TENNIS: Johnny Watterson meets a surprisingly mellow Venus Williams ahead of the Australian Open which gets under way on Monday at Melbourne Park
This is how it works. You sit in a plush hotel suite opposite Venus Williams for 15 minutes. Two strangers facing each other. You ask questions. She answers. When time is up they knock on the door. They are her minders, agents, managers. You thank her and leave.
As you are leaving another journalist is coming in. Outside International Management Group (IMG) officials say "have a good day". Carlos, a handsome, athletic IMG executive, who used to work for Don King in Cleveland, Ohio, shakes your hand. These days women's tennis is Williams-shaped.
You'd entered the room full of promise and with a heartbeat you could hear. You come out loose limbed and woozy.
Venus Williams is like that.
Her breathless, low-wattage patter is a Chi-massage. The number two tennis player in the world doesn't come at you with her dreadlocks and wingspan spread like some menacing bird of prey, but diffuses and placates. She is soft textured, mildly narcotic.
Once or twice she has a Venus-to-Earth moment and forgets what it is she's talking about then quizzically returns to the present with a half-apologetic "what was that question"?
Last year, before Wimbledon, the world number two didn't know who she was playing in the first round on the Friday before the championships until the immigration officer at Heathrow Airport told her that it was local hope Jane O'Donoghue. Just didn't seem to be too important.
At one point in the match, which took place the following Tuesday, O'Donoghue won a service game and sought the crowd's approval with clenched fists. Williams's next 110 m.p.h. serve caught her in the mid-riff. The local hope swirled down the drain in less than an hour, 6-1 6-1.
The tennis world is also Williams-whipped. Between herself and younger sister Serena, they have divvied up the sport.
Tennis physiques are a Williams design, strictly high relief. The speed of tennis balls is Williams-determined. The level of play has been genetically modified by the Williams gene and the major trophies are all at home in the Williams houses - all but one, the Australian Open.
Venus, in a tight navy polo neck, smooth muscled and languidly athletic, moves her statuesque
6ft 1ins frame through the lobby fiercely avoiding eye contact. While startling the drinkers, she has not had the same affect on the tennis world, which has been beaten senseless by Serena.
The world number one, Serena last season won three of the four Grand Slams, in Paris, London and New York in the best year of her career. She was disappointed she didn't get four. Venus won no Slams in 2002 but lost in three finals, all of them to her little sister.
Twice a winner of Wimbledon and the US Open, few believed Venus could be beaten until Serena matured and roughed her way to the front of a rowdy queue.
Lindsay Davenport, Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, Monica Seles, Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne were elbowed out of the reckoning in the scramble for primacy.
Ultimately the Williamses' baptism into the mildly narcissistic and WASPish sport through to their domination took only four years. In splendid isolation at the top they now look to each other for kinship as well as rivalry, an issue which both talk of frequently but say little about.
Nothing is thundered about outside the confines of the family, not their religion, their politics or their colour, while any attempted inflammation of their rivalry is met with a mix of weariness and understated hostility.
"Myself and Serena, we're close," she says. "When we go on court we know we have a job to do and to entertain the crowds. That's what we do, we're entertainers. If I'm not playing good tennis I feel in a way that I haven't done my job. I guess the way I'll beat her is to get to match point and win that point. That's basically how to do it.
"It boils down to who the better player is and I think this year Serena has been the better player. My goal has always been to be the best player but I believe that . . . if I'm not the best player that day, well then I can understand that. If I lose because there is something I have not done myself . . . if I didn't prepare enough or if I didn't give it my all, that kind of thing it's different. That's disappointing.
"To get better I have to try harder. I have to work on my technique and I guess mentally I have to be there."
Guessing has never been part of it. The problem Venus now faces is how to beat her sister's game, one she intuitively knows as well as her own. She has also to go figure how to stop her sister beating her.
The endless childhood hours spent practising together on the public courts in the Compton ghetto of Los Angeles, with their father Richard feeding balls off a supermarket trolley, is double-edged nostalgia.
VENUS has always been the introvert, the less excitable older part of what dad calls "The Williams Show".
"Excited? Let me see, excited? . . . oh different things at different times get me excited," she says. "It depends on what's happening at that stage of my life. What I'm excited about now is my design, I've studied interior design. I think it's a natural interest of mine. I started getting interested in design in my late teens. I just realised it was me. I learned about art and I found recently that I was really inspired by architectural shapes from different time periods.
"For me it is important to have another life and maintain a balance between what you do on court and what you do off the court. You gotta make sure that neither one of them overpowers the other. For me, I have to do different things as often as possible."
The rest of the players in the world have become used to Williams speaking about life outside the court. It is as though, mildly bored by it all, she has disengaged herself and too enthusiastically roped alternatives to the game before her trumpeting procession through it has even been completed.
That placing of the game at a level somewhere below happiness, well-being and other mortal considerations has attracted sniping from other players, as if it has all come too easily.
But for Williams and her Jehovah's Witness family, tennis has never been seen as anything much more than a good way to live a life. Not life itself.
"For sure there is a bigger picture out there. My main goal is to not make my life complicated. I've just seen way too many times people getting involved in issues they don't have to, situations that they create themselves.
"I like to be free. I like to be happy and I don't like to have a burden. If there is something I can do something about then I do it. If I can't then I honestly think about it like Scarlet O'Hara (Gone With The Wind) . . . you know I'll think about it another time. It actually works."
She and Serena continue to raise the bar and this year will try to push it higher still. The challenge will be met.
"Hopefully so, yes. I think I can set the bar higher. That's the hope, of course, every year, every day and every second. I'm always aspiring to be better at my game and naturally as a professional athlete I'm never satisfied with what has happened. I rarely think I'm complacent. I don't think I have to work on that. It's a natural energy. I just need to get out there on the court.
"I think it's pretty innate for most athletes to be like that, especially if you are at the top of your game always wanting to do better and always looking for a way to make something happen. I'm just a hard working girl living with everyday challenges just like everyone else. I think the hardest part of it is that people are always over-critical and that's not always fun.
"I can be childish and a lot of other players in tennis are young. I mean, people writing outlandish things about 16-year-olds . . . that's just silly. I would never personally do that myself, pick on someone so young."
There is a knock at the door. The 22-year-old slides down in her chair from a straight-backed position, bats giant eyelids, then stands up and offers a hand that has earned her $12 million in prize money alone.
Without the on-court armour of her emphasised shoulders, self-designed cut-away tops and bright, violent colours, Williams is more haunting than warrior.
"I guess our time is up."
"I guess," she smiles.
