On the Line (17 page)

After that, we powered through the rest of the field without losing a set, and the great kicker was it was one of those tournaments
where they present the winners with a giant check after the final match. We’ve all seen those checks, right? The kind they
use for photo opportunities when someone wins a contest? I hadn’t really thought of the prize money before we ended up winning,
and I still don’t really think about the prize money. I play to win. Even today, tournament directors sometimes have to come
after me to get me to collect the purse. I’ll leave the site without remembering to pick up my money. They end up mailing
me the check. Not because I’ve got so much money in the bank that there’s no room for any more. (Yeah, right.) No, because
the money has never been the motivating force. That’s not why I play, so I don’t really think about it. For me, it’s about
the competition, the trophy, the title. Everything else is just gravy.

Back in Oklahoma City in 1998, winning was brand-new, but even then it was more about the accomplishment than the money. That
sounds like a line, but it’s the God’s honest truth. And yet, that first time I won, I wanted all the stuff that came with
winning. The ceremony at center court. The giant check. The photo op and the press conference and the article in the paper
the next day. I wanted it all. I’d grown up watching all these great players accept their giant checks at center court, and
it never occurred to me that one day I’d get a giant check of my own. It’s such a silly prop, really, but when you’re on the
receiving end of a big old check with your big old name on it, posing for pictures and waving to the crowd, it’s such a heady
feeling. I hadn’t really realized that was what I wanted, but now that it was happening it seemed like I’d wanted it all along.
The check itself was for $4,500—a lot of money, absolutely, but hardly enough to justify all that paperboard for the fake
check. And yet when they presented it to me and V it felt like we’d won a million dollars.

It was all the money in the world and a little bit more besides.

We still have that check, by the way. (No, you can’t actually endorse it and take it to the bank—not that we tried!) Every
time I look at it I think back to that first professional win, to how it felt to come out on top with my sister at my side.
Of course, true greatness would only come once I started winning singles tournaments. Even at sixteen, I knew that full well,
but for the time being this taste of half-greatness (with V tasting the other half) was just fine with me.

*  *  *

V
ery quickly, I went from being alone and untethered out on the court to feeling empowered when I was playing singles. I went
from being a little overwhelmed and out of place to believing I was untouchable, unstoppable… all in the space of just a few
tournaments. I had a lot of growing up to do in that time. I had to grow my game, that was part of it, but I also had to grow
my mind-set to where it could withstand the pressures of tournament play.

Pressure comes in all shapes and sizes. It means different things for different people. For a lot of tennis players growing
up on the junior circuit, it means pleasing their parents and coaches, and justifying the time and expense of flying all over
the place just so they can compete. For others, it means worrying constantly about what they’re eating, how hard they’re training,
what they’re giving up by focusing so single-mindedly on their game. For me, it’s been about the never-ending pursuit of perfection,
and making room for the realization that I might never get my game
exactly
where I want it to be—meaning I’d never be firing on all cylinders at precisely the right time.

I never really worried about the component parts of my game. I’d always had the shots, and the killer instinct, and the fiery
competitive streak, but I’d never had to put all those aspects of my personality together on such a public stage, so it took
a couple stops and starts. Also, it took some time for me to grow into my body and reinvent my approach. Remember, I had always
been on the tiny side, and my style of play reflected that. As I’ve written, I was all about lobs and volleys and shot placement
when I was a kid, but at around sixteen I had this monster growth spurt, which gifted me a whole other aspect to my game.
All of a sudden, I could hit with power, and I developed a range to rival my sister’s. And my serve! My goodness, it became
such a weapon!

It fell mostly to me to incorporate all these changes into the way I played. Emotionally, physically, it was on me. Daddy
was a tremendous coach, but it takes being out there a time or two to really
feel
your way. My mom, too, tried to help me make sense of my various growing pains and plusses, but here again it was on me.
It takes a certain measure of independence that’s hard to come by when you’re growing up in such a tight family, when you’re
used to doing everything together. (And I do mean
everything
!) It can be very isolating, very lonely, competing at a high level in an individual sport. There are no teammates to pick
you up or cover your back. There’s no one who can know
exactly
what you’re seeing, thinking, feeling. It’s on you. You can have all the support in the world—God knows I had a ton!—but
in the end it’s just you.

