Tag Archives: tennis

Serena Williams: The Change

Laurie says:

This blog is a huge fan of the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, as athletes and as world changers. I saw Serena winning the US Open and then found this poem in a post on A Philosopher’s Life.

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The Change by Tony Hoagland

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes –

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he’s a dummy.

but remember the tennis match we watched that year?
Right before our eyes

some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite –

We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,

putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn’t help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips

and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
so unintimidated,

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,
like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission.

There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,

and I don’t watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes

as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.

And the little pink judge
had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed –

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

from What Narcissism Means to Me © Graywolf Press.

Serena and Venus Williams: Sisters with Different Bodies

Laurie and Debbie say:

We have blogged about the Williams sisters before. But when we read this quote from Serena in an article by sports writer Bruce Jenkins (San Francisco Chronicle), it was time to write about her again. Usually “I’ve never been happier with myself” is a diet ad cliche.  Not this time.

Serena and Venus Williams

The most ridiculous criticism I’ve seen about Serena concerns her weight. Venus is a separate entity in the Williams family. She’s that girl you remember in high school, so trim and composed, and when you showed up at a reunion 20 years later, appalled at the collection of sad-sack mediocrity, there was that one girl, now a grown woman, even more admirable than before.

Serena’s body type falls into pattern with the rest of the women (including half-sisters) in the Williams family. Her entire adult life has been a battle to stay in shape. I was among many who assumed, five or six years ago, that she wouldn’t be long for the tour’s top 20. Now that she has proven everyone wrong (at the end of her epic, nearly three-hour Wimbledon semifinal win against Elena Dementieva, she was charging the net on match point against her), people still can’t quite grasp the truth.

“She’s not fit,” Simon Barnes wrote in the Times of London. “A pie or two has been consumed along the way.” Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock, in a piece as vicious as it was preposterous, wrote that “she’d rather eat” than compete hard in lesser tournaments, that she’s been “grazing at her stall between matches,” and that “she needs a little less butt.”

Nice to have these (male) “experts” offering as fact their uninformed opinions on the body of someone whose physical feats they couldn’t match in a million years.

Well, guess what, everybody, this formidable woman is laying waste to the countryside. Since this time last year, Serena owns three tournament titles – the U.S. Open, the Australian Open and Wimbledon. Her next major singles title will tie her with Billie Jean King (12) on the all-time list. Forget whatever the tour rankings claim; Serena is No. 1, followed closely by Venus.

“If all I did was play tennis, I’d be burned out by now and out of the game,” Serena said during Wimbledon. “But it’s not to say I don’t work hard at tennis. I’m in better shape than people think I am. I always wanted to look like Venus growing up, that tall, thin body that looks so good in clothes. Sometimes I felt like I hated her because I wanted my body to look like that, and I knew it never would. I’m built different. I have a big butt and chest. I could go without eating for two years and I still wouldn’t be a size two. I finally realized that not everybody’s Mary-Kate (Olsen), and I’ve never been happier with myself.”

Millions of American women need to hear what Serena is saying, in part because it never gets said from a position of power. The concept that women, including sisters, have different basic body types and shapes, that those shapes can all be as healthy as each other, and that you can be a terrific athlete without looking like a supermodel should not be radical. It shouldn’t even be slightly unfamiliar. But it is. And Serena Williams isn’t just a tennis champion: she’s also a truth-teller.