And so, in my second “debut” appearance, at Indian Wells, I was once again chased in the first round of the women’s singles bracket in straight sets, this time by a French player named Alexia Dechaume-Balleret (6–4, 6–0), but the silver lining was that V and I were also entered in the doubles tournament. Playing singles, I was a little bit beyond my comfort zone; playing doubles, I felt more sure of myself, more like I belonged. Venus must have felt the same way, because we made it all the way to the quarterfinals before losing to Lindsay Davenport and Natasha Zvereva 6–3, 6–0. Venus was such a great source of strength and comfort that just having her near helped me to relax and lift my game to where it needed to be for us to compete. This was something. Remember, I was still only fifteen years old, with no real tournament experience, so I took my strength and comfort wherever I could find it, and hoped that it would spill over into my singles game as well.
Eventually, that’s just what happened, but it took a while for eventually to find me. Indeed, my very first tour championship came in doubles—at Oklahoma City the following year, in 1998 when I was sixteen years old. Venus was seventeen, and she had already made it to Wimbledon, the French Open, the Australian Open, and all the way to the U.S. Open finals (with a 66 ranking!), before losing to Martina Hingis in straight sets. She was really getting it together, in a big-time way, but she still hadn’t won anything until Oklahoma City. It was our fifth doubles tournament, and by this point we were starting to figure things out. Still, we were terribly young and inexperienced, as you could tell from our doubles ranking going into the tournament—192.
Daddy always told us it wasn’t about winning, just yet, as much as it was about improving. That was our focus. The idea was to get our footing, to get a little better each time out, to start feeling like we belonged. Of course, if we could figure out a way to improve and win, so much the better. That’s what happened here in Oklahoma, and it was such a rush to come away with the title. (For Venus, it was a double rush, because she ended up taking the singles title, too—her first!) Our championship run included an unexpected quarterfinal win over Katrina Adams, a great African-American doubles player, and her partner Debbie Graham, who had been the WTA’s Newcomer of the Year a couple years earlier. They were the #1 seed in the tournament, and once we got past them we started to think we had a shot. (We were up 6–4, 4–3 when they “retired,” but I’ve always counted it as a straight-sets victory!)
After that, we powered through the rest of the field without losing a set, and the great kicker was it was one of those tournaments where they present the winners with a giant check after the final match. We’ve all seen those checks, right? The kind they use for photo opportunities when someone wins a contest? I hadn’t really thought of the prize money before we ended up winning, and I still don’t really think about the prize money. I play to win. Even today, tournament directors sometimes have to come after me to get me to collect the purse. I’ll leave the site without remembering to pick up my money. They end up mailing me the check. Not because I’ve got so much money in the bank that there’s no room for any more. (Yeah, right.) No, because the money has never been the motivating force. That’s not why I play, so I don’t really think about it. For me, it’s about the competition, the trophy, the title. Everything else is just gravy.
Back in Oklahoma City in 1998, winning was brand-new, but even then it was more about the accomplishment than the money. That sounds like a line, but it’s the God’s honest truth. And yet, that first time I won, I wanted all the stuff that came with winning. The ceremony at center court. The giant check. The photo op and the press conference and the article in the paper the next day. I wanted it all. I’d grown up watching all these great players accept their giant checks at center court, and it never occurred to me that one day I’d get a giant check of my own. It’s such a silly prop, really, but when you’re on the receiving end of a big old check with your big old name on it, posing for pictures and waving to the crowd, it’s such a heady feeling. I hadn’t really realized that was what I wanted, but now that it was happening it seemed like I’d wanted it all along. The check itself was for $4,500—a lot of money, absolutely, but hardly enough to justify all that paperboard for the fake check. And yet when they presented it to me and V it felt like we’d won a million dollars.
It was all the money in the world and a little bit more besides.
