[November 12th
marked the
125th anniversary of the signing of America’s first professional
football player, William
“Pudge” Heffelfinger. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Pudge and other groundbreaking
professional athletes, leading up to a weekend post on Trump and sports!]
On two factors
that have entirely changed my perspective on the tennis superstars.
I have to start
this post with full disclosure: for many years, indeed most of their long and
hugely successful careers in professional tennis, the
Williams Sisters would have been most likely to show up in this space as
part of my annual post-Valentine’s
non-favorites series. There were quite a few things that rubbed me the
wrong way about Venus and Serena Williams, but I would highlight two in
particular. One is not at all on them: their father Richard
Williams, who had always seemed (and still I will admit largely seems) to
me to embody the worst kind of overbearing and self-centered tennis/sports
parent. And the other was much more fully about them, and especially Serena,
who (I long felt) could never lose a tennis match and credit her opponent in
any way; she always seemed to be blaming herself and her play, suggesting that
if she just played the way she could, it would be impossible for any opponent
to give her a challenge. Given Serena’s unrivaled career success, that might
well be an accurate assessment, but it still felt at best petty and at worst
downright disrespectful to so consistently (as I saw it) talk about her
opponents and matches in that way. So even a couple years, I would have viewed
the most recent Australian
Open final between Venus and Serena as the worst thing that could happen in
a women’s tennis tournament.
My perspective
has entirely changed in the last couple years, however, and while I know that
doesn’t and shouldn’t matter at all to the Williams Sisters, I do think that
the two most central influences in shifting my point of view are interesting
ones to AmericanStudy and are both relevant to this series on women in sports. The
single most
powerful influence has been the sections of Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen (2015) dedicated both to narrating
one particular controversial moment in Serena’s career and to portraying
and analyzing perceptions of Serena’s identity (that New York Times Magazine piece by Rankine echoes and extends many of
Citizen’s topics, if in a different
genre of course) and her responses to them overall. Of course I had long
recognized, when I took a step back from my personal feelings on Serena and the
sisters, the crucial roles that both race and gender (in an intersectional
combination) have always played in shaping our narratives of the Williams’.
But it’s one thing to recognize something analytically, and another to feel it
empathetically; and I have to admit that it was reading Rankine’s book that
truly made it possible for me to emphathize with Serena (and Venus) and how
such narratives and frames have affected (if in no way limited) them at each
stage and moment. Perhaps I should have been able to do so without the book,
but of course works of art can and do greatly amplify our capacity for empathy,
and Rankine’s portrayal of Serena offered a wonderful case in point for me.
The other main
factor in shifting my perspective is a bit more complicated to write about, and
a lot more 21st century. To put it simply, many of the scholars and figures whom I follow on
Twitter—many of them women of color, but also certainly folks in every
conceivable ethnic and identity category—are huge fans of Serena and Venus, and
would often during and around tournaments Tweet about what the Williams Sisters
meant to them. I’ll be the first to admit that Twitter often fails to live up
to this ideal, but at its heart one of the things it best represents is a
chance to listen to other people, to hear and learn from their voices and
perspectives with an immediacy and (in its own digital way) intimacy that’s not
possible (or at least not the same) in any other medium with which I’m
familiar. I can’t pretend that the first few times I saw such pro-Williams
Tweets, I wasn’t more annoyed than anything else; but fortunately I continued
to see them, and starting listening to and learning from them. I’m not looking
for a pat on the back for that, as again I was doing both what Twitter should
allow us to do and, for that matter, what any human being should do in
conversation with others. Instead, I want to highlight this effect as both a
model of what a site and space like Twitter can do and mean, and as a
particularly good example of how these 21st century communities can,
again at their best, help open us up to perspectives and voices that it might
be otherwise harder for us to truly hear and be shaped by. Thanks to such
perspectives, as well as to Rankine’s wonderful poem, I now am nothing but
excited for the Williams Sisters to have one more (or another—who knows how
many more there might be?) Grand Slam tournament battle.
Next
AthleteStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other athletes or related histories you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment