“Sisters at Court,” by Julia Reed, was originally published in the May 1998 issue of Vogue. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Sittings Editor: Camilla Nickerson. Makeup, Julie Harris.
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The happiest moment of Venus Williams’s seventeen-year-old life was not when she beat the top-ranked Martina Hingis to make it to the finals in January’s Adidas International in Sydney. It was not when she went on to win the mixed doubles at the Australian Open a few days later. It was not even when she beat number-two-seeded Lindsay Davenport to win her first professional singles title in Oklahoma City in March, or when, after a 30-minute break, she joined her sister Serena to win the doubles title as well. The happiest moment of Venus Williams’s life came at a promotional event a few days earlier when she and Serena managed to throw $485 worth of groceries into two shopping carts to win a version of Supermarket Sweep. The girls are so devoted to the television show that, according to their mother, the grocery-store event was one of the main reasons they decided to play the tournament, the IGA Tennis Classic. “It’s like realizing a dream,” Venus tells me. “I always wanted to be on that show. It was more exciting than winning any match. I’m not kidding. It was wonderful.” Serena, sixteen, is equally thrilled: “I can’t stop thinking about it. I could do this, like, every day.”
Tennis may not be the most important thing in their young lives, but they are already important to women’s tennis. After only two years of playing a purposefully sparse professional schedule, Venus, with her six-foot-one-and-a-half-inch frame and her 123-miles-per-hour serve, came on strong at last summer’s U.S. Open, making it to the finals by beating Irina Spirlea, who deliberately crashed into her during a changeover. Rookie Serena beat Monica Seles and Mary Pierce in a single tournament last fall. When the girls arrived in Australia at the start of the year, Venus had played only ten matches in major championships, and Serena had played none. They ended up captivating the crowds by playing each other (Venus won), and since then they have become the hottest sister act around in a game where teenagers suddenly dominate. Twenty-eight-year-old Steffi Graf and 24-year-old Monica Seles are literally old news. This year the seventeen-year-old Hingis became the youngest tennis player, male or female, ever to earn more than $5 million. Sixteen-year-old Russian Anna Kournikova, dubbed the “pinup” of the tour, had a reported $2 million sponsorship deal at thirteen. When she lost to Lindsay Davenport in Sydney, a fistfight broke out over her towel. Then there is sixteen-year-old Mirjana Lucic—a statuesque blonde like Kournikova—who won the very first pro event she entered last year and was named Tennis magazine’s Rookie of the Year. One sportswriter refers to this dazzling lineup as “big babes bashing tennis balls.”
“They all insist that they’ll be number one, but no one says it as loudly as Venus, who got Hingis’s hackles up last year by promising that she and Serena were both destined to knock her off her throne. She even has a necklace made of dice that spells out “Venus #1.” Their mother, Oracene (usually referred to as Brandi), told Vie Washington Post in January, “They know they are good. And they know it’s just a matter of time before they get it going because it’s something that they work on…"My girls didn’t come to be on the sidelines, they come to be on top.”
Venus repeated her prediction last March, even after she lost to Hingis. “She said it again?” asked an indignant Hingis. “I mean, one day if I’m probably not playing anymore she could get there.” Venus graciously agreed that Hingis is the current rightful number one, adding that Hingis “really doesn’t have ups and downs.” It’s true that neither Williams sister possesses Hingis’s remarkable focus, but they make up for it in pizzazz, with their beaded hairdos, up-to-the-minute clothes, and spunky sound bites.
And they have a good story. They are black in an almost entirely white game, they learned to play on a cracked municipal court in the South Los Angeles ghetto where they grew up, and they burst on the Corel Women’s Tennis Association Tour cold turkey—their father, who is also their coach, kept them off the junior circuit that made mincemeat of such former prodigies as Jennifer Capriati and Andrea Jaeger. And there are two of them. When they played each other in Australia, one sportswriter termed the match “sister against sister, phenom against phenom, dream against dream.” It was definitely the new WTA chief executive officer’s dream. “One of the things people used to say about women’s tennis is there’s no depth, and once you get beyond the top few players nobody cares very much,” said Bart McGuire before Venus and Serena walked onto the court. “Well, this is a second-round match, and it’s tremendously important.”
