Serena Holds Court Tennis: She was down and seemingly out, now Serena Williams is racing back to the summit of tennis, here she discusses race, religion, sex and dinosaurs with Gaby Wood. We had agreed to meet at her home in Florida the day before Easter. Serena Williams, one of the decade's cultural icons, was in the middle of the most astonishing stage of her career. The so-called ghetto Cinderella had just pulled off a comeback of proportions neither Perrault nor Grimm would have considered: unseeded, and ranked at 81 in the world, she had won the Australian Open in January having scarcely played for 16 months. Yet the circumstances of our interview were so relaxed, so idyllic, I thought, it was bound to go wrong. And for a moment it seemed I was right. 作者跟小威约好了访问 这段大概描述一下小威澳网的成就 At the barrier to the lush and vast gated compound where Serena lives north of Palm Beach, I stop while the guard rings a number. He informs me that the house phone is out of service. I insist that I am expected. He makes a call to a mobile and returns. This time he is emphatic - even a little threatening. 'I spoke to Ms Williams,' he says. 'She told me she doesn't know anything about an interview and asks that you respect her privacy.' 作者到了 但是保全打电话给"威廉丝小姐" 但这位威廉丝小姐并不知道有访问 因此回拒了 It turns out that Serena's plane from Los Angeles is late. When she comes breezing in from the airport in her white SUV, oversized sunglasses masking half her face, small dogs jumping and yapping at the open window (she's sorry, her luggage took so long to arrive), and picks me up at the gate, it becomes clear that the guard has spoken to the wrong Ms Williams. 'Must've been Venus,' Serena explains as she drives me to her home. 'I didn't tell her you were coming and whenever anyone asks for an interview,' she says, taking the keys out of the ignition and grabbing one of the dogs from my lap, 'naturally, we always refuse.' 原来那威小姐是Venus. Serena没跟他说有访问 As they have for the past 25 years - and long after the story of their professional rivalry has dimmed - the Williams sisters live together. (And their father lives 15 minutes away.) Of course the place is far from small - the arched front door is flanked by colonnades, the floor-to-ceiling windows at the back surround a swimming pool and, when the house was built for them seven years ago, they asked for a wing each (Serena wanted two storeys, Venus wanted one; Venus, inevitably, is now kicking herself). 大威跟小威目前住在一起 威爸住在离他们15分钟的地方 'If I'd known about the place across the road I would have joined that one,' Serena says of another luxury community, as we unload her belongings - handbags, shoulder bags, a huge rib-rack of tennis rackets (courteously, she gives me the pink one with the wheels as she lifts the heftier things with no visible effort). 'Everyone's a member there - Tiger [Woods] is a member there, that guy who's married to Catherine Zeta-Jones is a member ... but I didn't know about it when we bought this.' The dogs, Jackie and Lorelei, follow at her heels as she opens the front door. 'Hmm,' she says, looking a little perplexed. The main room - or should I say atrium? - contains a Venetian chandelier so large you can barely imagine it fitting inside Venice, some pink-and-white striped satin Louis XV furniture and a few extra pink upholstered chairs piled up next to them. There are double-height midnight blue curtains embroidered with gold giraffes, and pseudo-Impressionist paintings lean against a wall. A hasty Post-it note reads: 'Please do not walk on the office floor. We will be back tomorrow.' 大概形容一下家里的样子 As it turns out, there's little point in attempting a through-the-keyhole analysis of the house, because Serena hardly recognises the place herself. The only traces of the sisters are the photographs of them, taken for Elle magazine years ago, on the walls. 'You know, Venus has an interior-design company now,' Serena offers by way of explanation. Every time Serena goes away, it seems, Venus takes the opportunity to experiment. Only a few weeks ago, the house was pink. 'When I came back it was all white - my sister decided we needed "a more sophisticated look",' Serena says, her head wobbling with irony as she pauses to admire some brand new Nike trainers that have landed in her hallway. 小威说大威有室内设计公司 所以每次小威不在 大威就有机会做实验了XD 小威说几星期前房子是粉红色等 等他回来变白色了XD 因为Venus说他们的房子应该要有个与众不同的颜色 The 22-year-old who had won Wimbledon two years running and four grand-slam titles on the trot - a feat she dubbed the 'Serena Slam' - lost the 2004 Wimbledon final to the teenage Maria Sharapova. Asked later how, as a 'tennis superstar', she felt about the defeat, Williams replied: 'A tennis superstar? I'm not a tennis superstar. I'm a superstar. Period. Like Britney Spears.' 