What we can learn from ‘King Richard’

In nearly every scene of “King Richard,” a new film starring Will Smith that re-tells the familiar backstory of Venus and Serena Williams’ rise to worldwide fame, there is tension between Richard Williams and an opposing character who either thinks he’s crazy for trying to raise two tennis prodigies on the run-down courts of Compton or on the verge of screwing up a sure thing.

If it’s not legendary journalist Bud Collins giving Williams the brush-off when he’s running around the fancy country clubs of Los Angeles looking for coaching help, it’s the constant exasperation of industry veterans at Williams pulling his daughters off the junior tournament circuit or turning down multi-million dollar offers from agents and shoe companies before Venus had even played a professional match.

“You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met in my life,” one of the Williams’ sisters’ early coaches tells Richard, whose plan for his daughters refused to follow any traditional path that generations of champion tennis players had previously tread.

Though Venus and Serena fans will flock to “King Richard” to relive the childhood of two of the world’s most popular athletes, the sisters are somewhat secondary in this telling of the tale. For most of the movie, the main character is their father’s self-assurance in navigating a world that was totally foreign to him aside from what he had read in magazines and absorbed through teaching videos.

But for all the controversy that surrounded Richard Williams as he unconventionally brought his daughters into the world of professional tennis while boasting of their yet-to-be-proven capabilities, the film’s primary lesson can be applied across all sports, races and economic classes. As imperfect as the process of building athletic careers might be, it always comes back to discipline, work and self-belief.

“I’m in the champion-raising business,” Richard says unapologetically early in the film, long before anyone outside the Williams family knew what Venus and Serena would one day become.

And, in fact, everyone in the audience already knows that when young Venus (played by Saniyya Sidney) talks about wanting to win Wimbledon, that she in fact went on to win it five times. We also know that the portrayal of young Serena (played by Demi Singleton) loving her older sister but struggling at times to escape her shadow would portend becoming arguably the greatest female player ever.

In that sense, it would be almost impossible to build any suspense or narrative tension around the Grand Slam titles the Williams sisters won or getting to No. 1 in the world. This is a movie about the process Richard Williams believed in and the high stakes of every decision that was made before either one of his daughters ever played a professional match.

To be clear, this is not a hagiography despite Venus and Serena serving as executive producers on the film. The less appealing parts of Richard Williams’ personality and his life are on full display.

But the heart of the story contains a message that every parent and every aspiring athlete can gain something from: Be humble and do the work.

Are great athletes born to be great, or are they trained to be great? In this case, perhaps it’s both. In that sense, there is no sport Williams could have chosen for his daughters better suited to his instincts.

Though there are a lot of different ways to play tennis effectively, it’s game of relentless repetition, the ability to physically withstand brutal points and split-second mental reactions that can ebb and flow based on all kinds of circumstances.

What makes “King Richard” so clever is that it weaves a family story with great insight into how Williams blended the knowledge of technique that he had acquired through voracious research with some oddball drills that had to have been entirely homemade. (When tennis coach Rick Macci visits the Williamses in Compton, he doesn’t quite know what to make of the girls warming up by javelintossing old, beat-up racquets.)

Despite the bombastic caricature that Williams became and how often he frustrated the establishment, the reality is that he mostly knew what he was doing. Though he was never a high-level player, he acquired knowledge of technique through whatever means he could and gave his daughters some very valuable skills that led to a lot of their success.

One of them is the trademark Williams racquet preparation on their forehand that allowed them to take the ball early and on the rise. The other was hitting groundstrokes with an open stance as opposed to the more traditional method of always turning the body sideways.

In fact, one of the more humorous through lines of the movie is Richard Williams’ insistence — to the annoyance of the girls’ formal coaches — that they hit with an open stance to be able to recover quicker to the next ball. What the movie doesn’t necessarily make clear but that hardcore tennis players and fans will instantly understand is that Williams, on that topic, was most definitely ahead of his time.

And at the end of the day, Williams’ fundamental philosophy that the everyday grind of practice and working on skills was more valuable than young kids competing against one another is one of the more resonant messages of our time.

Would Venus Williams have become Venus Williams had she followed the traditional model of going all over the world playing against the top-ranked juniors from the time she was 11 or 12 years old? We’ll never know.

But what we do know is that even at age 41, with her best tennis several years in the rear-view mirror, she still wants to compete and get better with new technical adjustments showing up in her game every year. We know that Serena, despite childbirth and injuries and turning 40 all catching up to her, still hungers to win one more Grand Slam title even though it really wouldn’t change her legacy at this point whatsoever.

As “King Richard” makes clear, Williams was not a perfect father or tennis coach. His exact methods and his beliefs wouldn’t work for everyone, and at times his were so extreme that even his daughters eventually pushed back. But he built a foundation, a discipline and a hunger into his daughters’ tennis that everyone guiding an aspiring athlete should be able to relate to.