A Tale of 2 Courts

The drive is a short one between these two places where tennis greatness began. And they are a world apart.

Start at the upscale Jack Kramer Club in Rolling Hills Estates, where Pete Sampras played much of his early tennis, and drive to the neighborhood where the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, hit their first back hands.

Go past the brilliant display of bougainvillea and oleander that line the road, past the horse stables and white slat fences at the beginning of the descent. Near the bottom of the hill, turn right and pass by a refinery, then go north toward a tougher world. Hang a right on a street that eventually becomes Compton Boulevard and stop at Atlantic Avenue. The park is there, a sliver of green surrounded by strip malls, grimy auto repair shops and tiny, stucco homes.

The tennis courts, refurbished now but once little more than cracked asphalt and tattered nets, are where the legend of the Williams sisters began.

In all, the drive from the Kramer Club to East Rancho Dominguez Park--where the reigning men’s and women’s Wimbledon champions grew up--is a scant 15 miles, much less as the crow flies.

Yet the road that Sampras and the Williams sisters followed to the $15-million U.S. Open tennis championships that begin today in New York could not have been more different.

Sampras, arguably the best player to ever pick up a racquet, grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes--the top of the hill, literally and figuratively, a community rich in tennis culture and tennis stars. The early years for Wimbledon winner Venus and last year’s U.S Open winner Serena, were at the bottom, on mean streets where gang warfare was an inescapable part of the landscape, where gunshots were often the background noise of the night.

In 1990, just as the Williamses began appearing on the tennis radar screen and Sampras was winning his first U.S. Open at 19, there were 78 murders in Compton and none in Rancho Palos Verdes. Other crime statistics for Compton that year were as gloomy as they were predictable. In Rancho Palos Verdes, a gunshot was big news.

Yet different as the backdrops were, there is an intertwining of the two worlds: Growing up, the Williams sisters looked to Sampras as a role model, admiring a rocket serve they now can almost equal. They have geography in common as well. Both Sampras and the Williamses moved off to Florida, although Sampras is now back, close to the rest of his clan. And both came from homes where the work ethic and family were always first.

Never mind that the Williams patriarch, Richard, seems at times both quirky and overbearing, especially when compared with the reticent Sampras family. (After years of shunning the limelight, Sampras’ father and mother finally watched in person this year as their son won Wimbledon.) The underpinnings of stability were there in both worlds.

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In chronological order, the Sampras story comes first. Start with the parents, Soterios (Sam) and Georgia--he a Chicago-bred engineer, she a former beautician, one of 10 children born in a Greek village near Sparta. She came to the United States in 1960, and they met when Sam saw her in a Washington hotel where she was working.

By then, Sam was working as an engineer for the U.S. government, as he would be for the rest of his career. But that was only his day job.

“He worked a full-time job until 5 in the afternoon,” says the eldest of the Sampras children, Gus. “Then at night he was a partner in a restaurant with his brothers-in-law.”

At home in Potomac, Md., the brood began to grow: first Gus, then Stella, then Pete, then Marion. In 1978, when Pete was 7, Sam Sampras was transferred to California as a civilian project manager for the Titan missile program at the U.S. Air Force Space Division in El Segundo. They arrived in a Ford Pinto, the six family members and a parrot named Jose shoe-horned into the car. With his bank account more flush than usual because he had sold his share of the restaurant, Sam Sampras bought a home in Rancho Palos Verdes. At the time, the now-pricey Palos Verdes Peninsula was where many middle-class aerospace workers settled.

“The peninsula was built on aerospace--a lot of engineers and corporate people, but by no means the presidents of their companies,” said longtime area Realtor Gary Marler. “These days, those kinds of people can’t afford to move up here. My parents moved here in 1963 and they bought a house for $40,000. They sold it for $550,000 last year.”

Neither Sam nor Georgia Sampras played tennis, but their kids liked the game. Not long after the move to California came that storied moment when Sam had all four children playing on public courts in Torrance. Two lawyers watching them play told Sam that Pete was good enough even then to warrant professional coaching.

Sam hesitated, then decided the lawyers’ free advice might have merit. So he turned his son over to the pros. In the South Bay, they weren’t hard to find.

In the United States, the top tennis talent is concentrated in either Florida and Southern California. And within Southern California, a major talent resource has been the Palos Verdes Peninsula, producing such tennis superstars as Sampras, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport, along with many others only a rung or two below them.

Austin describes those years as a “lucky time.”

“There were probably 15 kids at the Kramer Club who were right at my level,” said Austin, who in 1979 became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Open. “We pushed each other along. We were all best friends but we were all striving to improve.”

Sampras had several tennis coaches, including Peter Bruce Fischer, who was sentenced to prison years later for a sexual molestation conviction. Another of his coaches was Robert Lansdorp, a silver-haired instructor with a reputation for demanding absolute obedience from his students.

Lansdorp remembers Sam Sampras asking him to tutor both Pete and daughter Stella, now a tennis coach at UCLA. Lansdorp wasn’t overly impressed when he saw Pete hit for the first time. “He was very talented but not a phenom,” Lansdorp recalled, describing Sampras as short and skinny. “When he was 10 years old, he had a bad forehand. He had to learn a lot. He was just another kid.”

