On the Line (16 page)

One of the biggest changes about to take place when we were kids was the age-eligibility rule. This was a big topic in our
house. It used to be that you could play in tournaments when you were fourteen, but starting in 1996 that was going to change
to sixteen. The thinking was that young players were not fully developed emotionally and could not really withstand the pressures
of being on the tour. There had been some famous examples of young players who’d had flashes of success at thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen years old, and then flamed out early on. In some cases, their lives off the court spiraled a little bit, or their
bodies started to break down, or they became estranged from their parents or coaches… all because of the demands of the game.

This was a good change, a long time coming, and it made sense for a lot of players, but we were used to doing things our own
way. As a family, we felt we had a good handle on our own situation. If we wanted to play tournaments at thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen years old, we wanted to be able to make that decision for ourselves. We didn’t want some governing body telling us
what was right for the Williams sisters—even though Daddy had no thought to enter either one of us in professional tournaments
when we were that young. He was sticking to his game plan. He used to say, “You’ll be ready when you’re ready.”

It turned out that Venus actually thought she was ready before Daddy did, and she pushed for him to allow her to play. Venus
can be pretty forceful when she sets her mind to something, and here she was just that. Daddy had no choice but to cave, and
Venus entered a professional tournament in Oakland, California, in November 1994, just a couple months after her fourteenth
birthday. The Bank of the West Classic. I remember it as such an exciting moment, such an exciting time. We didn’t have enough
money for all of us to travel from Florida, but I went as Venus’s hitting partner. Lyn came, too. What a thrill! To be down
on those courts with all those great players! Oh my goodness, I was so pumped! Daddy told me to hit as hard as I could when
I was working with Venus, and I imagined that I was playing in the tournament and that Venus was the top seed and that all
these people were watching us and cheering for us.

Actually, my imagination wasn’t that far off, because our game was a whole lot different than that of most of the top female
players at the time. The convention was to play a baseline rally game. There were just a few players who could hit with real
power, but for the most part the girls on the pro circuit seemed to rely on shot placement and consistency—and here we were,
two little black girls just crushing the ball on the outer courts. I guess we did turn a few heads! And Venus really was a
star by then. She hadn’t played a single point as a professional, but everyone knew who she was. She’d been written up in
all the tennis magazines and in a lot of major newspapers. The fans were three or four deep on the practice courts, that’s
how anxious they were to see her play.

My mom made Venus a special skirt in honor of the occasion. I look back and think it’s ironic, that Venus and I would become
known for our head-turning tennis outfits and for working with all these outstanding, cutting-edge designers, and here she
made her debut in a homemade skirt. It was a pretty skirt, too. My mom could sew!

Venus drew an American player named Shaun Stafford in the first round—and she beat her! I can’t even tell you how happy I
was for V. I was over the moon and back again. It was crazy! Stafford was ranked 58th, and the win earned Venus a whopping
$5,350 in prize money—which was just about a fortune to her at the time. Daddy’s idea was to let us keep
all
the money we earned, and to learn to be responsible for it right away, so Venus started to look really, really rich in my
eyes, and I was only too happy to let her spoil me.

That first win also earned Venus the right to face the top seed, Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario, the number-two-ranked player on
the tour. We were all so happy, Venus almost as much as Daddy, and Daddy almost as much as me. Going in, he didn’t think Venus
was ready for the pro tour, but this was something she really, really wanted, so he stepped back and let it happen. Now that
she’d won her first match he was in her ear, convincing her she had the stuff to keep it going. It was like that time I’d
snuck into my first tournament. I thought Daddy would be mad, but once he saw I had a chance to win he was all over it. Here
in Oakland, once the championship was within reach, he helped with the reaching.

Venus didn’t exactly need a lot of help, or a lot of convincing. She was an extremely confident player even then. She wasn’t
afraid to go up against a top player like Sanchez-Vicario. She just wanted to see what she could do, and she came out like
a demon in her second-round match, taking the first set and wowing the crowd. Other than that one hateful time at Indian Wells,
and I suppose on a few other rare occasions, tennis fans don’t really root
against
a certain player so much as they might be pulling
for
a particular favorite. They tend to applaud and appreciate good play. But here everyone seemed to be pulling for V. It wasn’t
like they had anything against Aranxta Sanchez-Vicario, but Venus was the Cinderella story of the tournament, even though
it was just the second round, and here she was off to a killer start against the number one seed. She even went up 3–0 in
the second set, but then Sanchez-Vicario recovered and Venus didn’t win another game, which kind of quieted the crowd. And
me
. Oh, I was devastated for Venus, once the match got away from her. She didn’t mind that she’d lost, but I did. She was just
happy she’d gotten to play, manage to win her first match, and throw a scare into a top player.

Still, as brief, shining moments go, this was way up there. No, it wasn’t
my
brief, shining moment, but I soaked it up like it was—all the time knowing, hoping, praying that my moment would come soon
enough, and that when it did I would pounce on it the way Venus had pounced on hers.

