The Body and the Court

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.