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The court jester tennis4/18/2023 ![]() She answered me with a tone both astounded and naïve: Sometimes I use a shovel but a broom’s better I can hit the ball better …” “Well, it’s better than playing with my hand. “Mansour, what are you doing? Why are you playing with a broomstick?” She knew me in the way that she knew all the kids at Amjadieh hanging around the entrance for the privilege of picking up the balls. The one who arrived was a very beautiful woman, aged about forty: the wife of a big-wig. I was secretly hoping that there wouldn’t be a client coming to ask me to act as his ball boy. I, on the other hand, preferred hitting a ball against a wall with a broom, rather than lazing in the shade. Everyone was taking a siesta the shopkeepers would draw their curtains, and no-one reappeared before four o’clock. These really hot afternoons in Iran were rarely devoted to sport. ![]() One summer’s day, when I must have been ten years old, I was waiting for clients, not feeling too hopeful. Later, when he signs with another coach, the motor-mouthed Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), he removes his daughters from lessons in Florida for a trip to Disney World.A racket: what would I not have given for a racket? In one amusing sequence, he talks Pete Sampras’s coach, Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), into giving Venus free lessons, only to stand by the court with his video camera and interrupt with his own contradictory advice. Less admirably, he has lost contact with his offspring from a previous relationship, he is prone to inflammatory statements and his unpredictable behaviour can tip from stubbornly independent to plain annoying. Besides, Richard is a complicated, capricious hero.Īs determined as he is that his daughters should be world champions, he is also determined that they should have fun, study hard at school, and have at least some taste of a normal childhood. The film doesn’t end with the customary unalloyed triumph, either, but instead with Venus’s first professional tournament at the age of 14. It’s a slick, funny story of family togetherness and tenacity, but there are no captions to announce the date or the location of events, no major turning points or lessons learned, and-mercifully-no slow-motion shots of racquets striking balls. However, the director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, and screenwriter, Zach Baylin, ensure that “King Richard” isn’t wholly conventional. The typical response: “Did you ever think about basketball?” Eventually, Venus starts entering competitions, where her pony-tailed opponents prefer to cheat than accept that she outplayed them.Ĭelebrating Richard’s superhuman optimism, bravado and tirelessness, the film serves up the kind of inspirational, rags-to-extreme-riches fairy tale which rallies audiences and wins awards: a bearded, greying Smith, who dims his charisma and juts out his lower lip, has been tipped for an Oscar nomination. Richard tours LA’s exclusive country clubs, handing out photocopied pamphlets to the cocktail-sipping patrons, in hope of sponsorship. ![]() The white people who live farther afield are just as unhelpful. (The film is again squarely on Richard’s side.) A gang of hoodlums harasses him so often that the girls regularly greet their mother with a matter-of-fact “Daddy got beat up again”. One neighbour decides that Richard is too tough on his children, and summons the police to intervene. The black people in the area are not encouraging. If the Williamses ever resented this routine, “King Richard”, which credits Venus and Serena as executive producers, doesn’t admit it. By day, when Brandy goes to work as a nurse, he packs the girls into a Volkswagen camper van, drives them to whichever pock-marked public tennis court is available, and trains the ever-cheerful Venus and Serena while their ever-cheerful half-sisters sit on the sidelines and do their homework. During his childhood in Louisiana, Richard says, he was “too busy running from the Klan” to play tennis, but he has decided that Venus and Serena will excel at a sport which has traditionally been as white as a Wimbledon uniform.īy night, he works as a security guard at a mall, a job which allows him to sit and study coaching manuals into the small hours. At the start of “King Richard”, around 1990, he shares a small bungalow in Compton, Los Angeles, with his wife Oracene “Brandy” Price (Aunjanue Ellis), his three step-daughters, and the couple’s two biological daughters, Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton). Twenty years on from playing a champion himself in “Ali”, Will Smith stars as the middle-aged Richard Williams. ![]() Yet it is their father who has been granted a biopic while they are still waiting for theirs. V ENUS AND SERENA WILLIAMS may be two of the greatest sportspeople ever.
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