John Jeremiah Sullivan on Venus and Serena

Here's another problem. Reading the story online, right? He describes in detail this video of Venus and Serena when they were kids in Compton-- a video he makes clear he's viewed.

So where's the video? I want to see it. Who let him watch it?

Oh sure as part of the "multimedia experience" we're offered a video. That's fairly godawful. It's Venus and Serena mugging for cameras during the cover shoot. An untrained voice reads from an odd script that was not written for video.

People rag on ESPN for all sorts of things, but they have teams of people that all they do all day long is video rights and clearances. They have folks mining video. It's an exhaustive, expensive process that I don't think the print world comes close to understanding.

Just thinking... There's a Venus/Serena documentary in the works that's supposed to debut in theaters. I wonder if that piece of video will be in that doc??

Whatever the case, in this article, "there exists" a video was a cop out for me.

 

Why does it have to be them against the world? I think if they had a bit better outlook on life from the beginning (especially their rich, pampered tennis life), they would have been embraced more.

I recall reading about one incident after they started winning Slams. Serena was playing someone in the quarters or semis who had beaten Venus the day before. Serena dusted her something like 1 and 2, then told her at the net, "you beat my sister ... I owed you."

Oh. Someone playing professional tennis had the gall to beat a Williams sister, then get told the beat-down was some manufactured revenge thing, the kind of stuff on which the 1980s and 1990s Miami Hurricanes used to thrive.

The tirades against umpires. The contentiousness with the media. Why would anyone wonder why they get booed?

 

I take it you couldn't stand Connors or McEnroe then.

 

A lot of probably comes from being two black girls from the hood competing in a sport that isn't supposed to be for them (speaking for many tennis' people's point of view). Growing up they likely had a lot of backlash to them competing which instilled the us vs. them mentality. Keeping that mentality helps push an athlete too. Many athletes of kept a chip on their shoulder long after it should have been gone.

 

My interpretation was a member of the family showed Sullivan the video, but it's not public. Maybe he could have asked for them to allow the Times to post it online. Maybe he did, and they refused.

 

The cover-story status was the weight on this story from my point of view. I expect a John Jeremiah Sullivan story to be well written. I expect the Times Magazine cover story to have real weight and consequence. The writing lived up to my expectations, but the content did not.

Again, though: I really did enjoy the story. But it was inconsequential. It didn't add much to the narrative. Did you read Gerald Marzorati's story on tennis rivalries in advance of last year's U.S. Open? That had the scope I expect out of a Times Magazine cover story.

 

Which family member? Richard? Oracene? Too much is left open for interpretation.

But my point about video was, in a multimedia world, you don't just ask for the video. You have to go after it with the same doggedness that you approach the interview. If the owner of the video didn't want it to be used, then I might have either spelled out why or considered not using the video to make a point in the article. It just leads to disappointment when the reader clicks on the video to the left.

 

The sisters didn't grow up playing junior events. Richard purposely kept them off the national circuit; if anything, the backlash was against him because the "experts" thought he was crazy for not putting the girls on the court under tournament pressure against the best juniors.

The chips on their respective shoulders, as noted in Sullivan's piece, come from their parents (especially dear ol' Dad). While I am sure they've both encountered a troubling amount of racism during their pro careers in a sport as white as tennis, they came into the sport with preconceived notions about people because Richard raised them as if they were still living in the 40s and 50s.

I guess he did that to prepare them for the inevitable slurs, but in a way it's really too bad. All the "us vs. them" stuff is really what's kept a pair of incredibly gifted, intelligent, creative and occasionally charming women from being embraced on a deeper level by their own country. Considering where they started and everything they had to overcome to get where they are, Venus and Serena really are the embodiment of what used to be the American dream.

 

Great post.

 

Well, that and "I swear to God I'll fucking take this ball and shove it down your fucking throat!"

 

Which is said dozens of times a night on football fields and basketball courts everywhere by the biggest stars in those sports. One of the interesting things to me in the discussion about Venus or Serena or even McEnroe, et al., (without regard to issues of racism or sexism) is the nature of broadcast tennis, and the fact that we can hear individuals say identifiable things and hold them accountable for having said them.

Who knows how many times the greatest sports heroes in America have said exactly that same sentence - but were never judged for doing so because we couldn't hear it.

 

The booing and lack of embracing was happening early and often, waaaay before the 2009 incident.

And by the way, has the question ever really been answered about why a foot fault was called on her at that particular moment?