After Oakland, we went back to Pompano Beach and resumed our routines. Nothing really changed, except that Venus had turned
pro, but it’s not like she played this one tournament and then started traveling the world on the pro circuit. Not at all.
In fact, this was in November 1994, and Venus didn’t play again until the following August, as a wild-card entrant in Los
Angeles. This time, she lost in the first round. And this time, it wasn’t enough for me to just sit on the sidelines and soak
up what was left of the attention being showered on my sister. This time, I was just a couple weeks shy of my own fourteenth
birthday, so I wanted to be out there playing, making some noise of my own. I wanted what Venus had, and I didn’t want to
wait for it to be my turn. I wanted it right away.

True to form—and true to his cautious, disciplined approach—Daddy didn’t think I was ready, but I talked him into it. (We’re
Daddy’s girls at heart—we get what we want!) I’d learned all about the changes to the age-eligibility rule, and used that
as an argument in my favor. The way it worked was, if I turned fourteen in 1995 before the new rule took effect, and if I
played in a tournament that year, I’d be grandfathered in under the old age restrictions. If I didn’t, I’d have to wait until
I was sixteen to start playing—another two years! And even then, at sixteen, there would be all kinds of restrictions on the
number of tournaments I could play. The new rule would kick in and I’d be chasing the calendar, so it made sense for me to
play at least once in 1995, to establish my eligibility. After that, we could take our time and decide for ourselves when
I was
really
ready.

Once again, Daddy finally caved, and he signed me up for a professional tournament in Quebec City. It was November 1995, and
I drew a hardly ranked player named Anne Miller. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as Venus’s debut, but it was mine. For one thing,
it was a much smaller tournament; for another, I was only playing in the qualifying round, to start. For some reason, the
thing I remember best about that first tournament was that I was so ugly! Forget how miserably I played, what’s stayed with
me is how I looked. Thank God there was no digital video back then, because I’m sure I would have wound up on YouTube or some
site, embarrassing myself. I joke about it now, but at the time I
hated
the way I looked, especially when I stood next to one of my sisters. They were so beautiful, so tall, so graceful, so perfect.

Thinking back, I’ve often wondered if my poor self-image had something to do with my poor performance that day in Quebec.
Over the years, I’ve come to spend a lot of time on my appearance. I want to look good while I’m out there, sweating and grunting.
That’s become my thing. Wasn’t always my thing, but it is now, and as a stylin’ tour veteran I have to think my self-image
had
something
to do with my disappointing debut. I mean, it only follows that if you want to be at your best you have to look your best,
right? How the world looks back at you has everything to do with how you look out at the world, and here I didn’t like how
I looked. Not one bit.

For whatever reason, I didn’t play very well. Anne Miller beat me 6–1, 6–1, and the scoreboard didn’t really tell the full
story. Nothing against Anne Miller, but it wasn’t like she was a dominant player. She wasn’t running me around on the court.
She wasn’t dictating the points. I wasn’t making my shots, that’s all. On another day, under other circumstances, I could
have beaten her, no question, but I think the moment was a little too big for my fourteen-year-old self. It messed with my
head to be playing in front of a great, big crowd, underneath these great, big expectations.

Okay, so I wasn’t ready. The powers that be at the WTA were right, I guess. Daddy was right, I guess. But I filed the experience
away and vowed to learn from it. Even at fourteen, I knew there was an important takeaway inside this moment. For me it was
that you can’t take anything for granted. Playing in all those little-kid events out in California, I’d always expected to
win—and I usually did. I think I lost just two or three matches in my little-kid career. Here, though, I could no longer expect
to win. I’d have to earn it, fight for it. And I’d have to do it by myself. Daddy couldn’t swing that racquet for me, and
Venus couldn’t tell me what to do, and my mom couldn’t help me readjust my game if it turned out that my first plan of attack
wasn’t effective. No, when you’re out there on the court in a tournament setting, for real, it’s all on you.

I flashed back to how things were when we were just starting out on those public courts in Compton, when it was all of us
together—on our own side of the net, even!—and I realized that from here on in I’d have the court all to myself.

*  *  *

D
addy saw to it that it wasn’t
just
me out there on the court, all by myself, all the time. I didn’t play another tournament until March 1997—at Indian Wells.
In all that time, I stayed in Florida and went to high school and kept up with my training and conditioning every day. I was
a professional in name only, because of that one appearance in Quebec, but in every other respect I was back to where I was.
I was still just a kid, going through the motions and waiting for my opportunity. When it finally came, Daddy made sure that
Venus and I played in separate tournaments, because we didn’t want to have to face each other if we could avoid it. At some
point, if things worked out the way we all hoped, there’d be no avoiding each other on the circuit, but here, when we were
still picking our spots, we could stay out of each other’s path.

Now, the part about it not
just
being me out there, all by my lonesome, is this: Venus and I started playing doubles. We’d always played doubles, so it seemed
like a natural extension for us, but the side benefit to our playing together in my first few tournaments was that I had my
sister at my side,
on my side of the net
, as I took some of these first steps as a professional. In some ways, it was just like crawling into Venus’s bed in the middle
of the night, because I didn’t want to sleep alone. That was the kind of comfort I drew from having her near. Even on the
court.

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!)