The Florida Everglades are a ravaged landscape with an empty road. Summer, 2001.
I have been instructed to wait in a layby while Richard Williams, the father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena, arrives.
A black sports car customised for me skids to an abrupt halt just inches from my back bumper, half-an-hour after our scheduled meeting.
‘Get in!’ he barks, roaring off before I can close the passenger door.
Williams is seen wildly veering from lane-to-lane as the needle approaches 100 mph. He takes apparent pleasure in my alarm clock and bombards you with aggressive questions.
Richard Williams orchestrated the Williams sisters’ ascent to the pinnacle in women’s tennis.
What’s my agenda? What’s my agenda? What makes him trust me? Strangely enough, I went to college.
‘Ah, so you an educated man!’ he sneers, in his Deep South baritone. ‘Me, I’m not educated. I’m stupid . . . least, that’s what people like to think.’
He then declares himself a self-taught polymath, brilliant at science and the arts, and a ‘genius’ at maths.
He likens his inability to sleep while working to Napoleon or Martin Luther King.
So began my disquieting and, at times, surreal day with ‘King Richard’, as he is styled (doubtless to his pleasure) in a biographical film which opened in British cinemas at the weekend.
Williams, who moulded Serena to the best female tennis player ever, and Venus just behind, was perhaps the architect of the most daring human experimentation in sports history.
Will Smith brilliantly portrays him in the movie. It aims to show his true motivations for programming his daughters to win tennis.
I say ‘purports’ because, having had inside access to this phenomenal sister-act from the moment they punctured the white, privileged bubble of ‘ladies’ tennis, I know this sentimentalised, feel-good film — produced by Venus and Serena themselves and based on their father’s autobiography — reveals only the sugar-coated version of their story.
These more dangerous aspects of the situation are often ignored, deformed or glossed over quickly.
Williams’s strict tennis methods were a major reason for his daughters’ long-lasting success in the game of tennis.
This is achieved by the script ending in 1994 when Venus, a 14-year old Venus made her professional debut.
The events are then cherry-picked, and present as newsreel flashbacks.
We are reminded of the sister’s vast sponsorship deals; Serena’s world-record 23 Grand Slam wins; Venus’s seven Wimbledon titles; their immeasurable contribution to black and female empowerment.
We are also given the impression of a family which, though it’s had its differences, remains united.
But had the story been allowed to continue for a few more years, audiences wouldn’t have left their seats with such a warm glow.
For although Williams has unquestionably realised his dream (Venus and Serena are collectively worth £225 million and the latter is widely regarded as the all-time best woman player), his success has come at a considerable price.
When I first met him 20 years ago the myth that he had created was beginning to crumble. To try to put them behind him, he welcomed me into his private sanctum.
First, he whisked me to a ghetto, where gang members high-fived him ‘out of respect’.
Next, he moved to a project to help disadvantaged kids that he claimed financed with millions of dollars his girls had saved.
Will Smith portrays Williams in King Richard, currently playing in British cinemas
He showed me streets ‘named in his honour’. While juggling four business deals with his phones, he did it all.
Then, as evening fell, I became the first journalist allowed inside ‘Leisure Acres’, the estate behind whose electrified, 10ft walls he chivvied his daughters to practise until their hands blistered, and subjected them to the rules set out in his 78-page ‘masterplan’ for tennis immortality.
Williams took me into his tennis laboratory — lined with wall mirrors so this ultimate egotist could watch himself at work — and logged on to the 4 sq ft computer screen where he analysed not only Venus and Serena’s tennis statistics, but those of their rivals.
We climbed aboard the campervan in which he shuttled them between tournaments (so they wouldn’t have to mingle with other girls on the tour).
Its livery was sprayed with images of his protegees flanking their mentor, the ‘Greatest Father on Earth’.
I was not the kind of despot that King Richard regaled. He was captivating, but he seemed menacingly calculated.
Serena WIlliams, (pictured), is widely recognized as being the greatest female tennis player in history.
His girls were confident and assertive on court, which is what we’re led to believe. They were far from it though, and their strict upbringing meant that they lived well into their 20s, before becoming the role models we admire today.
What do you know? It was when Venus was 18, and Serena 17, that I flew to Florida, for my first non-tennis interview.
Wimbledon was fast approaching and I wanted to find out about their unique upbringings, music tastes, fashion preferences, and boyfriends.
Unfortunately, I was left with an inordinate amount of embarrassing nonsense, adolescent giggles and unpublishable gibberish. This was punctuated occasionally by incessant pings as the girls texted each other using their Nokia phones.
Their father’s refusal to allow them to mingle with their peers, and his insistence that they spent every spare minute practising, had left them devoid of even basic social skills.
Richard wasn’t the only one to blame. Their mother, Oracene, a Jehovah’s Witness, was equally strict, banning the girls from going out with boys until they were 18. ‘When they are dating, they should be planning to get married,’ she told me.
A second concern was the fear of her being vulnerable to more mature women players’ amorous advances.
‘They are in the locker-room talking with these older women — undressed — and they are lesbians,’ I recall her saying earnestly.
Venus and Serena were first confronted by the brutal realities of their lives as sports icons in 2001 when a cousin said that the results of their matches against one another had been rigged to ensure they remained at the top.
This damaging claim may explain the jeers that Serena received when she first stepped foot on French Open court. It was racism, though, that her mother explained to Serena.
The truth is that things only got worse with Oracene and Richard becoming a bitter rival.
This film depicts the two of them fighting, peacefully and vehemently, about his insistence on making big decisions regarding their daughters, without consulting her.
Serena Williams, currently seeking a 24th Women’s Grand Slam title
Williams has not been accused of resorting to violence. Yet shortly before our encounter, I uncovered reports filed by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s department, revealing that officers were called to ‘Leisure Acres’ twice, in 1997 and 1999, on suspicion that Williams had assaulted his wife.
According to reports, Oracene was left with three broken ribs after the second incident.
The couple subsequently separated and divorced in 2002, ending the second of Williams’s three disastrous marriages.
Betty Johnson became his second wife. He was accused by one of the children that he had abandoned them all to go into poverty.
He was 38 years older than his son, Lakeisha Graham. She bore him a boy before their bitter marriage ended in 2017.
However, the most tragic chapter in the real Williams sisters’ story came in 2003, when their elder half-sister, Yetunde Price, was murdered in a drive-by shooting, in the notorious Los Angeles suburb of Compton.
The film makes much of Richard’s courage in facing down gang members who pestered the then 19-year-old Yetunde as she watched her sisters practising on the pot-holed local courts.
What it doesn’t tell us is that, as the boss of a security business turning over $1million a year (so he told me), he had the means to raise his family in a safer area. His master plan included Venus and Serena’s upbringing in Compton.
Venus Williams is the proud owner of seven Grand Slam titles. However, she’s struggled to find success in recent times.
He believed that the rise from poverty of sporting icons like Larry Bird and Mike Tyson would help them to be more prepared for the circuit.
He was reckless and it had devastating consequences. The family moved to Florida after Rick Macci, the top coach offered Serena and Venus a scholarship at his academy.
Yetunde was the top-performing student in her class and therefore allowed to continue her education.
Tragically, her actions were not her fault. She was driving her boyfriend through a dangerous drug-dealing area when her partner drove her.
As I watched the film cleaned up at the weekend, it made me wonder if Richard, her stepfather at 79, who is now weaker from several strokes recently, could at least take some responsibility for any collateral damage he caused through his vainglorious pursuit.
Remembering the messianic glint in King Richard’s eyes as we sped along that Everglades highway, that seems highly unlikely.