But I got there, before long. On my own. And then, one crazy-weird day in 1999, about a year after my first professional win,
my parents told us they were getting a divorce. It threw me, I’ll say that, but I was pretty much an adult by this point.
Venus and I were building a house and planning to move in together, so a divorce wasn’t going to change
our
lives all that much. My parents’ lives, sure. That’s the whole point of getting a divorce, to find a way to be happy apart
if you can’t find a way to be happy together. But our lives? Not so much. And yet, the change still did its own little number
on me, because for years and years we had two great sources of strength and power running through our house; we had our faith,
and we had each other. Our God, Jehovah, and our family itself. It was central. And so in this way, at least, my parents’
announcement seemed to tear at the very fabric of our lives.

My first thought was,
How will we keep going as a family after something like this?
But then I realized that we were all grown and independent and doing our own thing. It wasn’t like we were all living under
the same roof and our lives would never be the same. It was more like:
Okay, if they’re not meant to be together, they’re not meant to be together; if they don’t make each other happy, they should
move on.
And if we sisters had a hard time dealing with our parents’ breakup, we just had to get over it.

My parents are strong, opinionated people. I loved them dearly. We all did. That wasn’t about to change. And we all knew they
loved us right back. That wasn’t going to change, either. If together they came to the decision that they should get divorced,
then they should get divorced.

My take didn’t much matter, but here it is anyway: I always saw my mother as the backbone of our family, the spine. My dad,
he was the rest of the body. Together, they made up the whole. They kept our family working. At some point, their relationship
wasn’t working anymore, but they kept at it for a while. And then they split and I started to think: you can’t live without
the spine, can you? You can’t live without all those other moving parts. For a while there, we were all worried how the spine
would work without the rest of the body. We worried where we’d find our direction. I thought about it, and I thought about
it. Venus and I, we talked and talked about it. We talked about it in terms of tennis, and in terms of everything else. I
talked about it with
all
my sisters. I talked about it with my parents.

And guess what? In the end, it was all just talk, because you can’t know a thing until you’re in its middle. You’ve got to
try it on for a while and see how it fits. Doesn’t matter if it’s the first baby steps you take on the professional tour or
the first night you go to sleep knowing your parents are getting a divorce. It weirds you out at first, but then you wake
up the next morning and realize your life looks a whole lot like it did the day before. The people who love you still love
you. The opportunities you’ve been reaching for your whole life are still there for the taking.

It’s up to you to get on with it, that’s all.

Fear will hold U back. Champions fear nothing. Only fear God and give Him glory. Fear no man (woman). Use those legs. God
gave them to U for a reason. Put your gifts to work. Take the ball on the rise. Attack the short ball—it’s waiting for U!!!
Show no emotion. U R black and U can endure anything. Endure. Persevere. Stand tall.

—
MATCH BOOK ENTRY

I
like to look my best on the court. I believe it’s important. It goes to self-esteem, and at the same time it ignites an all-important
spark for some of that silent fuel I like to talk about. It also gets me thinking how we sometimes draw strength in areas
we never think to look. In my case, I’m an athlete; I’m meant to draw strength from the weight room, from my iron will, from
the sheer force of my game. But here I am, fussing over how I look, thinking that this, too, will make a difference.

