Life and times of the greatest female tennis superstar

During her tennis career, the fiercely indefatigable and boisterously prolific, Serena Jameka Williams, has won six major titles at Flushing Meadows in the US Open and seven titles in the Melbourne Australian Open.

She has also captured three grand slam titles, in the French Open clay centre court at Roland-Garros. Additionally, she has attained seven grand slam titles in the grass of The All England Club, SW13, at Wimbledon.

Her total coronation of major victories are 23 grand slam titles. She vivaciously obtained a 2012 London Olympic gold medal and four consecutive majors between 2002 and 2003. She's also been conferred Laureus annual sports extravaganza, an unprecedented five times. The mighty Serena is eminently, the greatest female tennis superstar in history.

Gender-based violence

She has vanquished adversities, including the unrest and violent childhood metropolis of Compton. She has overcome career foreboding injuries and losing her oldest sister Tunde to gender-based gun violence.

She outshone prejudiced opponents and prevailed over disgruntled umpires. She silenced racist rebellious hateful and indefensible Indian-Wells crowd in March 18, 2001, full of vitriolic inflammatory and emotionally damaging bigotry.

She defeated a horrendous pulmonary embolism pregnancy complication. Battled an entitled tone-deaf World Tennis Association, which was obsessed with imposing malevolent administrative conventions of indiscretion, on progressive diversification.

Serena's memoir On the Line, is a panacea ascendancy playbook. It illuminates how her parents infused consistent assurance, conviction, high self-esteem, a positive fearless winning mentality and a redoubtable work ethic on their daughters. It exemplifies how they were enamoured with greatness components, permeated by an ingredient of optimistic strokes, colossal passion, a superiority complex and meticulous tennis proficiency.

On the Line confers readers with an authoritative blueprint for positively impacting their children, subconsciously. It psychologically instigates the nurturing of young minds from infancy, to embed career objectives and become ebullient wealthy grand achievers. It subsequently helps in developing an insatiable craving for pre-eminence in children, to effectuate insurmountable goals.

Serena was bred reared and refined in the violently pervasive boondocks of Compton, in 1117 East Stockton Street. Three miles from another notoriously murderous parochial, Watts, in the outskirts of Los Angeles California.

Her father, Richard Williams, a security company owner, was a studious pragmatic loving hard-headed optimist. He had a gentle endearment demeanour towards his children.

Serena's mother, Oracene Price, was a nurse, tennis pedant and positive ideologist. She was an earnest demonstrative workaholic, who practiced tennis, juxtaposed to her first two daughters in her third trimester, when pregnant with Venus.

They veered their children, Yetunde Lyn Isha Venus and the last born Serena, into pursuing towering careers. Inspired them to deviate faltering hopes and in-executable dreams to virtuoso full-throttle manifested actuality. They did this in the dilapidated Compton tennis courts.

Pungent stench

The courts embodied weeds growing between cracks, broken glass, the pungent stench of beer bottles, soda cans and fast food wrappers. There were deafening drive-by gunshots, thundering consistently around the borough. With shootouts between infamously despondent gangs South Side Crips,Mob Piru Bloods andthenefarious Compton Police Department.

"The gunshots didn't sound that terrifying, until I learnt they were," Serena writes. "I thought someone was cracking balloons or setting off fire crackers."

Richard ensured each of his children, contrived composed and jotted their daily goals, every day.

He positioned inspirational positive proverbs, written on placards, at the perimeter fences surrounding the tennis courts. This subliminally galvanised his daughters’ dreams and disseminated them into their subconscious minds.

"Over and over they kept telling us we were champions. After a while we started to believe them."

Serena writes about the infinite subconscious conviction her parents incessantly encrusted in them. "My parents had me thinking I was invincible."

Richard acquired a shopping cart, overloaded to the brim with tennis balls, racquets and brooms for sweeping the courts. He would stack it at the back of his old yellow Volkswagen minibus, with his five girls and drive to tennis courts where they'd meet Oracene, after work for practice.

At home, they watched hours of VCR classic tennis matches.

Training tempo

When Serena and her sister Venus, who never lost a match as a junior player, were five and seven years old respectively, their parents encountered their exceptional progress.

They incremented the onus, asserting a conscientious training tempo. They had two daily sessions, at dawn before sunrise and after school sequentially into the darkness.  

“We went from training for three or four times a week," Serena writes, "to three or four hours every day."

"Whatever you become," her mum constantly repeated the power of visualisation and faith, "You become in your head first."

Their perpetuity endured into the 2002 French Open, Wimbledon, U.S. Open and January 2003 Australian Open. Serena faced Venus in all four consecutive major finals and won. Commanding the world number one tennis rank for a record 57 weeks.

“Daddy was always telling reporters and whoever cared to listen that someday we'd be number one and two in the world,” she writes, "He deeply believed it in his heart." It substantiated, and motivated them to becoming efficacious unbowed women.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother