Howard Bryant

The Williams Movement and Power Play and How Is This Still a Debate?

The Williams Movement

You watch the protests. You hear them outside your window in your small town and watch them on TV, millions marching across the globe on January 21.

You talk with a man you’ve known since the eleventh grade—white, respectable, of unremarkable wealth or accomplishment yet carrying a learned smugness, completely secure in the legitimacy of his status—who you discover is offended more by the vulgarity of the protest signs than the vulgarity that created them. Fortified by the protections and perks of maleness in perpetuity, he speaks of the women as a minor inconvenience, a moth on his tweed.

“It was a moment, not a movement,” he tells you. “It changed nothing.”

You know this comment, after a lifetime of diminishment, should carry no value, and yet it remains inside you, eats at you. During this same conversation, he tells you of his “loss of respect” for civil rights icon John Lewis, and you know then that this person you’ve known for decades is not only talking about the women marching. He’s talking about you too.

You watch the Australian Open championship final between Venus and Serena Williams with this tumult in mind, and when Venus’s ball lands in the doubles alley and Serena becomes a champion again, “It was a moment, not a movement” rises up like bile, and you wonder if the day will ever come when the presence of Venus and Serena will not feel like defiance. But you know better. It will not.

You see the hug at the net and the tears of the fans. The humanity of it all. You want to trust that this breathtaking show of respect for these two champions is part of the natural ritual of sports—swords falling as the twilight nears, ceremonial respect for the athlete’s journey becoming a final, unifying act—but you cannot shake the slights. The latest occurred during her second-round match against Stefanie Voegele, with the way ESPN commentator Doug Adler described Venus’s strategy in attacking the second serve. Adler said he was referring to the word “guerrilla” when talking about how she moved to the net, but after all the years when Venus and Serena have had their looks and sexuality questioned, the clarification is unconvincing. Gorillas charge, guerrillas sneak attack.

You watch the final, and if you have eyes and a heart, you see just how different and difficult and brilliant these matches really are. You see Serena turn her back to her sister after a point to show her emotion; against any other opponent, that emotion would not be so cloaked. She will scream “COME ON!” at Victoria Azarenka, but she will not embarrass her sister. You see Venus, overmatched but knowing she is playing at a championship level against any other opponent but her sister, flashing the resolve of a legend but resigned to grace in defeat—partially. During her runner-up speech, she reminds the audience of her pride of family. “Serena Williams, that’s my little sister, guys,” Venus says. She receives compliments for being gracious and elegant; she is both elegant and protective. Even in their finals, it was never one against the other, but two against everyone.

You see the enormous pressure the sisters put on each other with their serves because they know a weak serve will be a pummeled one. As you watch the twenty-four-shot second-set rally, you realize the legacy of Venus and Serena cannot be located in either of their trophy cases or in the tired, confining narratives of mentioning their influence only when a new young black girl hits the scene. Their legacy is in six-foot-two, all-legs-and-power Maria Sharapova; six-foot, all-legs-and-power Garbine Muguruza; in the devastating cross-court forehand of six-one CoCo Vandeweghe. Their legacy stands in all of the athletic big hitters who now define the women’s game. The Williams sisters are the measure of the women’s game, and if you can’t hit with them, you can’t play. Venus and Serena, somewhat sadly, have forever diminished the championship hopes of the waifish and the crafty, the Agnieszka Radwanskas and Carla Suarez Navarros, who before the arrival of the sisters might very well have held up multiple Grand Slam trophies. There will be youngsters weeded out of the game earlier because they lack the power unnecessary in 1987 but critical in 2017. You see a sport revolutionized; you see not just generations of black girls but the wealth of Eastern Europeans who now inhabit the sport. You see legacy in action.

You also see the patriarchy step on the Williamses even when it wants to share the sunshine. Even when it blows them kisses. Serena, in victory, thanked the crowd for its fervor, the tournament for its professionalism, her sister for their blood, and her team for their commitment—but not her new fiancé, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, an omission that was mentioned often by broadcasters. In your mind, you flip through the victory speeches you’ve heard and try to remember a moment when Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal or Andy Murray was chastised for not mentioning his spouse or girlfriend by name. You can find none.

