Williams sisters have traveled a tough road

Saturday morning, on the pockmarked grass at Wimbledon’s center court, two sisters from Compton will trade booming serves and bolo-punch forehands for the All England title.

When the last ball is struck and Venus and Serena Williams embrace at net, they will have finished facing off in a Grand Slam final for the seventh time, the third time on British soil. This is a supremely consistent duo: A Williams sister has played in the Wimbledon women’s singles final every year this century but one.

We’ve grown accustomed to seeing these two powerful women hoist gleaming trophies and smile those big, bright smiles and fight for each point like it is some sort of golden nugget. So accustomed that we take the Williams sisters for granted. We tend to forget the obstacles they’ve faced, how they’ve persevered, and the fact that what they’ve been doing all these years defies expectations.

Think about the odds. When they were little girls, Venus and Serena’s enigmatic father told everyone who would listen that his girls would one day take professional tennis by storm. He was castigated and scorned. Fact is, given how difficult tennis is, even if Richard Williams had been a wealthy, suburban dad audacious enough to say that his girls would one day earn tennis scholarships to Weber State, he’d have been branded delusional.

Venus and Serena weren’t daughters of a suburban dad. They hail, we know, from the hard Southland flats and they spent their formative years learning tennis in South L.A.’s most difficult neighborhoods. Compton and its environs are a maze that must too often be moved through with caution.

I know this. Not long ago a member of my own family was murdered there, a baby caught in a crossfire in front of my great-aunt’s well-tended home.

Venus and Serena know this, too. Tennis prowess allowed them to leave Compton for Florida just before they reached their teens. They made it out, partly because of the tightly focused gaze of their parents. But that focused gaze, and that discipline, couldn’t keep Venus and Serena’s sister, Yetunde, from being gunned down by a gang member as she innocently drove on a dark South L.A. street five years ago.

No, in some parts of L.A., strong parenting is often not enough to protect. But it did help Venus and Serena form the inner strength necessary to succeed despite the odds and critics and naysayers, of which there have been many along the way.

What they’ve done, crashing through the upper reaches of a virtually all-white sport, then remaining there for over a decade, borders on the impossible.

I’ve some small sense for what they’ve been through. I’m African-American and I played tennis at a pretty high level. I was a captain on Cal’s 1989 indoor national champion tennis team and for a short while a lowly ranked, scuffling player in the minor leagues whose highest world ranking was No. 448, in doubles. That’s not as high as I would have liked, but put in another perspective, it’s not too terribly bad. There were about 1,200 players with world rankings on the men’s tour when I played, and I could count the ones who looked like me with two hands. Think it’s any different now, even with Venus and Serena? Think again.

Nothing comes easy when you’re that distinct a minority. You’ve got to have a strong spine and immense confidence to fight against isolation and doubt, both self-inflicted and coming from others. You are forced to play at country clubs whose exclusionary policies make walking in the door problematic.

Some opponents and fans, emboldened, are more than open about their attitudes, calling you every name in the book.

Happened to me more times than I’d like to admit, most memorably in a match against Arizona State that nearly ended in a brawl.

The Williams sisters, trust me, grew up facing this kind of pressure -- doubt and isolation -- writ large. Mega large. They still face it.

Serena recently had to deal with an allegedly racist heckler at a tournament in Florida. Closer to home, in 2001, the Williams family was subjected to a raucous, vile barrage of boos at a tournament in Indian Wells that one top tennis official said was among the harshest crowd behavior he’d ever witnessed.

Who’s to know what motivates crowds, but many believe the verbal taunts were motivated, at least in part, by race.

This isn’t to say that Venus and Serena haven’t been treated well.

They’ve been welcomed by the tennis world, adored and admired and catered to in ways that should make all of us proud. Somewhere in the heavens, Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson are beaming.

The progress we’re seeing these days is real. Remember this on Saturday.

And remember, too, the hard journey Venus and Serena Williams have taken to once again reach the finals at Wimbledon, tennis’ Taj Mahal. None of this has come easy for these daughters of South L.A.

--

[email protected]

--

We meet again

The Williamses head-to-head in Grand Slam finals:

*--* YEAR EVENT WINNER 2001 U.S. Open Venus 2002 French Open Serena 2002 Wimbledon Serena 2002 U.S. Open Serena 2003 Australian Open Serena 2003 Wimbledon Serena *--*