She’s the first Black woman in the Open era to be ranked the number one female tennis player in the world she’s won a combined 21 Grand Slam championships and 4 Olympic gold medals. That’s almost three decades of excellence. Just look at the material: At 41, she’s now the inverse of the age she was when she first went pro. Venus Ebony Starr Williams is the epitome of “twice as good.” Hell, she’s twice as good squared.
Of course, I’m guessing that was her point. Here was one of the world’s greatest athletes going out of her way to acknowledge the singular thing I do better than she does-the thing that I, too, had to work twice as hard on to meet her at this moment. Venus Williams had just thrown me off my game and we weren’t even on a court. “As someone who can’t write, I admire those who have that skill.” The thousands of miles between her chic Paris hotel room and my apartment in California weren’t enough to dull my shock. “Your articles are beautiful,” Venus said, sitting in front of her laptop in a silky pajama-style top, hair pulled back in a low bun, ornate chandelier casually twinkling behind her. That’s why I was fully prepared, as I opened my laptop for our Zoom, to honor the fact that Venus would once again be the best in the “room.” What I wasn’t prepared for, before I even asked my first question, was a compliment. Black women are often taught that we have to be “twice as good to get half as far” as our white counterparts in any given industry, and we rarely get to say aloud what it means when we succeed-that we are, in fact, the baddest bitch in the room (or as track and field star Sha’Carri Richardson would later succinctly put it, “that girl”).
Some writers may have found that intimidating, but I felt the opposite-her words made me feel confident, empowered. As the mic drop reverberated across the internet, it dawned on me that I would have to be the one to pick said mic back up and ask Venus to elaborate.
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