Throughout the fortnight, as the prospect of an all-Williams final creeps toward reality, you hear only one person, the legend Chris Evert, give credit to Richard Williams, the father who had a vision for his daughters that was ridiculed for the overwhelming majority of their story. Richard was the lens through which the sisters were viewed inside and out of the game, the head of the family that didn’t belong, until the championship trophies and gold medals were piled so high the critics finally had to surrender.

You remember the first time you really spoke to Richard Williams, in June 2012, at Wimbledon, when he smoked those skinny cigarettes, when it was just the two of you on the deck between the players area and media center, when he told you players should spend less time on the court and more time learning geometry because tennis really is a game of angles, as every opponent of Serena’s has discovered the hard way. He talked about his daughters and about the family not being wanted by the blue bloods of tennis, and you knew by the way his eyes drew sharper, fixed on you—older black man to younger one in the United Kingdom—that he was really talking about the American blueprint for anyone who isn’t white, how you don’t get to be smug because you’re not protected by perks in perpetuity, that you never get to be so secure in the legitimacy of your status that you can determine for other people what is a movement and what is a moment.

“There was only one way: Win,” Richard Williams said, and when the sisters are standing on the podium in Melbourne, you see their excellence triumph once again, their blood vindicated, as a family. “Win and make them deal with us. Win and they have to give you a seat at the table, even if they don’t want you there.”

Power Play

Before the Women’s Tennis Association was formed in 1973, its founder, Billie Jean King, had to pry many players from their conviction not to fight for its creation. In an interview with former pro and current broadcaster Mary Carillo, King recalled the moment that became the turning point.

“If we do this,” one of the players said, “we’ll lose everything.”

“Don’t you understand?” King responded. “You have nothing. You literally have nothing to lose. Can’t you see that? What worse can happen that isn’t happening now?”

King’s response, Carillo told me, won the room and, later, history—a history not lost on the U.S. women’s national hockey team, which more than forty years later resolved to fight too. The women, earning $6,000 every four years with no hefty NHL salary to supplement them, flying coach when the men fly better, were unable to convince their federation that they deserved an equal seat at the table—a grievance similar to that of the underappreciated women’s national soccer team, which finally ratified a collective bargaining agreement after a contentious negotiation with its own federation. And so the hockey players threatened to boycott the women’s world championship in what was a basic and remarkable act: They bet on themselves.

On the historical scale of labor negotiations, the players’ demands were modest: a raise in pay plus travel and insurance arrangements equal to the men. In response, USA Hockey showed the little regard in which it held the women by its willingness to have America serve as host of the world championship without its two-time defending champions. The federation, likely banking on public sentiment that in so many cases sides with employers, scoured the college and junior ranks, ready to field a team of replacement players to represent the United States. The women, out of insults to take and damns to give, did not wilt and by fighting found allies from the Senate and the players’ associations of the NHL, NBA, NFL, and MLB.

The experience of going on strike also served as a reminder to the players that they are part of a historical continuum of conflict between labor and management, of the power of men versus the value of women. The conflict has been heightened by the current wave of athlete activism and the harsh response—in this case USA Hockey’s draconian reaction—to any resistance to authority. Team USA confronted what America is today: antilabor, antiprotest, antiaction, each under heavy assault by law and by custom. As Colin Kaepernick can attest, the mainstream public and media too often place more emphasis on the reaction to injustice than on the injustice itself. While the women received some support for their stance, just as Kaepernick had allies in many quarters, there were those who justified USA Hockey’s position because the women’s game is less popular and less lucrative. Ultimately, though, the thought of strike breakers was too great of an overstep, an unnecessary instigation.

USA Hockey counted on public antipathy toward mobilized labor—especially sports labor—that has defined the country since the 1980s. For once, that stance backfired. The federation and the players reached a deal three days before the world championship opener.

So often the people who have everything to lose become the conscience of a dulled, overindulged nation. So often that conscience is women. The big names—LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul—received attention for pleading for police and public confrontations to end, but the players negotiated with the NBA about when and how they would express themselves this season. Asking for guidance on how to protest is no protest. The NBA has twenty-one players earning over $20 million this season, but they responded to the obvious racism of Donald Sterling in 2014 not with a wildcat strike but by reaching out to commissioner Adam Silver. They trusted the power to protect them. Meanwhile, the WNBA players, most of whom don’t earn $100,000 and actually had something to lose, were far more defiant in their solidarity against police brutality than their multimillionaire male counterparts, even in the face of league fines.

