STILL AT IT

 

               I saw the movie “King Richard” the other night, and liked it. I say this in full understanding that movies about real sporting figures and events are held to a standard of accuracy quite a bit lower than those of other mediums. Some measure of suspense must be conjured up even when audiences are aware of outcomes, and this requires that some facts be fudged. Heroes ofttimes must be burnished to appear to be more, uh, heroic than they are or were in real life, villains sometimes must be manufactured. That’s entertainment.

                In “King Richard,” the main character is Richard Williams, father of the tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, and the story centers on how he made his daughters what they turned out to be. The film ends with V and S still girls (Venus 14 years old, Serena 13) on the brink of the stardom we know will be theirs. That made them bit players in their dad’s drama.

               Will Smith plays Richard, and does so wonderfully. Smith is 53 years old, around the same age as Richard Williams was in the movie, but Smith can do young, middle-aged and, probably, elderly as well or better than any contemporary actor, so whatever he does on screen usually turns out well. As you no doubt know, he made news at the Oscars the other night with an impromptu performance that brought him much-earned obloquy. What you might have missed is that same night he won the best-actor award for “King Richard.”

               As for the truthfulness of the movie’s script, I give it a C. The movie’s biggest failure was its core portrayal of Richard as a steadfast father who, in his own, oft-spoken film words, would “always be there” for his family. The easily verifiable fact was that his family with Venus and Serena’s mom Oracene and her three girls from a previous marriage was his second. He’d had five children from his first marriage but abandoned it while all the children were age eight or younger, apparently with few backward thoughts (“he was a sperm donor, not a father,” one daughter from that marriage recently told a British newspaper). Post-movie timeline, he would divorce Oracene, remarry and father a son, then divorce that wife.  

               I was sportswriting during the late 1990s when the Williams sisters came upon the professional tennis scene (“burst” would be more like it), and had some personal knowledge of Richard Williams. He liked to talk generally and to me in particular, probably because he admired the newspaper I worked for. I liked him because he had a light manner that inspired grins, but he had a story to tell and told it at every opportunity.

               His main pitch had a two-pronged thrust: the “ghetto to glory” story of his girls’ roots and his own role in their ascent. The first part was true and amply covered in the movie. Venus and Serena grew up in mostly black Compton, California, and Richard, without much background in the sport, had them smacking around tennis balls daily on the city’s public courts from the ages of five (Venus) and four (Serena), even during rainstorms.  The movie makes a bow toward recognizing that some might consider his regimen excessive in the form of a busybody neighbor who sics the social-welfare people on him, but it portrays the girls as happy participants in his program. Nothing they’ve said since contradicts that.

               To its credit, the movie’s portrayal of the girls’ early coaching history probably is more accurate than Richard liked. Even after they were successful pros Williams’ family mythology had it that he was their sole guiding hand, but the movie shows them coming under the tutelage of California coach Paul Cohen before they were 10 and then moving to Florida to spend four highly formative teen years in the Rick Macci Tennis Academy, a well-known assembly line that also produced Jennifer Capriati, Andy Roddick and Maria Sharapova. That move also cast doubt on Richard’s repeated claim that education came first in his girls’ upbringing; in such places the emphasis is much stronger on the “tennis” than on the “academy.” 

               The part of Richard’s spiel I found most curious wasn’t covered in the movie. It was his insistence that tennis would be a fleeting part of his girls’ careers, that they had numerous aptitudes and soon would tire of ball-bashing in favor of other, weightier pursuits. Cut to the present, with Venus age 41 and Serena 40, with both saying they haven’t quit the game even though neither has played a tournament match since last summer. Both women have had various side interests, but their involvement has been more as celebrity decorations than as fully active participants.  

               F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that there are no second acts in American lives seems to apply particularly to sports, especially lately when sports’ rewards are enormous. But with 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them, and nine-figure net worths for each, money or acclaim can’t be compelling reasons for their continuing. Thanks in part to their dad’s inventiveness the Williams sisters occupy a singular niche in our culture, and I’ve hoped he’d be right about them focusing their abilities elsewhere.

               That thought has been with me of late, not only because of “King Richard” but also because of the recent retirement at age 25 of the Australian tenniser Ashleigh Barty, the sport’s No. 1-ranked woman.  In going out on top she joined a short list of athletes who’d done the same, including Pete Sampras, Jim Brown, Barry Sanders and Sandy Koufax, although Koufax might still be pitching if his elbow allowed. It might be a bit late to put Venus and Serena on that roster, but better late than later.