“They are going to turn this sport around,” Sara Fornaciari, the IGA tournament director, says. “They deserve everything they get. They have personality. They are smart. They are mature. I have never seen anything like their media skills.”
No less an expert than Jay Leno agrees. After Venus held her own against the talk-show host, getting lots of laughs at his expense, he said, “You’ve got the P.R. game down. Whoa. “You’re gonna be huge.” Serena’s just as adept. At a news conference in Sydney, someone asked her about her weak first set against Mirjana Lucic, whom she beat. “That was my evil twin Selena. She was giving Serena some bad advice, but luckily Serena came back in the second. Selena was back at the beginning of the third again, but Serena closed it out.” Meeting the press in Oklahoma City, Venus asks Serena if she’s worried about anybody giving her trouble. “Just this one girl—she kinda looks like me.” When Venus beat Serena, the girls met at the net, put their arms around each other, took a deep, preplanned bow, and walked off the court hand in hand. “I’m sorry to take you out,” the elder Williams told her sister. “But, you know, I had to.”
Brandi attributes their wit and poise to the fact that she and her husband, Richard, “encouraged them to be themselves, not to have any inhibitions. You’re not really having fun if you’re not being yourself.” They do love to have fun. When I ask Venus why she hates to sign autographs, she says simply, “It’s not fun.” Fun is mugging for each other’s cameras. (“I love that camera,” Venus says of her tiny Pentax. “It’s so cute.” Serena’s not to be outdone: “Mine’s waterproof”) They pose with their carts at the supermarket, they pose in the parking lot, they pose in the hotel lobby. On the practice court Venus snaps Serena in “classic country-club style,” her jacket tied around her shoulders in lieu of a sweater, eyes wide, racket open, one leg up, like a goofy fifties promotional shot. For the next shot, she’s “in the ghetto,” pulling her warm-ups down below her crotch, looking sullen, her racket limp. Venus approves: “All right! Contrast!” Mom looks at me and shakes her head. “They never stop.”
No, but it’s a good show. At the mall after practice they grab some duck Scrubby Buddies and do a routine that involves quacking to “Old MacDonald.” They relive every second of the morning’s supermarket sweep, falling over in triumphant laughter each time. Venus tells me she loves Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers guard, because “he really inspires me. He plays professional basketball, he’s going to be the next Michael Jordan, he still takes classes at UCLA, and he speaks Italian fluently.” She shoots Serena a look. “And what are you doing?” Serena grins. “I speak fluent Ebonics and English. I am currently in high school, and I have read Hamlet.”” Mom rolls her eyes. “Serena, you are a nut.”
Their act aside, both girls are serious about school. Venus has two college credits (political science and writing) under her belt and plans to somehow fit into her schedule a series of intensive six-week-course programs, “so that when I finish my career I’ll already be through with college.” Serena, who will be a high school senior next fall, does her homework “during the boring tournaments” and wants to be a vet. She says she has a knack for “fixing” her dog when something’s wrong. Venus wants to be a designer—“not runway" but for stores like the ones she loves to shop in at the Palm Beach Gardens mall at home, “the best place on earth.” She’d also like “to do gowns. But right now I don’t have anywhere to go.”
When the girls aren’t on the road, they are practicing at home in Florida, with little social life but with a tight family structure that has kept them grounded. They grew up with three older sisters in crime-ridden Compton, California. Devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, they preached door to door and went to the Kingdom Hall three times a week. (They still do—when I arrived in Oklahoma City on a Sunday afternoon, the girls and their mother were at the local hall.) Their father, Richard Williams, decided early on to redeem his family’s circumstances through tennis, a game he taught himself to play years ago after seeing a match with an $8,000 purse on television. He taught his wife and the three oldest girls, but it was Venus and Serena, who hit the courts at six and five respectively, who really took to the game. When Venus was ten, Richard Williams predicted that his daughter would one day be number one, and that Serena would be an even better player than her sister. He coached his girls in private, eschewing professional help, kept them off the “kiddie circuit” he deemed too cutthroat, and has opted not to rely on a sports management company to run their careers. So far, so good: Venus has a reported five-year, $12 million contract with Reebok, and Serena has recently signed an agreement with Puma.