We still have that check, by the way. (No, you can’t actually endorse it and take it to the bank—not that we tried!) Every time I look at it I think back to that first professional win, to how it felt to come out on top with my sister at my side. Of course, true greatness would only come once I started winning singles tournaments. Even at sixteen, I knew that full well, but for the time being this taste of half-greatness (with V tasting the other half) was just fine with me.
* * *
Very quickly, I went from being alone and untethered out on the court to feeling empowered when I was playing singles. I went from being a little overwhelmed and out of place to believing I was untouchable, unstoppable… all in the space of just a few tournaments. I had a lot of growing up to do in that time. I had to grow my game, that was part of it, but I also had to grow my mind-set to where it could withstand the pressures of tournament play.
Pressure comes in all shapes and sizes. It means different things for different people. For a lot of tennis players growing up on the junior circuit, it means pleasing their parents and coaches, and justifying the time and expense of flying all over the place just so they can compete. For others, it means worrying constantly about what they’re eating, how hard they’re training, what they’re giving up by focusing so single-mindedly on their game. For me, it’s been about the never-ending pursuit of perfection, and making room for the realization that I might never get my game exactly where I want it to be—meaning I’d never be firing on all cylinders at precisely the right time.
I never really worried about the component parts of my game. I’d always had the shots, and the killer instinct, and the fiery competitive streak, but I’d never had to put all those aspects of my personality together on such a public stage, so it took a couple stops and starts. Also, it took some time for me to grow into my body and reinvent my approach. Remember, I had always been on the tiny side, and my style of play reflected that. As I’ve written, I was all about lobs and volleys and shot placement when I was a kid, but at around sixteen I had this monster growth spurt, which gifted me a whole other aspect to my game. All of a sudden, I could hit with power, and I developed a range to rival my sister’s. And my serve! My goodness, it became such a weapon!
It fell mostly to me to incorporate all these changes into the way I played. Emotionally, physically, it was on me. Daddy was a tremendous coach, but it takes being out there a time or two to really feel your way. My mom, too, tried to help me make sense of my various growing pains and plusses, but here again it was on me. It takes a certain measure of independence that’s hard to come by when you’re growing up in such a tight family, when you’re used to doing everything together. (And I do mean everything!) It can be very isolating, very lonely, competing at a high level in an individual sport. There are no teammates to pick you up or cover your back. There’s no one who can know exactly what you’re seeing, thinking, feeling. It’s on you. You can have all the support in the world—God knows I had a ton!—but in the end it’s just you.
But I got there, before long. On my own. And then, one crazy-weird day in 1999, about a year after my first professional win, my parents told us they were getting a divorce. It threw me, I’ll say that, but I was pretty much an adult by this point. Venus and I were building a house and planning to move in together, so a divorce wasn’t going to change our lives all that much. My parents’ lives, sure. That’s the whole point of getting a divorce, to find a way to be happy apart if you can’t find a way to be happy together. But our lives? Not so much. And yet, the change still did its own little number on me, because for years and years we had tw
o great sources of strength and power running through our house; we had our faith, and we had each other. Our God, Jehovah, and our family itself. It was central. And so in this way, at least, my parents’ announcement seemed to tear at the very fabric of our lives.
My first thought was, How will we keep going as a family after something like this? But then I realized that we were all grown and independent and doing our own thing. It wasn’t like we were all living under the same roof and our lives would never be the same. It was more like: Okay, if they’re not meant to be together, they’re not meant to be together; if they don’t make each other happy, they should move on. And if we sisters had a hard time dealing with our parents’ breakup, we just had to get over it.
My parents are strong, opinionated people. I loved them dearly. We all did. That wasn’t about to change. And we all knew they loved us right back. That wasn’t going to change, either. If together they came to the decision that they should get divorced, then they should get divorced.
