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This comprehensive documentary about the life and career of Serena Williams, arguably the greatest female tennis player of all time, arrives as the perfect prelude to Wimbledon, the tournament she frequently dominated between 2002 and 2016, and won seven times in total (among her 23 majors). The 2018 HBO series Being Serena followed Williams’s pregnancy and the birth of her first child, giving some sense of the player as a human being, with a life outside of tennis. Such is the Williams sisters’ cultural reach that Will Smith played their father and first coach in the movie of their lives, King Richard, which won him the Oscar for Best Actor in 2022. In the Arena takes a different approach again, using sport as its entry point, and it is a pleasantly candid surprise.
Made by the US sporting network ESPN, it takes the crucial tournaments of Williams’s career as its framework, and weaves her life story through the footage of her most pivotal matches. It is still breathtaking, even now, to watch Williams in her prime, to see her win and lose, to rally and crumble, as she comes to rule women’s tennis for almost two decades. There is a lovely intimacy to Williams’s recollections here. She admits to fan-girling over 1990s Serbian-American star Monica Seles, recalls specific heckles from crowds that drove her to victory, and explains the tactic she developed for when she inevitably met her sister Venus in the draw, an experience she calls “absolute torture”: she worked out that she could do it if she refused to look at her, and simply pretended to be playing someone else.
The series has many of the characteristics common to contemporary documentaries, not least a strand in which the treatment of the Williams sisters and their father Richard by the media (and, it is implied, other players on the tour) is addressed with the horror of hindsight. Its strongest episode documents the shameful racism that she and her family were subjected to at Indian Wells, California in 2001, leading them to boycott the event for well over a decade, before an emotional return in 2015.
Through frank interviews with Williams’s family, her team, her agent (who admits that Williams could become “somewhat diabolical” during a Grand Slam tournament), her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and Roger Federer, a rich portrait emerges. Using home footage of the sisters’ childhood in Compton, archive news reels of two young superstars in the making, and eventually, Williams’ most famous moments of triumph and meltdown on the court, this is riveting for tennis fans, though perhaps a little too in-depth for the more casual observer.
★★★☆☆
From June 21, 11.10pm on BBC1 and iPlayer, and on Disney+ now
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