Interview: Serena Williams, tennis player

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 13:48

IT'S frequently said – even by the sisters themselves – that they should have swapped names. Unflappable Venus Williams should answer to Serena, while her one year, three months and nine days younger sibling ought to go by a name synonymous with high spirits.

• Portrait: Jed Jacobsohn

If I didn't know that, if I didn't know about the infamous outburst at September's US Open, when 28-year-old Serena threatened a line judge in graphic detail – earning a five-figure fine and potentially a future suspension – then at first glance I'd say the woman before me was not merely serene but exalted, comporting herself like a goddess.

Serena Williams is eating a late lunch and doesn't rise or offer her hand to accompany hello. What she does instead is lift her plate off her lap, allowing her assistant access in order to cover her with a blanket.

From the matter of factness of these ministrations, it's clear that Williams is inured to deference. One journalist described meeting the tennis star as "less interview than audience", and it's intriguing that the UK edition of her recently published autobiography, Serena Williams My Life, is subtitled Queen Of the Court, whereas the US went with On The Line.

In the book itself, conceived as equal parts memoir and inspirational tome, Williams assigns the five sisters roles, offering examples of how, as youngest, she's always been family princess.

If anyone is "tennis royalty" it's Williams, who has 11 Grand Slam singles titles to her credit, numerous doubles wins alongside Venus, and who, days before our meeting, battled Venus to capture the WTA (Women's Tennis Authority) Championship in Qatar. She finished the year ranked number one and set a record for single season prize money, raking in more than 6.5 million.

That might explain why this large suite in London's Dorchester Hotel is a maze of clothing rails, open suitcases, shopping bags and boxes. Part of me wants to nose around, but I'm far too distracted. Pictures don't always flatter, but in the flesh Williams is arrestingly beautiful. Her semi-recumbent state might also be ascribed to jumping aboard a plane an hour after winning in Doha – where it was dry and blistering by day, hideously humid after dark – to tackle a week's worth of book publicity in chilly old London.

Pleasantries about the weather dispatched, I knuckle down to more pressing issues. Williams writes of spending hours flopped in front of the telly watching her favourite programme. So, Serena, which Golden Girl are you?

"Blanche Devereaux," she responds with alacrity, before correcting herself between giggles. "I'm not Blanche, by a long shot, but she's my favourite. If I'm a Golden Girl then I'm Sophia. I'm really sarcastic and always making jokes, but Blanche is so full of herself and so sexy and I just love her!"

This comes as no surprise. Despite being a world-class athlete with a serve so fast and powerful that it could take your head off, Williams is a self-professed girly girl. Off the court she designs jewellery and fashion lines, and on the court she takes pains to look her best, reckoning that it helps sharpen the edge on her game.

But the most important aspect of Williams' life is her faith. That, more than anything, defines the woman she is and wants to be. The Williams are devout Jehovah's Witnesses and throughout the girls' childhood the thrice-weekly meetings at Kingdom Hall were non-negotiable: they even trumped tennis. Considering that Venus and Serena were deliberately and methodically groomed to be champions from a tender age, it underlines the intensity of the family's beliefs.

Faith, she writes, "is at the root of everything I do, everything I believe. It's what gets me out of bed each morning before first light, to head out to the tennis court. And it's what keeps me believing that anything is possible – not just on the court, but all around. Without faith, what do we have? What is the point?"

Her mother, Oracene, is deeply spiritual and chose the Jehovah's Witnesses after trying several churches on for size. "She had to feel comfortable wherever she worshipped … She was looking for something real, she used to tell us. Something honest. The truth."

Core elements of the religion are Bible study – she's been reading the Bible since she was three – and reaching out, but Williams also describes something called "informal witnessing, which basically means preaching by the way we carry ourselves". How does it work?

Her voice is whisper-soft and serious as she explains. "Recently I've been more spiritual, learning more about the Bible, and what does the Bible really teach? If you like something and learn something you want to talk about it, and that's what Jehovah's Witnesses do.

"Let's say we're sitting on a plane next to each other. So many topics of conversation can lead back into the Bible. Informal witnessing means we'll get to a subject like, for instance, global warming. People will say global warming is going to cover the earth, and this is a really big concern. What's going to happen in the next two generations?

"But the Bible talks about things like that too, how God says that He would never destroy the earth and that this earth is going to be inhabited forever by righteous people. He's going to cleanse the earth and make it for the righteous to dwell in. That's an interesting concept, when you think about all the stuff that's going on with war. God talks, in Isaiah, about how they'll beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning shears, and war will be no more. All this stuff is really comforting to know, like when my sister died …"

Yetunde – Tunde for short – was her "big, big, big, big sister", the oldest of the five (from Oracene's first marriage) and almost a decade ahead of Serena. Her role was "forgiver". She was incredibly close to her littlest sister, like a second mum.

