The Williams sisters are still making history in 2015.
During the lead-up to the US Open quarterfinal match between World No. 1 Serena Williams and older sister Venus, seeded 23rd, the media conversation had appropriately shifted from the multiple achievements Serena is seeking at this tournament to the legacy of these two tennis champions as a whole.
That legacy began with a dream, and a plan. Richard Williams resolved to have more children with the intent to train them into tennis prodigies. It is normal to hear conversations and media chatter about how remarkable it is that Williams made that decision and succeeded, and it is.
But tennis is a sport in which those who play at the highest level were likely introduced to the racket as a toddler. More often than not, a champion's path begins with a parent's guidance. Tennis is a sport of child stars.
When we unpack the language used to describe the Williams Sisters' progression, we begin to understand how couched it is in race and class. What is amazing is not that Mr. Williams was able to train two Grand Slam champions, but that they learned their trade on Compton's concrete courts, with barrettes flapping around in their hair, from a Black man who had to educate himself on the nuances of the sport before he could teach it to his daughters.
The narrative relies on the idea of the Sisters having exceeded expectations on a monumental scale. They weren't "supposed to be here." Such sentiment helps bring into context how American media views urban life for people of color in poorer communities. In a word, it's bleak. But the bleakness is accepted as a fact of life.
Sports media celebrates outliers. (And it must be stated that the Sisters did not grow up in extreme poverty as those unfamiliar with their story are likely to assume). Such celebration not only diminishes the scope of Venus and Serena's achievements, which should stand on their own merits, but it also perpetuates a habit within the national psyche of avoiding discussion of the structures that perpetuate poverty and discrimination.
For a long time, professional tennis organizations could be included in such structures, particularly as it relates to race and gender. This is why the US Open final is now played inside Arthur Ashe Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. It is a mea culpa sans any admission of guilt.
Though there have been many sports stars to have embraced a not-supposed-to-be-here narrative — notably LeBron James in recent years — one would imagine that Mr. Williams and his ex-wife Oracene Price do not see what they did as nearly as remarkable as the media, which is only now truly fawning over their daughters. During interviews and in his autobiography, Mr. Williams speaks with a matter-of-factness that elicits no "Aww shucks" sentimentality and seeks no approval from the tennis-loving masses.
All around the world, families have been training tennis champions for generations. That these families have been mostly of European descent and mostly affluent should not make the fact that a working-class Black family from Los Angeles did it something to celebrate. That is purely a face-value assessment that trends toward camp and ignores the true reasons the Sisters' story is remarkable.
Venus and Serena have handled their tennis careers with an almost incomprehensible grace, and continued their individual and collective marches toward immortality, letting go of all the noise that has followed them since their debuts into a tennis world that is still working through some very harsh biases.
They have both held the position of World No. 1 despite very active, very malignant forces that have conspired to keep the poor and people of color out of the sport since its inception, and have held women's earnings down. And they have not let it consume who they are. They're just cool with it. They're just playing tennis, or defining fashion trends, or fighting for equal pay, or becoming the greatest of all time.
Richard and Oracene do deserve celebration for teaching Venus and Serena about what they could expect, and for putting in the daunting work of building a support system so that their girls would never feel like they were set adrift. In grounding their daughters, they began something that turned out to be incredibly sustainable.
What we also can celebrate is that these two seasoned, champion siblings just completed their 27th meeting as rivals, and remain extremely close. They gave us one of their best matches in years, a three-setter in which Venus' forehand was on fire and Serena's serve homed in on its target more often than not.
And at the end, they embraced at center court, as they have 26 previous times, still aware of how little all the lights and pomp and noise matter. Still graceful, and infinitely remarkable.
