![]() ![]() The latter Williams was infamous for shirking the so-called rules of the game and troubling, in his private life, for his willingness to steamroll the desires of even those people closest to him, the women in his life that he was ostensibly working so hard to support. So we are treated to an equal-parts moving and humorous depiction of Williams the hard-working family man, on the one hand, and of Williams the dadager on the other. Nor does the movie give us the lowdown on another tale Williams spins in his memoir, one that’s just as memorable and revealing: of dressing up in a Klan uniform as a teenager and, feeling duly empowered, knocking a white guy upside his head with a stick. This is not a story that the Richard Williams of King Richard, played by Will Smith, tells in explicit detail onscreen, despite being a man full of stories - and potentially, to the primarily white world of tennis in the 1990s, full of shit. The act was a warning to young men like Williams not to get ahead of themselves, never mind their barely keeping pace to begin with. Reckless? Heroic? He was a young Black man whose father, in the memoir’s telling, “put me way behind the starting line in the race of life.” The race of life : a phrase tragically summarized in Lil Man’s lynching. Whatever produce they didn’t have to sell, Williams stole from white vendors, passing it off as his own stock. He spent his adolescence tending to a produce garden in his family’s backyard, going so far to hire employees - loiterers he paid to stalk street corners and drive business his way. His was an impoverished but eventful life, as Williams describes it, marred by his father’s emotional abandonment and by the racism of the era, but brightened by Williams’ sense of duty to his mother and sisters. This was in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1950s. In his 2014 memoir Black and White: The Way I See It, Richard Williams - father of tennis legends Venus and Serena and a noted celebri-dad in his own right - tells the story of the lynching of his childhood best friend, a boy his age named Lil Man.
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