If there’s a moral core to the movie, it’s Oracene, particularly in a scene when she dresses down her husband for his egotism. Yes, the jagged edges of his driven personality are softened, his faults rendered almost as grace notes, the historical exposition burnished. Williams drummed into his daughters that they were exceptional and he made them so. It’s an up-by-your-bootstraps tale, almost unfashionable in the current epoch of entitlement and child-rearing that makes a virtue out of never experiencing failure, the doctrine of mindless equivalence where everybody gets a gold ribbon. He keeps Venus off the punishing junior competition circuit because he wants the girls to have a normal life, stiffening his spine after the meteoric Jennifer Capriati is busted for drug possession at the age of 18. It was his indomitable will that catapulted the sisters to unimaginable success and fame, even as a neighbour sicced child welfare authorities on him for overworking the girls, making them practise in the pouring rain, hammering sports platitudes into their impressionable minds: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Yet he insists throughout that tennis should be fun.
She is credited with correcting and honing Serena’s awesome serve.Īs an origin story, though, “King Richard” puts Richard Williams on centre stage. 2 daughter in her father’s grand ambitions, to the point that Oracene takes over her coaching. Meanwhile, Serena chafes, mildly, at being the apparent No. Only when Richard pulls Venus out of junior tournaments, in opposition to her coach, does “Junior,” as Richard calls his daughter, slam a door in frustration. They are obedient daughters, utterly trusting their father’s instincts, even when those are capricious. Serena and Venus are endlessly saying “Yes Daddy” to everything in the movie, cleaving without complaint to all his dictums, which often verge on bullying. If nothing else, that episode provides added context to the very real violence that surrounded the Williams family and from which Richard and Oracene tried to cocoon their children, laying down tough rules for the girls: They had to achieve high grades and couldn’t date as they were raised in a righteous Jehovah’s Witnesses home. It was after Richard was pounded by the gangbangers that he grabbed his gun, which he legally carried for his job, with vengeance on his mind - an incident he relates in his autobiography, “Black and White: The Way I See It,” that is recreated, with some details changed, in “King Richard.” But he found his primary tormentor already shot dead on the street. Yetunde was murdered in 2003, the innocent victim in a Compton shooting.) (Actually, Yetunde was the oldest of three daughters Oracene Price brought into the marriage, half-sisters to Venus and Serena. He was beaten up, first by the racists in the pointy white hoods and then, while working as a night security guard in Compton, by Black thugs sniffing around his oldest daughter, Yetunde. Richard Williams was raised in Louisiana at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was a ferocious social and political force. But he was also right in nearly every step he took steering the development of his two young prodigies. Venus and Serena are executive producers of film, which has opened to generally good reviews, though it has been criticized in some quarters as too hagiographic of its central protagonist, who was indisputably a difficult individual. That is the narrative brought to vivid life in “King Richard,” the biopic starring Will Smith that has just hit the big screen. The audacity of the man was breathtaking but it vaulted the sisters straight out of Compton, Calif., to the pinnacle of the tennis universe, from asphalt inner city courts, the home turf claimed by gangbangers, to the emerald lawns of Wimbledon. Richard Williams was a demanding disciplinarian, cantankerous, and a self-made visionary who pretty much invented his daughters in a superstar petri dish, according to the 78-page manifesto - a career gestation road map - he wrote even before they were born. And they did it on their own terms, or rather the terms inculcated in them by their father. At the very least they belong in a panoply that includes Jackie Robinson and Wilma Rudolph. How blindingly white and overwhelmingly privileged the sport once was.Īrguably no one has transformed their athletic genre more than Venus and Serena, who between them have won 30 Grand Slam titles and 14 doubles championships. It’s hard to remember a tennis era before the Williams sisters.
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