Serena Williams Biography

I realize that Serena Williams is possibly the most athletically gifted female to ever play the games of tennis. I also know that, when healthy and movivated – which seems to be a huge problem these days – Williams can beat any female on the planet – and probably some men too. ;

However, as I wrote in a column earlier this year (You Go Girl) in response to tennis great, Chris Evert’s publicly calling Williams out for her lack of desire to play tennis, I had to agree with Evert on the fact that Williams, could have – and should have – gone down in history as the greatest female tennis player of all-time. 

While it looks as though that may never be the case, Williams has still managed to compile a career record that others only dream of. 

Williams was born in Saginaw, Michigan. Eventually, the family moved to the Los Angeles and when she and her four sisters were young, their parents, Richard and Oracene (also called Brandy), took them to the poor and sometimes violent Los Angeles suburb of Compton. Her father dreamed of making at least one of his daughters a tennis superstar, hoping that involvement in sports would give them a way out of that neighborhood. 

When Williams was four and a half, she won her first tournament. She entered 49 tournaments before the age of 10, winning 46 of them and at one point, replaced her sister Venus as the number one ranked tennis player aged 12 or under in California. 

In 1991, Richard Williams, saying that he hoped to prevent his daughters from facing racism, stopped sending them to national junior tennis tournaments, and Serena attended a tennis school run by professional player Rick Macci instead. Macci had already helped the careers of Jennifer Capriati and Mary Pierce, among others.