The U.S. women’s hockey team, now part of King’s legacy, stood unified too. The Americans beat nemesis Canada 2–0 to start the world championship and went on to beat Russia 7–0, Finland 5–3, and Germany 11–0. But the real victory was being on the ice on their terms, a message sent to the next generation of women whose bosses tell them to shut up and play.

How Is This Still a Debate?

Thirteen months ago, before game 2 of the World Series, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred shared a podium with Hall of Famer Henry Aaron and retiring Red Sox titan David Ortiz. Manfred was asked how, with the world watching baseball’s marquee event, the league could still abide the Indians’ using Chief Wahoo as a mascot. Manfred fidgeted, annoyed by the presence of a fastball where there were supposed to be only softballs. He insisted there was no place for racism in baseball and, attempting to douse the issue, said he and Cleveland Indians owner Paul Dolan would revisit the issue in the offseason.

A year later, Manfred suspended Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel for making a racist gesture at Yu Darvish during the World Series—yet has left intact the smiling stereotype of Chief Wahoo. Players are so much easier to punish.

While plates and bellies are loaded with turkey and stuffing this year, the Washington Redskins will, for the first time and quite controversially, host a game on Thanksgiving. Some eyes will roll at the suggestion that sports is humiliating a people, but neither fatigue nor cynicism can undo a central fact: There is plenty of room for racism in American sports. All the eye rolls in the world won’t change that.

Instead of debating racism, it is more appropriate to wonder why Native Americans are spared the dignity of progress, why the sports industry continues to insult them today as society commonly did one hundred years ago. To many fans, perhaps nothing feels more American than logos like those of the Indians, Blackhawks, and Redskins, but that feeling requires ignoring the history. Native Americans were excluded from being American—from the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted equal protection and naturalization of all citizens born on United States soil, to the Fifteenth, which granted African American men the right to vote, in 1870. Native Americans were not granted American citizenship until 1924 and did not receive full nationwide voting rights until 1957. By that time, each of the team names, as racist then as they are today, was well fixed within the sports culture. America has chosen logos over people.

The customer is always right, but only if you’re the seller. If you’re not, it is obvious that the fan acts from selfishness. This is their entertainment, and the racist logos and offensive names are a nostalgic part of their memories and experience, and they aren’t willing to give them up. Washington owner Daniel Snyder knows this, which is why he has spent his time and money bankrolling studies and Native American leaders who agree with him, to use them as cover instead of using common sense.

“You cannot have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm X once said. His statement was directed toward the class warfare that lies at the root of capitalism, and it applies even to the blankets, foam fingers, jerseys, caps, and T-shirts the sports teams sell, even on a day ostensibly dedicated to a giving of thanks and peace between settlers and natives. The hypocrisy is disgusting.

Once more, there is a difference between difficult and complicated. For the leagues, it might be difficult to once and for all treat Native Americans with humanity by having the courage to risk the money and start a new history with new names and better attitudes. But there is precedent. When spoken and written, people now commonly use “the N-word” to replace its more offensive antecedent; the patronizing, sexualized connotations of “stewardess” long ago gave way to “flight attendant.” Society did not come unmoored.

It might be difficult for sports leagues to appear to capitulate to the protest behind a word’s usage, even if that capitulation is out of simple decency. It might be difficult for teams and the public to admit their casual racism. It is not, however, complicated to understand that these logos must go. It is not complicated to know a relic from the first decades of the twentieth century, routinely regarded by historians as the most racist period since the antebellum era, is inappropriate today. In classic misdirection, the Boston Celtics are often used as a false equivalent in this ersatz debate—a team name harmlessly based on an ethnicity. But people freely use the word “Celtic” in common speech without offense. Consider this while passing the cranberry sauce: Outside of discussing the Washington football team, who in mixed company comfortably and routinely uses the word “Redskins”?

Enough. We all know better.