Tunde didn't come along when the family moved from Compton, in LA, to Florida, having discovered that it was a Mecca for tennis training. Serena found it tough adjusting. She insists she wasn't bullied, despite being "quiet, a little bit of a geek", but she didn't get on well at school. She found the other girls virtually incomprehensible, while they teased her for "talking like a white girl".

"I was like, 'I speak English, I don't know what you speak!' And the whole big city, little city issue was a really big culture shock. Plus I was an outcast because I was the girl that played tennis. I went through an awkward stage. I didn't make friends, and Tunde hadn't come with us. Looking back, I can't imagine what she must have felt like, losing her whole family. The older I get, the more I think that she was pretty young too, but she didn't want to go to Florida and I don't blame her. She was of age, so she moved out."

Tunde was studying to be a nurse, and the family struggled financially, so the sisters didn't see each other as often as they would have liked. Serena felt as if a piece of herself was missing, and that ache intensified when Tunde started her own family. Though excited about becoming an aunt, Serena mourned the loss of their special sisterly dynamic.

In September of 2003 Serena was in Toronto with her sister Lyn, to film a television show. At 4am her mother rang from Florida, worried that she couldn't get hold of Tunde. Serena reckoned her sister was out enjoying herself, but rang California anyway, only to hear the horrific news that Tunde had been shot and killed. Still reeling, she had to tell not only Lyn but their mother that Tunde was gone.

Tunde's death lit a slow fuse that, once detonated, would catapult Serena deep into a depression that nearly ended her tennis career and drove her to the therapist's couch in search of help. She pulled up the drawbridge, avoiding tennis, avoiding her family, avoiding her faith. What brought her back into the fold?

"I feel like I didn't have my priorities right. Life should always be, for me, God first and family and then tennis next. It should never be tennis first, but I think for a while it was, and that could have been the problem. It wasn't like I didn't go to meetings because I was so devastated; I didn't go because I hadn't been going consistently at that time. I think had I been, I wouldn't have spiralled down into such a depression, I would have had a totally different reaction."

Did she question God's existence? "That was never a factor. We're children of God and we don't necessarily want things to happen, they just happen, so that's how we look at it. God, for me, is loving, and all the stuff that He provides from a simple rose," she says, indicating a nearby bouquet, "I mean it's amazing.

"And think of the body. I'm fascinated by the body. I was reading an article about how scientists don't understand why we die, because a cell is so perfect. In the Bible we are not supposed to grow old and die. We're supposed to live forever. But because of Adam, one man's sin entered the world and therefore man's punishment was death. It all goes back to our roots. Informal witnessing, then, is that random topics can lead back to Biblical truths."

All this talk of scientists – I'm guessing that her belief system comes into conflict with science when the subject is evolution? "We definitely believe in creation, that God created the first human. We believe in the Bible, the Old and the New Testament, that's the basis of the religion. We believe that whatever it says in the Bible is the truth. I just don't believe that I came from a fish that walked on land and decided to go into this magnificent form," she waves a hand down her body to illustrate the beauty of mankind. "The Bible says that we're created in God's image. That's my personal belief. I'm not saying everyone else has to believe in it."

She may acknowledge her magnificence now, and rightly so, but it's been a long, ongoing struggle to bolster her self-esteem. Like most women, she's too often felt ugly and the wrong size. As a child she was always tiny, and looked on enviously as Venus shot up and came into her height and power as an athlete. From the start, whatever Venus had, whatever Venus did, Serena wanted it too. That envy catalysed her intense focus and drive, and she's often said she wouldn't be a champion now without having Venus for an older sister.

At 16, Serena finally had a growth spurt, though at 5ft 10in she is still shorter, joking that it suits her, since she's afraid of heights. Curvy, with a big bottom and boobs, she's sometimes struggled with her weight.

Though preferring not to read her press, it was impossible, she says, to ignore the jibes when she finally returned to the circuit, in 2006, noticeably larger and not in the best shape. "It hurts. I am human and people don't take that into consideration. I tend not to talk bad about people. You never hear me talk about any other player or anything bad about anyone, because you never know in life what they may or may not be going through."

How did she gather up the courage to pose nude for ESPN magazine? "Well, I'm really, really fit now. I had some clothes on but you can't tell. I was flattered that they wanted to use me for the cover because I'm not a stick-thin model. I thought it would be nice to see a real woman, a real size."

