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Serena Williams
Serena Jameka Williams was born September 26, 1981 in Saginaw, Michigan. When she and her four sisters were young, their parents, Richard and Oracene, took them to the poor and violent Los Angeles suburb of Compton. Her father dreamed of making at least one of his daughters a tennis superstar, hoping that involvement in sports would give them a way out of that neighborhood and provide his children with a better life. When Serena was four and a half, she won her first tournament; she was entered in forty-nine tournaments before the age of 10, and won forty-six of them. At one point, she replaced her sister Venus as the number one ranked tennis player aged 12 or under in California. In 1991, Richard Williams, saying that he hoped to prevent his daughters from facing racism, stopped sending them to national junior tennis tournaments, and Serena attended a tennis school run by professional player Rick Macci instead. Macci had already helped the careers of Jennifer Capriati and Mary Pierce, among others. Soon Richard, who had struck a deal on behalf of his daughters with a major clothing company, was able to move the rest of the Williams family to West Palm Beach, to be near Serena and Venus. In 1999, Serena was ranked number twenty-one, and she and her sister Venus had become celebrities. She defeated Amélie Mauresmo in a final the same day that Venus won in Oklahoma City, marking first time in professional tennis history that two sisters had won titles in the same week. Her winning career continued in 2000, she won the doubles gold medal at the Olympics with her sister Venus. Soon after she sustained a debilitating knee injury and had to lay off tennis for a short time. Serena withdrew from the Australian Open in 2004 to continue rehabilitating her left knee. She reached the final of Wimbledon once again, but lost to the 17-year-old Russian player Maria Sharapova. On July 30, Serena withdrew from her quarterfinal match against Russia's Vera Zvonareva because of cronic pain in her knee. On August 1, she announced her withdrawal from the Rogers Cup due to the same injury. The injury also forced her to pull out of the 2004 Summer Olympics. In 2005 she returned to win her seventh Grand Slam event, winning the Australian Open. On May 3, 2006 she announced that she would miss both the French Open and Wimbledon as a result of her nagging chronic knee injury. Tidbits
CelebWeLove.com: Serena Williams Tennisrulz.com: Serena Williams She Got Game: Serena Williams Sexy Babes X: Serena Williams | |||||||||||||||||
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