When Venus was eleven, the family moved from California to Florida on the theory, says Brandl, that “they would get better training.” The Williamses eventually went back to coaching the girls themselves, a move that has received criticism. “A lot of people were doubting and trying to figure out if what Richard was doing was the right way,” says Zina Garrison, who played on the women’s tour for sixteen years. “I think they should applaud him for believing in what he believed. I think a lot of times you have to go with what you think is best for your child.” Says Brandi, “You find people won’t do your kids like you want them to…What’s good for us is what we know, because we run this family.” She travels with her daughters to every match. “I’d never let my kids stay with a stranger. They never even had a babysitter.” When her oldest child was young, she had a nightmare that she was molested in preschool. “I made up my mind to stay home and teach my kids.” She didn’t go to work as a nurse until Serena was well into elementary school. Now, on the road, she serves as hairdresser and as coach when her husband is not there, which is frequently, since he hates to fly.
Richard Williams has managed to make it to Oklahoma City—he drove from Florida in his black Montero—and the family practice sessions are models of decorum. Every few minutes Richard hugs one of his daughters: “That’s great, Venus. That’s terrific.” “I love you, Serena. You’re a great daughter.” In between, he is a bit tougher: “That's a good shot, V, but it’s not enough to get to number one. Forward, Serena; stay down, V; watch the wrist, Serena. Serena, if you keep standing up you gonna become a loser. You’re getting on my nerves now. You know what I’m talking about, right? Don’t go on defense, Venus; everything is offense.” When Serena blows Venus away, he says, “Very good. Now, that’s surviving.” When Serena lets a ball die, Mom says, “That is not running, Serena, that is walking.” They reserve their harshest criticism for private whispered conferences with each girl, and at the end there is elaborate praise, hugs, and thank-yous all around. (They are so solicitous of one another’s feelings that when Brandi was taking pictures in the supermarket, her husband reminded her to “make sure you get a little more pictures of Serena than you do of Venus since it's her camera.”) In the parking lot after the session, Richard tells his daughters that “y’all are some of the best peoples in the world.”
Richard, who was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and whose mother picked cotton to support him and his sisters, has a reputation for being a bit pompous and not just a little irritating. But he is also wickedly funny. He introduces Venus and Serena to the club director, looks at me, pauses, and says, “And this is my daughter by my first wife.”
Venus has her own rap for being standoffish on the tour, but then she is always surrounded by family. Also, as she has pointed out, she is there to play her matches and do the necessary interviews, not to socialize. In any case, there seems to be little chance of anyone getting too big a head. Brandi will not let the girls fly first-class, not even to Europe or Australia. “I’m just not going to pay all that money. I feel like I’m cheating somebody who needs it.” This is the subject of one of her daughters’ favorite schticks. “In second class,” Serena says, “people are unruly; the bread is hard and cold. In first class, on the other hand, they serve you sundaes, it’s roomy and spacious and comfortable, and you can lean back without having to worry about somebody hitting you.” Venus steps in. “In first class, everybody has their business papers and stuff. If you could lean over you could probably learn to make some money. In second class, if you don’t watch out, they’ll steal your wallets.” Mom has heard all this before. “If it were up to me," she tells me, “Venus wouldn’t even have a car. But it wasn’t up to me.” Right, Venus teases: “If it were up to you, we’d all be eating rice and barley.”
At the supermarket, while the girls plan strategy for the sweep, Brandi compares prices. “I can’t believe that these juices are $7. I don’t pay that at home.” They are, after all, not too long out of Compton, California. Watching the girls toss items in their carts, Richard says, “This makes up for all the days when we didn’t have enough money to spend at the grocery store. They were probably having flashbacks.” He has a few himself. When he finds a dollar on the floor of the hotel lobby, he says, “This is a rich hotel. In the ghetto where I come from, you’d wait 20 years before finding a penny.” Now he’s a man in a hurry. He answers his hotel-room phone, “Venus? Serena? Who?" When the tournament director runs five minutes late to take us to the supermarket, he paces. “Time is important to me, man. Say 7:30, mean 7:30. That’s like people in the ghetto, that’s why they there. I could be doing something, man, making money.”
