Queen Vee

Where were you when you first heard the name Venus Williams?

I can recall it like it was yesterday - a Reebok commercial that was run incessantly during the 1997 Wimbledon tournament. Now, this was well before I gained access to the internet at home, and the attention I gave to the tennis tours wasn't yet a full-time hobby of mine, as it is now.  At that point, I had no idea about the hype that was starting to build around Venus and her sister as being potential future champions. All I know is that this commercial ran over and over again during the tournament - 'she's 16, she's 6'2"' - and at the tender age of just 10 years old, I was already hip enough to the history of tennis to know that hey, here's something you don't see every day: a heavily-promoted black teenager who chose to play tennis over any other sport. Little did I know that this wunderkind had already lost in the first round of Wimbledon that year; this was merely the beginning of her story.

Flash forward a few months later, at the 1997 U.S. Open. Who should I see but this same lanky black girl - now 17 - flying around the court, a gangly blur of knees, elbows, and beads, powering her way through the draw and making it all the way to the finals, ranked #66 in the world. Unfortunately, the clock struck midnight for the "ghetto Cinderella," as her father deemed her, in the final; she managed only four games in a 6-0, 6-4 defeat against the then-world #1 Martina Hingis. But it didn't matter - clearly, a star had been born.

I had my reasons for jumping through great hoops to avoid mentioning the Williams sisters by name until yesterday, and it wasn't out of a desire to be cutesy or coy. Well, okay, it kinda was. But in my mind, it served a purpose: first of all, as I mentioned on my personal Facebook page, was that I want people to celebrate all of these players with the same enthusiasm that is usually reserved for the sisters. Let's go ahead and be really real: when you're black, especially in America, the deck is already stacked against you for oh so many reasons, too many to even begin to list here. To make it in a sport as difficult, idiosyncratic, individualistic, and frankly, prejudiced as tennis has been, is a worthy cause of celebration for all of these black players, whether they've won zero titles on tour or their last name is Williams. And yes, I have zero issues in calling tennis prejudiced; if, like every other major sports league in the United States, you think that somehow the USTA wasn't being discriminatory when it excluded blacks from its ranks until the late 40s and early 50s, you probably think that Donald Trump is an effective world leader. (And in case you think the ridiculousness ended once the barrier was broken, check out this transcript of how the media treated Venus after her breakthrough run to the U.S. Open final.)

Do you know the main reason why I did so, though, and why I saved them for the end? Honestly, there's a part of me that feels like it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: it's because these two remarkable women are so great, so worthy of praise, so deserving of every single accolade and all of the admiration that they have received and continue to receive, that they are in a separate class from everyone else I have profiled so far - and that is with ALL due respect to the great trailblazers of yesteryear, particularly Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe. But the Williams sisters are something else entirely; the sine qua non of black tennis players, the pinnacle of the long journey. To tell their story is to tell the story of black tennis in both America and the world as a whole, from the formation of the ATA, to Dr. Reginald Weir and Oscar Johnson taking the first steps to legitimize black participation in the sport, to Althea Gibson kicking in the fucking door, to Arthur Ashe inspiring a generation of black people to take up tennis when he won Wimbledon, to Yannick Noah fueling an entire nation to play tennis, right on down to the public courts of Compton, CA, where Richard Williams and Oracene Price raised their two girls to believe that they could be tennis champions of the world one day. And boy, did they ever.

With the success of her younger sister, who has gone on to do even mightier things in the sport, I feel like Venus tends to get a bit of a short shrift, especially nowadays. Well, let me put an end to that malarkey; she may not have had quite as brilliant a career as Serena's, but Venus has done some amazing things in her own right. In fact, the reason why I framed this post the way that I did at the outset is because I think that people have kinda forgotten that Venus was initially the higher-touted prospect of the two sisters, and it was her run to the U.S. Open final in 1997 that announced that the Williams sisters had arrived on the scene. It was Venus whose game matured first; in fact, she once held the upper hand in the sisters' rivalry, leading her sister by four Grand Slams to one at one point. It was Venus who was the first of the two sisters to reach the world #1 ranking, doing so in February of 2002, the first black woman in the Open Era to achieve that status and doing so before (perhaps fittingly) Serena took it from her after Wimbledon later that year. In fact, Serena has been nothing but extraordinarily complimentary towards her sister for all these years. After her recent Australian Open victory, in which she defeated Venus in the final to win her 23rd Grand Slam, Serena said, and I quote, "there's no way I would be at 23 without her; there's no way I would be at one without her. There's no way I would have anything without her. She's my inspiration; she's the only reason why I'm standing here today, and the only reason why the Williams sisters exist." Straight from little sister's own mouth, folks.

Even without juxtaposing her career against Serena's, however, Venus' accomplishments easily stand on their own. She has won 49 career titles, including five Wimbledons, two U.S. Opens, four Olympic gold medals (three in doubles with her sister, one in singles), and a 35-match win streak in the year 2000, the longest such streak since the turn of the millennium and included her first Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles, plus Olympic gold. Do you know how many women in the Open Era (since 1968) have won at least five Wimbledon titles? Four. Steffi Graf, Martina Navratilova, Serena, and Venus. Since the return of tennis as an Olympic sport in 1988, do you know how many tennis players have won four gold medals? Two - Venus and Serena. And honestly, her career statistics might have been even better had her sister not been around - the two played four consecutive major finals over the course of 2002-03, the first and only time in women's tennis history that this has happened. Serena swept all four and completed her first "Serena Slam"; who knows what might have happened had Venus been afforded the chance to play anyone else. Regardless, Venus Williams is easily one of the greatest tennis players who has ever played the game - there is no doubt about that.

What is perhaps the most remarkable thing about Venus' late-career renaissance is that, since 2011, she has played with an incurable autoimmune disease - Sjögren's syndrome (pronounced "show-grens"). She began to notice a lack of energy in the closing stretches of her matches as she got older, and during the 2011 U.S. Open, she received an official diagnosis of Sjögren's; it's a disease that affects the glands of the body that produce moisture, and can often lead to dry mouth, eyes, and a lack of energy, particularly when performing a strenuous activity (like, I don't know, say...tennis). Her ranking suffered while she adjusted to the symptoms and treatment, with her ranking bottoming out at #103 at the conclusion of the 2011 season. Naturally, this caused many people to call for her to retire and claim that she was "embarrassing" herself; meanwhile, Venus kept right on doing her thing, and at the tender age of 35 in 2015, she was back in the world's top 10, reaching two Grand Slam quarterfinals and finishing the year at the world's seventh-ranked player. Not bad for an "old lady," huh? I can't stress it enough - people really need to shut the fuck up when it comes to calling for an athlete to retire. They have earned the right to quit on their terms, and not according to what any observer in the peanut gallery has to say about it. I think her recent run to the Australian Open finals proves it once and for all: at any given moment, this woman will be a threat to win big until the day she decides to retire.

And yet despite everything this woman has accomplished...somehow, she's only the second-best tennis player in her own family. Isn't that something?