shot in the back of the head by a store owner who killed her for stealing a bottle of orange juice,” he wrote in his book. “It took me only a couple of months to realise I was in the middle of hell and only God could help me now.”
But he stayed. Richard had come up with a detailed plan to make the girls into world champions, and he stuck to it. When Venus was three and Serena two, he put them to work, delivering telephone books for money.
“Neighbours thought I was working the girls too hard,” he remembered.
By the time Venus was five, Richard – who only learnt how to play tennis so he could teach his daughters – had started her tennis training. He found some abandoned courts, covered in broken glass, “human waste”, needles and condoms, and decided to train her there.
But gang members didn’t want to let Richard have the courts, and he ended up getting into fights, including one where six or seven gang members beat him up.
“To this day, the details are hazy, but I do remember when I woke up that 10 of my teeth were missing from being kicked in the mouth,” he wrote. “Over the years I have grown accustomed to not having teeth, and to this day wear my toothlessness as a badge of courage.”
He ended up getting the courts, and the gang ended up supporting Venus and Serena. Former Compton councilwoman Patricia Moore told CNN that the gang members were “wonderful” in the way they watched over the sisters, making sure no one messed with them.
To toughen up his daughters, Richard would hire schoolchildren to surround the courts and call them “every curse word in the English language, including n*****”. It was so intense that the gang members objected.
“When [they] came to me and said, ‘You can’t talk to Venus in that way…’ I said, ‘Watch out. I’m going to do what I want to do,'” Richard told CNN. He felt the training later came in handy for his daughters, with Serena winning the final of the Indian Wells event in 2001, despite being booed by the crowd.
Serena Williams and her sister Venus Williams ride with their father Richard Williams at a tennis camp in Florida
“The whole crowd turned against her and all she had to do was remember the training that she had been through.” Richard had some other unorthodox techniques. Rick Macci, who coached Venus and Serena when they were young, remembers one way Richard used to stop his daughters from stepping back too far when they were playing.
“There were a few times Richard put broken glass on the court,” he told The Sun. “The glass was behind the baseline, back by the fence, so they wouldn’t back up and take the ball early.”
According to a profile in The New Yorker, Richard didn’t let the two girls have boyfriends, “and, to discourage any impulse toward early motherhood, Richard would rip the heads off of any dolls Venus brought home”.
Richard’s plan to make Venus and Serena into tennis champions was a spectacular success, with the sisters going on to win 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them. But his decision to move the family to Compton in the early 1980s had a tragic consequence.
Oracene’s oldest daughter, Yetunde, stayed in Compton, working as a nurse and looking after her three children. While chatting with her boyfriend in her car one night in 2003, she was shot dead by a gang member defending a drug house with an AK-47. It was just across the road from the courts where her half-sisters had learned to play tennis.
Serena said she cried when she saw the character of Yetunde on screen in King Richard.
“I think I cried the whole time,” she told Red Table Talk. “Whenever she came on film, I just… personally, I just started, like… I mean, even still.”
No one really knows what Richard thinks of the movie or Will Smith’s portrayal of him, though. Having recently gone through a messy break-up from his third wife, Lakeisha Graham, he’s also suffered a series of strokes that have left him suffering dementia and barely able to speak.
But for Serena, it’s obvious why the movie focuses on her dad, instead of her and her sister.
“My dad was an amazing guy – is an amazing guy, I should say – and I think he was way ahead of his time,” she told Refinery29.
“There would be no Venus and Serena if it wasn’t for Richard.”