If the girls were having flashbacks in the grocery store, they make up for it in Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall. After practice, we swing by the hotel to pick up what Serena calls “units.” What? “As in monetary.” They change into the fruits of past shopping trips: Serena’s Pepe Le Pew backpack, her Goofy and Dr. Seuss watches, one set on home time and one set on tournament time; Venus’s Tweety watch and blue eye shadow; Venus’s Gucci shades and Serena’s Diesel pair, on matching tortoiseshell chains. In their tennis bags, they carry enormous “hair-emergency kits” filled with extra beads in every color and dozens of plastic spiral headbands to pull their braids out of their eyes. “The pink,” Venus says, “goes great with brown eyes.” They are so style conscious that Venus attributed Patrick Rafter’s third-round demise in Melbourne to a black shirt that neither sister thought looked good on him.
At the mall, Serena buys Blueberries ’n Cream lip balm; Venus buys nail polish in Lolligag, Blue Moon, and Peach Fuzz. At a jeweler’s, Venus has fun with a salesman who is trying to sell her a gold bangle with a delicate diamond design. “It’s definitely stunning, but it clashes with my current wrist-wear. And I have nowhere to wear it. I run into all kinds of problems, don’t I?” At the next jewelry shop, she has a more serious response to a $3,400 gold, sapphire, and diamond bracelet. “This is definitely a piece.” The saleslady offers it for $1,999. “Can I show my sister?” Sister, trying on a pair of $79 gold loops, approves. Mom is dismayed. “It would take me so long to break down and buy something like that.” Venus says she'll think about it.
In the shoe store, things really pick up. Serena decides on two pairs of black platform boots, one in suede and one in leather, and tries on another pair in white patent. “Yeah, girl,” says Brandi, “because spring is coming up.” Venus gets a pair of black platform sandals that make her about six foot six, and a pair of suede boots like Serena’s. “My calves are skinnier than yours,” she tells her sister. And then to her mother: “I can’t help it. It’s your fault.” But Brandi is too busy dancing to Rod Stewart’s “We’re Having a Party” to care. At the next stop, Serena lip-synchs using the cash register scanner as a mike, and then asks if she can scan their purchases herself since she’d had such fun doing the same thing that morning.
During the rest of the afternoon, Venus buys: a silver wallet with a long silver chain (silver is her favorite color), a rainbow-striped knit hat, plaid boxers, electric-blue camouflage pants, a chenille camisole (“my carpet shirt”), a tiny black “chiffon” slip dress with pale-blue embroidery, a velvet jester hat (“I’m gonna be wild”), baby-blue satin pants with yellow pinstripes down the sides. Serena is more cautious, picking up a Green Day T-shirt (it’s her favorite band, and she left hers at home), two pairs of denim shorts, a cobalt-blue watch on a chain, some multicolored leather flower headbands, and a few daisy barrettes for her mom. “I’ve gotten a little cheap lately,” she says. “That’s good,” says Brandi. “You might keep your money a while longer that way.” At the food court, a lunch of tacos, chicken nuggets, and chili dogs is punctuated by hordes of autograph seekers. “Oh, my God,” shrieks a girl brandishing a tournament poster. “The beads are even awe- somer in real life.”
Back at the hotel, I leave them talking on the phone to friends at home, supplying a raucous play-by-play of the supermarket sweep. Six days later, Venus wins the tournament and they both win the doubles. Next stop, California and Jay Leno. When I tune in, Venus is in the chair, looking like a million bucks. She has on her new slip dress (the length of which is the cause of much comment by her host) and her new black suede boots. I look at her wrist. She has on the gold, sapphire, and diamond bracelet. Perhaps Hingis should watch out. She is a girl who gets what she wants.