HER SERENA HIGHNESS
An intimate portrait of tennis’s Greatest of All Time explores Serena Williams’s many identities, writes
A disappointing real-life ending capped the five-part HBO documentary series Being Serena this week when tennis star Serena Williams had to withdraw in the fourth round of the French Open due to injury. The series, which does not credit a director, focuses on Williams’s journey over the past year and a half, from her 23rd Grand Slam victory at the Australian Open just after she and her partner, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, discovered that she was eight weeks’ pregnant, through to the birth of their daughter Alexis Olympia Ohanian jnr, their wedding, and Williams’s return to tennis, ending with her appearance at Roland Garros for this year’s French Open.
Anchored by Williams’s voice-over, the series gives an often intimate insight into the life of tennis’s GOAT (Greatest of All Time), behind the headlines she makes. We see her life of assistants and helpers in her California and Florida mansions, and the celebrity guest list at her wedding that included Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Kelly Rowland and Anna Wintour.
However, this is not a reality show flashing of bling life in the vein of Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta. Rather, it’s an attempt by Williams to offer an insight into how she performs her life in the glare of the constant spotlight — in which she is often faced with racism and sexism.
The central struggle of the series is between Williams’s desire to be a good, strong, successful mother and her wish to return to the world of the sport she’s dominated for the past decade. We watch as she and her husband (who is endearingly supportive and besotted) negotiate the anxieties of her pregnancy up to the moment at which Alexis jnr is delivered by Caesarean, only to have her mother then face a very serious postpartum threat that makes our hearts jump in fear.
As Williams deals with the difficulties of post-pregnancy training and we watch her strain under the pressure of making difficult decisions that force her to choose between the necessities of motherhood and the demands of her career, it’s hard not to empathise. She is there to remind us of the challenges she’s already had to face since she and her sister Venus started dominating the sport in the early 2000s.
The series makes use of plenty of archival footage to take us back to moments like the final of the Indian Wells Masters in 2001 when the sisters played each other, and their doggedly determined father, Richard, was booed following accusations of rigging tournaments and pre-deciding which of them would win. There’s a gentle rivalry between them in scenes where Venus makes an appearance, such as one in which she quips that her defeat by a newly pregnant Serena in the Australian Open final in 2017 wasn’t fair because it was two against one.
Overall the series might have benefited from an approach that allowed for more examination of Williams in the context of tennis history and her status as a black role model in a competitive environment that has made her have to work extremely hard for everything she has.
However, it manages to succeed more than it fails in presenting an intimate portrait of a legendary figure and the identities she must negotiate in her everyday life. Williams is not just the Greatest of All Time, she’s also a strong black woman who has fought hard for her status, and a new mother who is as anxious, loving and protective as her own was when she was raising Serena on the tough streets of Compton.