My take didn’t much matter, but here it is anyway: I always saw my mother as the backbone of our family, the spine. My dad, he was the rest of the body. Together, they made up the whole. They kept our family working. At some point, their relationship wasn’t working anymore, but they kept at it for a while. And then they split and I started to think: you can’t live without the spine, can you? You can’t live without all those other moving parts. For a while there, we were all worried how the spine would work without the rest of the body. We worried where we’d find our direction. I thought about it, and I thought about it. Venus and I, we talked and talked about it. We talked about it in terms of tennis, and in terms of everything else. I talked about it with all my sisters. I talked about it with my parents.
And guess what? In the end, it was all just talk, because you can’t know a thing until you’re in its middle. You’ve got to try it on for a while and see how it fits. Doesn’t matter if it’s the first baby steps you take on the professional tour or the first night you go to sleep knowing your parents are getting a divorce. It weirds you out at first, but then you wake up the next morning and realize your life looks a whole lot like it did the day before. The people who love you still love you. The opportunities you’ve been reaching for your whole life are still there for the taking.
It’s up to you to get on with it, that’s all.
Fear will hold U back. Champions fear nothing. Only fear God and give Him glory. Fear no man (woman). Use those legs. God gave them to U for a reason. Put your gifts to work. Take the ball on the rise. Attack the short ball—it’s waiting for U!!! Show no emotion. U R black and U can endure anything. Endure. Persevere. Stand tall.
—MATCH BOOK ENTRY
SEVEN
Fashion Statements
I like to look my best on the court. I believe it’s important. It goes to self-esteem, and at the same time it ignites an all-important spark for some of that silent fuel I like to talk about. It also gets me thinking how we sometimes draw strength in areas we never think to look. In my case, I’m an athlete; I’m meant to draw strength from the weight room, from my iron will, from the sheer force of my game. But here I am, fussing over how I look, thinking that this, too, will make a difference.
Face it, if you carry a positive picture of yourself you’ll present a positive picture to everyone else. If you put your best effort into how you look, you’ll put your best effort into whatever it is you do. Personally, I always felt that when there was an edge to how I looked, there was an edge to my game. That’s why I tune it out when people give me flak for spending so much time on my appearance. They say I’m an athlete, not a fashionista. They say that if I’m doing my job, I’ll be out there sweating and grimacing and trying to be competitive. I’ll look a mess. And they’re right. Once a match is underway, there’s no getting away from that—and there shouldn’t be. In fact, when I’m in the middle of a tough match, I wear all that sweat and effort like a badge. The nastier I look, the nastier I feel on the court, but why shouldn’t I dress myself up and pay attention to how I look before I start playing? And after? Why shouldn’t I put on a fun pair of earrings or a gorgeous bracelet or a killer outfit?
Like it or not, I live in the public eye. People are looking at me wherever I go. Most of the time, people see me on the court. They don’t see me when I’m on the town, or shopping, or goofing around at the beach. Well, of course they do see me, moving about in my normal, mundane way, but only a relative few catch me up close, nowhere near as many as when I’m playing tennis, when all eyes are on me and my opponent. Think back to all the great tennis champions in recent years, and you’ll see they all made an effort to look good on the court: Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Martina Hingis. (And—she’ll never let me hear the end of it if I don’t include her in this group—Venus Williams, of course!)
Remember Fernando, Billy Crystal’s Saturday Night Live character? The Fernando Lamas–inspired “You look mahvelous!” guy? The joke was that it’s better to look good than to feel good, but underneath it was a hint of truth. Appearances do count. I firmly believe this. No, appearances aren’t everything, but they’re definitely part of the equation. That’s why I spend so much time on mine.
I always considered myself kind of plain. When I look back at pictures of myself as a little kid, I’m put back in mind of how awkward and ugly I used to feel. Mind you, I didn’t feel this way all the time. For the most part, I was just doing my thing, hardly giving my appearance much thought. I was just me. When I was in high school, I tried to wear whatever the other girls were wearing. Don’t forget, I’d been out of the social loop for a bit, with those years I spent being home-schooled. Now that I was back among my peers I wanted desperately to fit in, so I didn’t really have my own sense of style. And yet, instead of trying to call attention to myself with my clothes, I guess I looked to deflect it. I liked to shop, and I liked to wear nice things, but most of my stuff was basic, simple. Tunde would help me pick out a couple stylish, versatile outfits at the beginning of the school year on our shopping trips to Mervyns. I wore a lot of solid colors, as I recall. Nothing loud. And certainly nothing that would stand out.