介绍一下小威过去成就 并且引用小威说自己不只是个网球明星的话 And with that, it seemed, she moved on. Serena concentrated more on her clothing line, Aneres (Serena spelled backwards), on her acting career and on her red-carpet appearances. Aneres, which specialises in strapless satin minidresses and lime green snakeskin prints, was inaugurated with a fuchsia Lycra-and-lace number that even Serena, who dubs the look 'Slut-rena', has described as 'probably the most hideous thing I've ever made in my life'. As for her performances, she appeared on ER, lent her voice to The Simpsons and other animations, and is still in discussions with writers and directors about various projects. In 2005, she and Venus made a worryingly watchable reality TV series called Venus and Serena: For Real, in which they were seen having dinner with their family, doing yoga and playing the guitar. On the show, at a red-carpet event, they rushed girlishly to embrace James Avery, who played the father on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Serena declared herself to be an aspiring actress, whereupon an entertainment reporter asked, large microphone in hand, whether she had a monologue prepared. She didn't. What was her favourite play? Serena looked blank. Afterwards, she whispered to Venus that she should have thought of doing that soliloquy she knew: 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ...' 'What's that - Romeo and Juliet?' Venus asked. 'No!' Serena tutted, 'It's Hamlet!' 介绍一下小威场外的表现 包括服装设计 场外活动 演戏.配音等 Perhaps realising that her chances as an interpreter of Shakespeare were somewhat slim (that line is from Macbeth), Serena slowly got back into shape. Last year, she had fallen to a ranking of 139, her lowest in a decade. She was widely berated for losing focus, criticised for putting on weight - her fate, it appeared, was appropriated by the whole of America. Chris Evert wrote her an open letter that was published in Tennis magazine. 'Just a couple of years ago,' Evert wrote in 2006, 'when you were fully committed to the game, you showed the athleticism, shot-making and competitive desire to become the greatest player ever. You won five of the six grand slams you entered over the 2002 and 2003 seasons and looked utterly dominant in the process. Then you got sidetracked with injuries, pet projects and indifference, and have won only one major in the last seven you've played. I find those results hard to fathom ... Whether you want to admit it or not, these distractions are tarnishing your legacy.' 又谈网球 But this January, some mysterious force kicked in. After losing a third-round match in an insignificant event in Tasmania, Serena experienced what she later described as a 'Rocky moment' and, symbolically overwriting her 2004 loss at Wimbledon, defeated Sharapova (by then ranked world number one) 6-1 6-2 in the final of the Australian Open. She became the lowest ranked woman to win a grand-slam singles trophy in three decades. To call the final exceptional would be an understatement. It was spectacular: Serena dominated the match against an opponent who had not dropped a set in five previous rounds. In tears, she dedicated the victory to her sister Yetunde, murdered four years ago in Compton, Los Angeles, the gang-ridden town the rest of the Williams clan had long ago left behind. 谈到今年在Hobart输球後痛下决心夺回澳网 Serena has performed gloriously ever since (at the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami in March, she defeated Sharapova 6-1 6-1 in the fourth round and went on to win the tournament) and, only days before we were due to meet, she had soared back up to number 11 in the rankings. Nick Bollettieri, who has coached Serena since she was nine and who has been involved with nine world number-one players including Andre Agassi, later told me that he rated her comeback alongside Agassi's famous return to form in 1998. 'What makes Serena unusual?' Bollettieri asked himself. 'First of all, once she starts rolling and you tell her to roll through a cement building, she'll put her head down and roll through the building. This girl has so many qualities. They were put into storage for a little bit, but whatever the reason for that, I don't care. The girl is back! She was down - down to the bone - and she found a way. She's a fighter: that's the inspiration.' Nick Bollettieri对小威的评价 Between points at the Australian Open final, the camera closed in on Serena's face as she glanced directly back over her shoulder. Where in Sharapova you saw blunted calm or irritation, here was a close-up the greatest actors would kill for, full of beauty and assurance and tenderness, a face that seemed to tell a more complicated story behind the astonishing force with which she was playing. But what was that story? Though various speculations have been made about her two-and-a-half-year lull - that she was more interested in her 'pet projects', as Evert called them; that she was distracted by a long-running court case in which she and Venus and their father were accused of reneging on a deal to play an exhibition match; that she was still grieving for her sister; that she was experiencing a delayed reaction to her parents' divorce in 2002 - and although Serena herself has said she was 'at the bottom of the barrel', having lost faith, lost hope, lost 'everything', when we sit down to talk about it she will not budge from the simplest of explanations: she just had a knee injury, and needed time to recover. 