Child's Play

Thus the Williams household has a few new rules. Rule No. 1: No one answers the phone before 10 o'clock in the morning so that everyone can get dressed and eat breakfast without being disturbed. Rule No. 2: Venus and Serena may not divulge the name of their elementary school to the press. In an effort to keep reporters at bay, Richard has had the girls change schools three times.

Serena is also a promising player. For now, though, she is enjoying the fringes of the glare of publicity focused on her older sister. A fourth-grader, she, too, gets all A's, and she says that if she can't be a tennis player, she wants to be a gymnast because her favorite activity off the court is turning backflips.

The attention may be overwhelming for Richard and Oracene, but it certainly wasn't unexpected. Venus and Serena are the products of careful planning by their parents, who decided long ago that their children would be tennis players. That all of them turned out to be girls only reinforced their position, because Oracene believed the opportunities for female athletes had greatly improved.

Before she chose to concentrate on tennis two years ago, Venus was undefeated in 19 track meets both as a sprinter and as a middle-distance runner, clocking a 5:29 mile at age eight. While Richard still wants her to pursue both sports, Oracene, who's a nurse, asked her to focus on one, because she worried that running on the tennis court as well as around the track would place too much strain on her young body. "It will be hard to oblige Venus with all the things she'd like to do, because she's good at so many," says Richard.

Richard had played football, basketball and golf as a teenager in the predominantly black Cedar Grove section of Shreveport, La. After he married Oracene, he learned tennis by reading instruction books, watching videos and practicing every morning with a group of men on a court about 100 yards from where the 1965 Watts riots began. Richard also taught Oracene and his three oldest daughters—Yetunde, now 18; Isha, 17; and Lyndrell, 12—to play, working out the kinks, you could say, until Venus and Serena came along.

When Venus was four, Richard loaded her into his Volkswagen van along with half a dozen rackets and seven milk crates full of tennis balls, and traveled to the public courts in Watts and Compton, where he gave her lessons. A year later Serena joined them. These days the trio spends most afternoons at the city courts not far from that enterprising drug dealer in East Rancho Dominguez. Richard jokingly refers to the two fenced-in courts and the nearby playground as "East Compton Hills Country Club."

Then there is reality. "We play in hell," he says. "We've been shot at on the tennis court. But now gang members know us and protect us when the shooting starts." Gang members have also taught Venus and Serena some of the finer points of gang-war survival, particularly how to drop to their hands and knees and crawl away from the crossfire.

During practice, Richard either stands on one side of the court, hitting balls at the two girls, or smokes cigarettes on the sidelines and watches them rally. During the course of an afternoon, they refine the shots in their repertoires: spinning serves, angle volleys, topspin forehands, two-handed backhands, lobs, smashes and drop shots. Periodically, Richard shouts, "O.K., good shot," or "Turn your shoulder," or "Concentrate now."

The sessions are as much lessons in common courtesy as they are in shotmaking and strategy. On this particular evening, dusk is quickly turning into darkness, but Richard wants to see a few more smashes from Venus. First, he asks, "Venus, is it too dark to hit some overheads?"

"No, Daddy," she replies as she leaves Serena and moves to midcourt.