# The Body and the Court *A Biography of Serena Williams* — Legendary Biographies No. 174 - **Subject:** Serena Jameka Williams - **Written by:** Roland Mercer - **Shelf:** Sport / Tennis - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 192 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-510-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-611-1) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/174-the-body-and-the-court.html ## About this book Broken asphalt on a Compton public court, the nets rusted through. Two sisters practised there under their father, Richard Williams, a Compton private investigator turned tennis coach, and their mother, Oracene Price. The younger of the two was Serena, the youngest of five daughters, and the family had moved to Compton when she was small. In 1991 they moved again, to Florida, for Rick Macci's academy. She turned professional at fourteen. Roland Mercer's biography follows what that court produced without flattening it into a highlight reel. Serena won her first Grand Slam at the 1999 U.S. Open and, over the next twenty-three years, twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles, more than any player of the Open Era. With Venus she won fourteen Grand Slam doubles titles, a record no pair has matched. She retired after the 2022 U.S. Open, at forty. The book gives equal weight to the years that nearly stopped all of it. The fatal shooting of the sisters' older half-sister, Yetunde Price, in Compton on September 14, 2003. The Serena Slam years of 2002 and 2003 that came before it. The Achilles rupture of 2007. The pulmonary embolism of 2010 that came close to killing her. The second peak that ran from 2010 to 2017 and produced a twenty-third Grand Slam at the Australian Open in January 2017, won while she was pregnant. The birth of her daughter Olympia that September, and the seventy-two hours of post-partum critical care that followed. The marriage to Alexis Ohanian the same year. Then Serena Ventures, the investment fund, the mother-and-daughter business years, and the ESPN documentary On Your Marks in 2024. What emerges is a portrait of the youngest Williams sister, Saginaw-born and Compton-raised, whose twenty-three Grand Slams across twenty-three years made her the most successful tennis player of the modern era. Mercer keeps the body and the court in the same frame, which is what the title means. ## Contents 1. Compton 2. The Courts of Compton 3. The Departure 4. Venus Rising 5. The First Grand Slam 6. Indian Wells 7. The Serena Slam 8. The Body 9. Yetunde 10. The Wilderness 11. Twenty-Three 12. Olympia 13. The Catsuit Ban 14. The 2018 US Open 15. The Record 16. Serena Ventures 17. Evolving Away 18. The GOAT Conversation ## Questions **Who is The Body and the Court about?** Serena Jameka Williams. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Body and the Court — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,208 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 58,500 words, 18 chapters, 192 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Roland Mercer is a Boston-based culture writer whose biographies of athletes have appeared as cover features in Sports Illustrated and The Atlantic. He covers the NFL, NBA, and the institutions that profit from each. His longform writing focuses on the physical costs of modern athletic competition and the complex systems that surround professional sports. Through books like The Fastest Woman, Friendly Fire, and The Bypass Transfusion, Mercer examines the intersection of physical endurance and commercial pressure. In books such as The Twisties and The Industrial Park Murder, he explores the psychological strain on high-profile competitors and the darker aspects of competitive industries. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his free time rowing on the Charles River and collecting vintage sports memorabilia.