提到小威受伤那时的失望跟沮丧 'I got injured!' she exclaims once we're out by the pool in the sun, sitting on infrequently used loungers. She stretches out, in her jeans and cut-off grey sweat top, takes the clip out of her hair to set her long, black extensions loose. 'I got injured and I got surgery, and I came back way too soon. And I did well,' she adds, in self-justification. 'I got to the finals of Wimbledon, but I never had fully recovered, so I kept having relapses. I'm much better now and thank God I took the time off. I don't want to go the rest of my career getting to the finals, getting to the semis - I've always considered myself more of a winner.' 小威说他复出太快了 就算她打进温网决赛 伤也没全好 But this, she reflects, is not merely the old self back - it's a new self. 'I feel like it's a mature self,' she says, though she is still only 25. 'I mean, I'm playing different, my game is a little better. I never felt that I'd reached my full potential. I always thought that I could play better.' And then she offers, in a pattern that establishes itself almost instantly, yet another proviso lest a crack in her confidence should be seen to appear: 'There was nothing wrong with my old self at all - to get to that level is awesome. I was playing amazing tennis. But at the same time, my game has matured.' 但现在小威说旧的自己回来了 说自己球技更成熟了 Years ago, she explains, she would always play to her opponent's stronger side; it was a kind of perfectionist challenge she had set herself on purpose, she suggests, to prove that her strong side was stronger than their strongest side - after all, what would be the fun in winning against weakness? Now, however, she has discovered the merits of efficiency. 'Now I'm like: let me hit to the backhand, I can get off in 25 minutes. It's just smarter. It's smarter tennis.' 几年前 小威总喜欢打对手最强的部分 证明自己比对手最强的地方还要强 但现在知道去找对手弱点了 打的更聪明 She also thinks she has changed outside of tennis. She is more relaxed, she says, more friendly. Not - the inevitable qualification comes quickly - that she wasn't friendly before. 'I was just shy and didn't talk as much. And I'm still very shy. People take it the wrong way, but it's not me being mean or anything, I'm just really shy. But I'm opening up more - in general, in life - I like to have fun more. And I realise tennis isn't the end of the world. I always took it really serious and now I'm out there and if I hit a bad shot I smile, and I won't be as upset, 'cos I realise it's just a game.' 小威说他其实蛮害羞的 但是现在他变的更友善了 也了解到网球不是全部 他如果打出坏球 因为他了解这只是场比赛 On the subject of her 'distractions', she says that some people need to have 'more of a myopic view on things'. Not Serena: 'I don't need that view. I can do different things, and I get bored easy. Like, if I were to play tennis every day, I would go nuts! Like, I take days off!' 关於他的分心呢 小威说他觉得有些人目光短浅 小威认为自己不需要那样的观点 他喜欢做些不同的事而不是每天打球 Venus, at home in Palm Beach with an injury, was so nervous she could hardly bear to watch the Australian Open final on TV. Serena says that she didn't especially feel her sister's absence, because Venus sent so many emails and called her so often with tips on how to beat individual players. 'I talked to her every day. She told me some key things - I can't tell you what, unfortunately!' she adds, breaking into glittering-toothed laughter. 'But they were really key. She helped me a lot in the final. Venus is a very smart player. She's played everybody.' 大威在澳网时很紧张 甚至不敢看决赛 但小威说他不觉得大威不在身边因为大威一直寄给他email 跟打电话给他建议 他说大威很聪明 也打过每个对手 Nevertheless, it is notable that the comeback was staged solo. Venus, after all, was the first to become world number one; she is 15 months older than Serena and they are unfathomably close. There was a time when they only seriously competed against each other in grand-slam finals and their wins seemed so interchangeable that accusations of fixing were frequent. Initially, she tells me, it was much harder for her psychologically when she beat Venus than when Venus beat her. 'Because Venus has always taken care of me my whole life - she's the ultimate bigger sister. One time when we were in school,' she says, introducing a story that says a lot about the dynamics of their relationship, 'I didn't have any lunch money - one of the many times I didn't have lunch money. And it was the best food - I think that day was like fried chicken day, and we were all so excited!' She laughs. 'Venus gave me her money and said, "Don't worry, you make sure you eat." And another time, when I was in fourth grade, I'd spent all my money at the ice cream truck.' Serena giggles again. 'But she'd saved her allowance and she had to pay for my lunch and she had to go hungry again. She's always taken care of me, almost like a mom. She used to read to me when we were little ... So the first time I beat her it was a little difficult. But after that it got easier.' 