Face it, if you carry a positive picture of yourself you’ll present a positive picture to everyone else. If you put your best
effort into how you look, you’ll put your best effort into whatever it is you do. Personally, I always felt that when there
was an edge to how I looked, there was an edge to my game. That’s why I tune it out when people give me flak for spending
so much time on my appearance. They say I’m an athlete, not a fashionista. They say that if I’m doing my job, I’ll be out
there sweating and grimacing and trying to be competitive. I’ll look a mess. And they’re right. Once a match is underway,
there’s no getting away from that—and there shouldn’t be. In fact, when I’m in the middle of a tough match, I wear all that
sweat and effort like a badge. The nastier I look, the nastier I feel on the court, but why shouldn’t I dress myself up and
pay attention to how I look before I start playing? And after? Why shouldn’t I put on a fun pair of earrings or a gorgeous
bracelet or a killer outfit?

Like it or not, I live in the public eye. People are looking at me wherever I go. Most of the time, people see me on the court.
They don’t see me when I’m on the town, or shopping, or goofing around at the beach. Well, of course they
do
see me, moving about in my normal, mundane way, but only a relative few catch me up close, nowhere near as many as when I’m
playing tennis, when all eyes are on me and my opponent. Think back to all the great tennis champions in recent years, and
you’ll see they all made an effort to look good on the court: Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Martina Hingis. (And—she’ll never
let me hear the end of it if I don’t include her in this group—Venus Williams, of course!)

Remember Fernando, Billy Crystal’s
Saturday Night Live
character? The Fernando Lamas–inspired “You look mahvelous!” guy? The joke was that it’s better to look good than to feel
good, but underneath it was a hint of truth. Appearances
do
count. I firmly believe this. No, appearances aren’t everything, but they’re definitely part of the equation. That’s why
I spend so much time on mine.

I always considered myself kind of plain. When I look back at pictures of myself as a little kid, I’m put back in mind of
how awkward and ugly I used to feel. Mind you, I didn’t feel this way all the time. For the most part, I was just doing my
thing, hardly giving my appearance much thought. I was just me. When I was in high school, I tried to wear whatever the other
girls were wearing. Don’t forget, I’d been out of the social loop for a bit, with those years I spent being home-schooled.
Now that I was back among my peers I wanted desperately to fit in, so I didn’t really have my own sense of style. And yet,
instead of trying to call attention to myself with my clothes, I guess I looked to deflect it. I liked to shop, and I liked
to wear nice things, but most of my stuff was basic, simple. Tunde would help me pick out a couple stylish, versatile outfits
at the beginning of the school year on our shopping trips to Mervyns. I wore a lot of solid colors, as I recall. Nothing loud.
And certainly nothing that would stand out.

That all changed soon enough. One morning I woke up and just started wearing different things. Whatever suited my mood at
that particular time. It was like a light switched on for me. I started looking at fashion magazines and developing a sense
of what I liked and what I didn’t like. What might look good on me and what I shouldn’t even think of wearing. I still didn’t
have my own sense of style, but at least I was a little more adventurous, a little more curious. At least I was open to what
was out there.

Now, take that frame of mind and bare-bones fashion sense and layer it on top of the role I filled with my four big sisters.
They were always dressing me up, and fussing with my hair, and basically putting me to work like a model or mannequin to try
out all these different looks they were considering for themselves. They were a fashion-forward bunch, especially as they
got older. When Tunde and Isha were in high school, they were looking in the mirror all the time! And, when they weren’t looking
in the mirror, they were working out their new looks on us! Lyn and V, too, in a sliding-scale kind of way, started dressing
me up and working it out. I loved all the fuss and attention, and on some level I guess I filed it all away for later, for
when I finally had the money and the opportunity—and the
stage
—to really strut my stuff.

Eccentric. Daring. Adventurous. Fun. Call it whatever you want, but very quickly I developed my own flair, which in turn was
helped along by a couple of welcome developments off the court. The first was a sponsorship deal with Puma, which gave me
license to be out there and bold and really, really distinctive in what I wore when I played; after Puma, there was Nike,
another sportswear company that was willing to push the envelope and let my personality shine through in what I wore. The
second was a course of study I started taking at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in design and fashion. I’ll hit the
sponsorship deal first, because that’s how it unfolded for me as well.