Driving force
IN KING RICHARD, THE NEW BIOPIC CHRONICLING the rise of the superstar tennis sisters each now known by one name—Venus and Serena—the protagonist Richard Williams, played with standout moxie by Will Smith, acts on a familiar parental impulse. Who among us hasn’t spouted off about the talents of our dear children to anyone within earshot? Richard, however, always possessed a supernatural level of confidence in the athletic abilities of his two youngest daughters. Parenting handbooks would tell you to set reasonable expectations for your children. Richard literally wrote his own plan: a 78-page blueprint for turning Venus and Serena into legends. “I’m in the champion-raising business,” Richard says at one point in the film.
Early on, in the movie as in real life, the lily-white tennis establishment resisted Richard’s conviction that these young Black girls, who learned the game on the cracked, weedy courts of Compton, Calif.,