That all changed soon enough. One morning I woke up and just started wearing different things. Whatever suited my mood at that particular time. It was like a light switched on for me. I started looking at fashion magazines and developing a sense of what I liked and what I didn’t like. What might look good on me and what I shouldn’t even think of wearing. I still didn’t have my own sense of style, but at least I was a little more adventurous, a little more curious. At least I was open to what was out there.
Now, take that frame of mind and bare-bones fashion sense and layer it on top of the role I filled with my four big sisters. They were always dressing me up, and fussing with my hair, and basically putting me to work like a model or mannequin to try out all these different looks they were considering for themselves. They were a fashion-forward bunch, especially as they got older. When Tunde and Isha were in high school, they were looking in the mirror all the time! And, when they weren’t looking in the mirror, they were working out their new looks on us! Lyn and V, too, in a sliding-scale kind of way, started dressing me up and working it out. I loved all the fuss and attention, and on some level I guess I filed it all away for later, for when I finally had the money and the opportunity—and the stage—to really strut my stuff.
Eccentric. Daring. Adventurous. Fun. Call it whatever you want, but very quickly I developed my own flair, which in turn was helped along by a couple of welcome developments off the court. The first was a sponsorship deal with Puma, which gave me license to be out there and bold and really, really distinctive in what I wore when I played; after Puma, there was Nike, another sportswear company that was willing to push the envelope and let my personality shine through in what I wore. The second was a course of study I started taking at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in design and fashion. I’ll hit the sponsorship deal first, because that’s how it u
nfolded for me as well.
Coming up on the tour, I always wanted what Venus had. I repeat myself, I know, but it’s one of the great themes of my life and career: Venus cut the path I meant to follow, so when she signed a big sponsorship deal with Reebok I came away thinking I wanted a sponsor of my own. I was still a long way from having any kind of real business sense, so my desire wasn’t about money or financial security or any of those pragmatic things. No, it was about matching V and getting my own. Only trouble with this was that I didn’t have the profile Venus had when I first joined the tour. This was back when V was the Next Big Thing and I was still just the Next Big Thing’s Kid Sister, so it’s not like all these sportswear companies were lining up to give me a deal. Plus, it was a time in the sport when there weren’t a whole lot of sponsorship deals to be had beyond the very top-ranked players. About the best you could hope for as a middle-of-the-pack pro or an up-and-coming rookie was to get your gear for free, from companies like Wilson or Nike or Head or Reebok. You’d wear their stuff, they’d slap their logo on the sleeve, and it was a good deal all around.
Somehow, Daddy was able to negotiate this tremendous Reebok deal for V, but after that it seemed nobody was really interested in me. I guess there wasn’t enough hype to lift two sisters to such heights, so I was grounded. I got that, but at the same time I resented it, and yet the harsh reality of big-time tennis was that there wasn’t much of a market for a teenage player who hadn’t really done much on the tour just yet. I understand that now, but I was really upset about it back then. There was a brief period in there when Nike expressed an interest, but it never went anywhere. I wore their clothes for a while, but then just after I had a great, deep run at a tournament in Chicago in 1997, that interest fell away. I’d just played my sixth-ever tournament and reached all the way to the semifinals. Along the way, I’d beaten Mary Pierce, the number seven player in the world, and Monica Seles, the number four player, before losing to the number five player, Lindsay Davenport, in the semis. For the first time, it felt to me like I was on my way, bound for some tennis glory of my own, but then I was left hanging—with only a couple complimentary Nike outfits to show for it.
On the Line Page 13