Review Of "On the Line," By Serena Williams

“I understand that I’m in the entertainment business. I compete at the highest levels of my sport. I know the only reason there’s all that prize money is because people buy tickets to watch. I get that. But I also get that I do what I do for me. … Don’t ask me to play in a pain you could never endure.” —Serena Williams. On the Line. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009, p. 76. “Honestly, at just that moment, I didn’t care if I won the championship, because the true victory, the family victory, was already at hand. We’d come so far from those run-down courts in Compton to become the two best tennis players in the world, and nothing else seemed to matter.” —Ibid. p. 146. “I was determined to win, but not for those jerks at the newspaper who called me a cow. Not for all the sportswriters who said I had no shot. Not for the sponsors who wanted nothing to do with me. No, I would do it for me. For the first...