CNN interviewed Serena Williams when she was 9. Here’s what she said about women in tennis.
It’s hard to describe the moment Serena Williams turned 9. You know how, when you’re a kid, you don’t talk about that? We don’t even talk about it when it happens to us. But Williams does, and her mother, Barbara Avant, and her sister, Venus, are the ones to explain their daughter’s birthday. Venus is also 9.
“We didn’t want to,” Avant says. “They were little. We weren’t even a year into it. It seemed like it would be a good idea.” She smiles. And that smile makes it clear how a child can define a moment.
When Serena Williams turned 9 in August 2011, she was an international star at 5-foot-11 and 20 years old. She was a dominant player in the sport, winning two Grand Slam singles titles, including the U.S Open, and breaking the record for most consecutive Grand Slam singles titles. She has been a top-tier player since she reached puberty, but that doesn’t really take away from the fact that, at 9, she was a very young child. It’s hard to think of a more compelling, and potentially transformative, story of a child in sports.
Williams has won nine Grand Slam titles, two more than the record she broke at age 9, and she is the oldest woman in the world to win a singles title, at 30 years old. She has had an incredibly successful career that has won her millions of dollars, fame, and admiration, but in a way, it feels like a story of struggle that she had to begin with, beginning with her childhood.
But Williams doesn’t talk much about her childhood. She doesn’t talk about her parents. She rarely talks about being a kid. In fact, Williams was never a kid. She just didn’t talk about growing up. She didn’t want to. Williams was at a crossroads in her life when she turned 9. A lot of what she had become, and what she was going to become, was a result of her relationship with her mother. She didn’t talk a lot about that. She just didn’t talk about it.
But Williams is a young woman from an incredible story in sports. She is an inspirational athlete with a unique relationship with her mother. She is a legend. Yet she rarely talks about her life in the game. She’s just