I am dying to ask, especially since she keeps playing with it: do you wear your own hair? "No, I don't wear my own hair. My hair is actually super long, and I like short hair, but I don't want to cut mine."

She erupts in a cascade of laughter, acknowledging the contradiction. "I don't have that many wigs compared to the other divas; I have about six. I'm growing my hair out for my wedding. I'm one of those girls who has it all planned out."

This from a woman who keeps denying she has a boyfriend despite being photographed together all the time. "Yeah, well …"

I don't suppose I'm getting a scoop? Have she and the Grammy-winning rapper Common (aka Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr] come to an agreement after years of dating so "on-and-off" that newspapers now refer to him as her "alleged" boyfriend?

She wiggles a ring-free finger in my face and insists she's not engaged. It's just that she's been dreaming about her wedding almost from the day she was born, plotting every detail. "I'm designing my own dress. I have three pictures in my bathroom of inspirations that I like. Creamy white, big but not too big, but definitely not A-line: I'm a bigger girl. I've even got the cake picked out. It's pathetic really."

She wants to marry on Tunde's birthday, 9 August. "I wanted to do 8-9-10, but that's never gonna happen! But my sisters and I are arguing about getting married on the same day – well, not Venus, she doesn't seem that bothered." What about a multiple wedding? She recoils. "Oh no! It has to be all about me!"

Her grief was debilitating, but the break from years spent relentlessly practising and touring had a silver lining, in that it prompted a rethink about her priorities. For the first time, Williams asked herself why, exactly, she played tennis. "For me, things are more important than hitting a ball over the net. I have to make sure that I'm happy and that I'm doing things I love."

Then, in 2007, all but written off by the press, her peers and her sponsor Nike, she made it to the finals of the Australian Open, going head to head with Maria Sharapova and winning 6-1, 6-2. That was her light-bulb moment: "I was determined to win, but not for those jerks at the newspaper who called me a cow … Not for the sponsor who wanted nothing to do with me. No, I would do it for me. For the first time in my career, it hit me: that's why I was playing, after all."

Everyone knows the Williams sisters started playing in the first place because their parents saw it as the girls' way out of LA's dangerous Compton district and pushed them to excel. How does it feel when she hears them – especially her father Richard – criticised?

She sits up. "Oh, I can't take it. I can't even read it. I was reading something about my dad being uneducated and I had to stop, because I was like, 'You don't know anything from jump, you don't know my dad at all.' He is so sweet, he talks to everybody, he always helps people. My mom, by the way, is way tougher. Dad is like a pushover, but you don't want to cross my mom!"

Richard used to tape up inspiring messages around the courts while his daughters drilled, and Serena still writes affirmations for herself in notebooks and on Post-its she tapes to her tennis bag. One such saying is: "What would U do if U were not afraid?" Which begs the question …

"That's from a book called Who Moved My Cheese?. Can you imagine all the stuff people can accomplish if they're not afraid? I'm afraid of a lot of things."

But you're a warrior!

She laughs. "Amazon warrior woman is afraid! I don't like anything that's crazy, like extreme sports. I am fearful of heights. And I am deathly afraid of frogs."

Yeah, but if you kiss enough of them … "I'll get that wedding! The one that's already planned!"

So much for the tangible stuff. What about emotional fears? "Of not making the right decisions. I want to get baptised and I think I might be a little afraid that if I do and I made a mistake, how that will affect me."

But we all make mistakes, all the time. And isn't the premise of your religion and morality that we learn from them and we make amends? "It is, exactly. I still don't understand this fear."

Presuming she avoids injury – at the mere mention she knocks wood – how long does she hope to play? "I always say till they take me out back and shoot me, Old Yeller style. I never want to become content in my career because I am really young. There's so much more I can do, so many more Grand Slams that I can win. But I don't want to be remembered for what I did on the court. I want to be remembered for what I am and who I represent off the court."

The PR comes in and Williams asks for more time. So, I ask by way of wrapping things up, are you still a bunny boiler? Startled, she relaxes when I point out that I learned about her special brand of crazy – prompted by things like unreturned phone calls and ardent men who turn aloof overnight – via her book and other interviews.

"Yeah, you know the guy I'm seeing now – who we all know," she laughs and dreamily rests her head on the sofa arm. "I've gotten really good and not so insane. I think I'm growing up and being more mature and not as neurotic – although I'm still a little neurotic, but it's good. I'm really happy."

After inscribing a lovely dedication in my book, she sees me to the door, where we stop and talk a bit longer. And this time I get my handshake.

Serena Williams My Life: Queen Of The Court is out now from Simon & Schuster, 17.99