But the world at the top of the hill was an easier place to get better, just as it is now. At the Kramer Club, for instance, memberships for junior tournament players--those being developed with an eye toward the pros--are offered at the discounted price of $200 a year and $63 a month. It is one way the club attracts talented young players whose parents might not be able to afford a regular membership of an $11,000 entry fee plus monthly dues.

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In Compton, that kind of access to instruction and facilities is nearly impossible to find. Part of the lore surrounding the Williams sisters is that their father, Richard, saw tennis as the ticket out of Compton and a better life for his family, although he had not a clue about how to play the game.

Not surprising, considering that Williams grew up in a Shreveport, La., shantytown and that his mother supported five children by picking cotton. Williams eventually made his way to Los Angeles, via Chicago, and over time found a place for himself as head of a security guard company.

Soon after arriving in L.A., he met his wife-to-be, Oracene Price, a nurse raised in Saginaw, Mich. They settled first in Long Beach, then moved to Compton in 1983 with their five daughters. Richard’s story of how tennis entered his life is this: He was watching a tennis match on television and was floored to discover that the winner’s check was more than he made in a year.

So Williams taught himself tennis. Then he taught it to his three oldest daughters as soon as each could wield a racquet. Finally, it was time for Venus, the No. 4 daughter, to give the game a try. When she was 4, Richard loaded her into his Volkswagen van, along with seven milk crates full of tennis balls. She hit every single ball and asked for more.

That was the beginning. A year later, Serena, then 4, began tagging along, but it was Venus who first garnered national attention when she started winning virtually every amateur tournament she entered. The media began to show up at the Williams’ small green home in the late 1980s. Richard Williams began to jokingly refer to the Compton courts where they practiced as the “East Compton Hills Country Club,” and to his daughters as “ghetto Cinderellas.”

One of the people who heard about Venus and Serena was Rick Macci, a noted Florida coach who had trained another young tennis phenom, Jennifer Capriati. The word he got was that Richard Williams wanted him to coach his daughters. In an unusual move for him, Macci (pronounced Macy) flew to Los Angeles and was picked up by Williams, who drove him to the Compton public courts in his van, Macci said, “filled with three months’ worth of McDonald’s wrappers and a flat basketball.” They arrived at the park at 7 a.m. on a Saturday.

“There were about 50 guys at the park,” Macci recalled. “Some were playing basketball, others were passed out drunk and some were just hanging out. It was amazing. They parted like the Red Sea to let the girls on the tennis courts.”

This, as Richard tells the story, in a place where all three Williamses once had to dive for cover when a drive-by shooter popped his gun through the sunroof of his car and sprayed the courts with bullets.

At first, Macci was unimpressed. But he began to change his mind when Venus did effortless cartwheels and handstands on her way to the bathroom. He changed his mind even more when the girls went from drills to hitting against each other.

“They went through the roof with their footwork and consistency,” said Macci. “When the bell rang, they went to another level.”

By 1991, the Williamses were ensconced in Florida. It looked like the two sisters would take the same path as other prodigies before them, undergoing grooming on the junior circuit in preparation for the pros. But to the consternation of the tennis world, Richard then withdrew his daughters, then 11 and 10, from tournament play until Venus was old enough to make her professional debut at 14. His reasoning at the time was the need to concentrate on education and to shield his daughters from racial slurs he feared would accompany their success.

The end result makes him look like a seer, albeit an eccentric one, who routinely holds up signs during his daughters’ matches. This one appeared at Wimbledon: “It’s Venus’ Party and No One Was Invited.”

Still, the likes of Lansdorp, who has coached many great players, have only praise for Williams because he did what others might have considered impossible.

“I give that guy more credit than anyone,” he said. “Any father who can take not one but two of his children, go out and work with them and make them champions deserves a lot of credit.”

Or, as Macci put it: “As bizarre as he might be in his statements, he did a world-class job as a father.”

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The worlds at the top and the bottom of the hill have changed over the years. The Asian population has increased significantly in recent years in Rancho Palos Verdes, while in Compton, the dominant population has switched from black to Latino in the last decade.

The top of the hill is filling up with mansions, and the median family income in Rancho Palos Verdes has jumped from $78,000 to $138,000 in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, Compton’s family incomes have risen only slightly, from $26,000 to about $30,000 for the same period, although the city is enjoying an economic resurgence and crime has fallen significantly since the early 1990s.

On the peninsula, Lansdorp bemoans the fact that it is becoming harder and harder to find kids like Sampras and Austin and Davenport who are willing to put in the hours it takes to be a champion. He predicts a drought of top tennis players from the peninsula.

And in Compton, the refurbished but often empty tennis courts are adjacent to a newly erected gymnasium that was dedicated earlier this summer and is used for basketball and as a day-care center.

The Williams sisters attended the dedication but otherwise have not been much in evidence since leaving for Florida nearly a decade ago. But 15-year-old Keisha Young is there most days, hitting with her uncle, Juan Sayles, and hoping for her own tennis glory. Sayles said few people use the courts these days and that his niece has never played in a junior tournament because her family can’t afford the money necessary to travel to tournaments. Still, he hopes a break will come their way, that someone will notice his niece.

And what of the Williams sisters? What of their success? Sayles said it is an ongoing source of pride.

“Any time anyone attains a certain amount of success, the people here take a certain amount of that for themselves,” he said. “It makes a little part of them feel good.”