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Venus,
the goddess of tennis
There
are events that change the career of an athlete, and they are not always
positive and happy. But they are decisive in order to speed up his maturation
processes.
In the case of Venus Williams it is necessary to go back to exactly
one year ago, when her sister Serena surprisingly won the women's US
Open 1999.
Their
rivalry in family was then only at the start. Venus is the older sister,
the one who has won more titles, and the one destined to stand out all
over the world by winning a Slam match. It is not the first time, and
it won't be the last, that a relationship also consolidated by family
ties deteriorates, causing the breaking up of hierarchies based on the
age.
But at this point come to an end all fears, illations and maybe also
the rivals' hopes that Venus-Serena relationship breaks up, therefore
compromising a delicate internal balance.
Starting
from the disappointment for this momentary overtaking, the older sister
finds an extraordinary inner force that helps her work even harder to
improve her technical skills, which are already exceptional. She decides
to go to Wimbledon, the tennis sanctuary, with a bad curriculum: only
11 matches played on grass courts. Yet, 42 years after Althea Gibson,
the last black athlete able to win the women's championships, Venus
manages to win this tournament by beating her sister Serena in the semi-final.
The
last obstacle she manages to overcome is called Davenport. From here
a new story starts. Finally no longer subject to the obsession of the
first Slam, Venus now proceeds like a steamroller.
She goes to Flushing Meadows with a long curriculum of 18 consecutive
wins after the English triumph, a number that soon increases to 23,
before the match with Hingis, the world number one. Venus manages to
repeat the Wimbledon success, even though with some difficulty. With
Martina she runs the risk of being defeated, and even daddy Richard,
annoyed for a bad stroke made by his daughter in a delicate moment of
the match, in the end decides to leave the field. “I made it in order
to provoke her reaction”, he said after the match.
And it was better for Venus, we want to add, given that from that moment
Hurricane Venus starts to play tennis in an incredible way, being no
longer influenced by his awkward father.
Yet,
after her daughter's victory over Hingis in the final rush and Davenport,
daddy Richard reappears to celebrate her. This is the Williams clan.
Thanks
also to a rigid discipline, with the whole family making turns for the
bathroom in their Palm Beach home and with the evenings spent before
the video recorder watching the films chosen by the 4 daughters with
equal rights and duties. And all that even now that two of them have
become tennis champions. The only exception to the rule was this year
at Wimbledon when, in order to comfort Serena, who had been beaten in
the derby with her sister, she was allowed to choose the film to watch.
The
future of women's tennis is in their hands, or better in the muscles,
the agility and the higher strength Mother Nature has given black athletes
as a partial balancing of secular prejudice.
Their
father Richard was right at least in this: the sport seen as an instrument
of emancipation from the Californian ghetto. After years of sacrifice,
this colourful but also proud father, impeccable in one of his most
difficult roles, can now fully taste his victory.
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