You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
...
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
•••
Staring into the camera with dark, defiant eyes, Serena Williams recites these chill-inducing lines from the late Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise, in a BBC video montage that aired during their broadcast of Williams's historic Wimbledon triumph on Saturday.
The montage, showing footage of Williams’s journey as a tennis player from her childhood to the present, has since gone viral. Watch it once and you will know why it is such a hit. Read that poem once and you will know why it is Williams’s favourite.
Indeed, she has risen – risen from the dusty, cracked and wire-netted tennis court in Los Angeles County into one of sport’s greatest ever. She has risen over poverty and prejudice, over injury and illness, over bereavement and heartache, over every setback that has crossed her path.
Coached by a doting and demanding father, Richard, Serena and her elder sister, Venus, had little money, nor many of the other privileges many young tennis players enjoy. But she had the audacity of hope and, to echo Martin Luther King’s eternal line, she had a dream.
"I didn't come from any money or anything, but I did have a dream and I did have hope ... That's really all you need," Williams is quoted on Wimbledon.com as saying following her victory over Angelique Kerber on Saturday to equal Steffi Graf's Open-era record of 22 singles grand slam crowns.
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Lest we forget, Williams has also won 14 grand slam doubles titles and three Olympic doubles gold alongside her sister. Also in her collection are two mixed doubles grand slam titles, an Olympic singles gold and five year-end championships. She has won more than US$80 million (Dh294 million) in prize money.
Not bad for a girl from Compton, California who started her journey with merely a dream and a hope. In the interview, she did not mention specific goals, such as equalling Graf’s record of 22 grand slams. And she would rather not talk about Margaret Court’s all-time record of 24 major titles, nor Martina Navratilova’s record Wimbledon haul of nine singles titles. Williams is on seven.
“Oh God, no,” said Williams, who has suffered mentally over the past 10 months, first after failing to complete a calendar grand slam at the 2015 US Open in front of adoring home fans, and then losing the finals of the Australian and French Open this year.
“One thing I learned about last year is to enjoy the moment. I’m definitely going to enjoy this. I’ve learned a lot about 22. I learned not to get involved in those debates and conversations. I just learned to just play tennis. That’s what I do best.”
Needless to add, she does it better than any player in the world today. Still, she is human and her frailties came to the fore following that loss at the US Open final last September. Williams felt she had let down a lot of people.
"This is the biggest moment in my career history, and I didn't get it, and I've never been in this position," a downcast Williams recalls of her US Open defeat in the recently released documentary Serena: The Other Side of Greatness.
“I’ve been in a real dark hole. I also feel like I let a lot of people down, like you were giving a lot of people hope to believe they could do something that was impossible. But, hell, I couldn’t do it either.”
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It took her some time to get over that disappointment, but Williams has risen again. She found inspiration in LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers' epic comeback from 3-1 down in the NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors.
“I was really inspired by what happened in the NBA this year, with LeBron James coming back,” Williams told ABC in an interview following her Wimbledon triumph. “That was, I felt like, wow! I felt like a lot of people wrote him off like, ‘Oh, it’s all about the other player [Stephen Curry]’. And he was like, ‘No. I’m still great. I am a great player’. I was really inspired by LeBron and what that whole team did.”
Inspiration, then, comes in many different guises for Williams. But probably her greatest influence is her coach Patrick Mouratoglou, the man she hired following her first-round loss to Virginie Razzano at the 2012 French Open.
The Frenchman knows what he wants and he is not content seeing Serena merely equal records.
"I don't like 22, I don't like 24, because Serena doesn't equal; she beats records," Mouratoglou was quoted as saying in The Sydney Morning Herald. "So it's either three more or nothing."
If those words don’t inspire Williams to No 25 then nothing will.
arizvi@thenational.ae
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