小威说打赢大威比输大威难受 因为大威一直都很照顾她 在学校的时候 小威没有带钱吃午餐 但那天午餐是炸鸡 所以他们都很兴奋 但是大威拿出自己的午餐前给小威 叫小威不要担心 自己吃饱就好 另一次小威把钱拿去冰淇淋了 大威又拿出自己的钱 然後又挨饿 The sisters were bred to be champions. A well rehearsed mythology holds that their father Richard, then living in the rough Los Angeles suburb of Compton with his wife Oracene and her three girls from an earlier marriage, heard that the winner of a local tennis tournament had earned more money than he made in a year. He announced to his wife that they were going to have two more girls and that they would be tennis champions. Then he took time out from his company, Samson Security, bought some instructional videos and taught himself how to play. 讲述威爸要教大小威打网球的往事 The girls practised (from the age of four) on public courts in the worst possible condition, with shopping carts full of old balls. On one occasion (so the story goes) gang violence broke out around them and they had to dive to the ground to avoid the scattered gunshot. From then on, so it is said, members of the Bloods gang became the girls' unofficial bodyguards against their rivals, the Crips. Richard Williams wanted his girls to be number one in the 'lily white' world of women's tennis one day and, when they got there, he wanted them to be able to say that they came from the worst neighbourhood. 四岁就开始在很糟的环境下打球了 都是旧球 还有帮派份子 甚至还有枪声 但是後来这些黑道变成大小威球场上的安全人员 The hype - as circulated by Williams in frequent press releases scripted in an attempt to drum up some sponsorship for his kids - was soon believed. By the time Venus was 10, she was being hailed by the New York Times and a Florida paper was pointing out, no doubt to Richard Williams's glee, that the murder rate in Compton was 10 times as high as that of Washington DC, the nation's murder capital among major cities. The girls had been seen by John McEnroe and Pete Sampras; they would play against Jim Courier, Jimmy Connors and Zina Garrison within a couple of years. When Venus was 11 (and everything that happened to Venus at this stage was everything Serena would later have to better), Sports Illustrated declared her 'the most hotly pursued pre-teen in US tennis history'. 说到在Compton环境有多糟 谋杀比例是华盛顿10倍高(大小威的大姐也是死在Compton) 大威十一岁的时候被体育画报选为美国网史上最炙手可热的小将 Once the impoverished stage for their success was set, and with potential sponsors standing in line, the family left Compton. With the exception of the eldest daughter Yetunde, who was pregnant with a Bloods member's child, they moved to Haines City, Florida, and quickly gathered stellar tennis coaches around them. Bollettieri tells me that 'when the Williams girls used to come here, my coaches used to go in the bushes and hide. These girls beat the crap out of them. I had to have eight coaches during the course of the day!' 後来在大小威搬家了 除了大姐当时已经怀孕了 然後他们去尼克学院 他说大小威已经可以打败教练了 他一天都要安排八个教练给他们 Serena says that she left Compton young enough never to have felt like she came from hard times. 'For me, growing up,' she tells me, 'I never wanted for anything. My mom had a great job - she was a nurse. But I'd talk to my oldest sister sometimes and she'd say, yeah, we couldn't do this, and we couldn't do that, and I never even knew, because I was so young. I left Compton when I was 10.' Venus has said that she didn't have a shower until the 1990s - and when she did, she thought they were a new invention. 'I went back to the house where we grew up,' Serena goes on, 'and I was, like, "Oh my God, how did I live there?!" If I'd been my sister's age, I would have died! We were five of us in one room, and we had bunk beds, so there were only four beds.' Serena never had a bed of her own - she just decided which sister she felt like sleeping with each night. 'I slept around, basically,' she says, giggling. 小威回忆说他离开Compton的时候还太小 不明白自己之前的苦境 而Venus一直到90年代才洗澡@@ 他甚至还以为洗澡是新发明 回到老房子的时候 小威想"天啊 我怎麽能住在这里?" 五个孩子挤一间 只有四张床 小威一直都是每个晚上选跟哪个姊姊挤 It wasn't long before Richard Williams had a change of heart. He claimed to despise the money that had been his reason for going into this in the first place. 'I'd be prostituting my girls and I'd be the big-time pimp,' he said of all the endorsements he could accept on their behalf. 'All these crazy people come up to you with cash in duffle bags, trying to get you to sign contracts. We just need a place to hide out.' He took to driving three different cars in the course of the day in order to throw people off the scent. He pulled the girls out of school and recruited different family members to teach them at home. He refused to let the girls enter any junior tournaments, to the point where it was years before they played anyone who was not an adult - a clue, perhaps, to their eventual reputation for locker-room shyness. 'I need to see them play against someone their own age,' said Billie Jean King, who had been observing their progress, 'see how they are emotionally and mentally.' 威爸说很多人想要他们签约 拿钱来吸引他们 而威爸不准他们打青少年比赛 金夫人说他想看看他们对上年龄相仿的对手是怎麽样 看看他们的心理状况如何 上半段结束 --

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