“I was close to being killed so many times” When Richard Williams narrated how difficult it was for him to train Venus and Serena Williams
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A young Serena Williams and Venus Williams, Richard Williams
Richard Williams remains the most successful tennis coach ever in the history of the sport having coached his two daughters Venus and Serena Williams to ultimate glory. It was Richard’s determination to turn his daughters into the best tennis players ever and his daughters fulfilled his wish by breaking nearly every record possible with Serena having won 39 Grand Slam titles across disciplines while Venus bringing home 23 major titles as well.
The Williams sisters not only won individual honours but brought glory to the USA on the international stage as well as contributing to the country’s titles in the Hopman Cup and the Fed Cup while bringing home 9 Olympics medals home, of which 4 Gold medals were won by Serena with Venus winning 4 Gold and 1 Silver medal as well in what has been a glorious career for both the sisters.
Early struggles Richard Williams faced while training Venus and Serena Williams
While the Williams family as a whole reaps the fruits of the success of Venus and Serena, their parents, Richard and Oracene Price had to struggle a lot initially to get their daughters the best training. Richard had made a blueprint of more than 70 pages on how he was going to raise his two daughters and make them the greatest players but it came at a cost of suffering racism, abuse and lot of other obstacles.
“In order to be successful you must prepare for the unexpected — and I wanted to prepare for that. Criticism can bring the best out of you,” said Richard. Recalling one of the incidents when local gang members in Compton started threatening him, Williams remembered the gang members saying, “Everything that white people shouted. 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,” in an interview with CNN in 2015.
Richard is no stranger to discrimination especially after growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1940s and ’50s. He recalled seeing one of his friends being lynched and another of his friend being killed in a road accident with the white woman who was the driver blaming the whole incident on Richard’s friend. “There was no investigation, there was no police car,” remembers Richard about the whole thing before recalling his own incidents saying, “But that was life. I was close to being killed so many times. A hell of a lot of times.”
The racial abuse incident for Serena Williams and her family at Indian Wells
The Williams family incident in Indian Wells is one of the darkest spots in the sport with the entire family being hurled racist abuses during the 2001 season when Venus was forced to retire due to an injury prior to her semis clash with Serena. The two sisters by then had become crowd favourites and having been robbed of the match, the crowd was quite angry even accusing Richard of fixing matches so that jealousy did not prevail within the sisters.
“One guy said, ‘I wish it was ’75, we’d skin you alive,” remembers Williams who described the crowd treatment’s towards his daughter as similar to what “a dog, or frog or hog” gets. “The whole crowd turned against her and all she had to do was remember the training that she had been through. There was no place in the world that was rougher than Compton. The ghetto will make you rough, it’ll make you tough, it’ll make you strong. And so that’s why I went to Compton with them.”
“I would never want to be at another tennis tournament ever. I’ve been there for too long. Serena often tells me that if it wasn’t for me and Jehovah she wouldn’t be where she is. That’s enough to make you cry. I tried to get them to believe that they have pushed themselves, not me. Too many parents are pushing their kids the wrong way, and that could have been me at one time. But I hope that the two of them, whenever they retire, whatever they’re going to do, they can accept what they have,” concluded Williams.
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Sarthak Shitole
(3462 Articles Published)