“King Richard” and the Mythologizing of the Black Patriarch
I tried to watch it twice.
“I don’t think much of the way he’s handling his daughters…He hasn’t allowed them to reach their full potential… All you have to do is listen to them. You can hear the girlish attitude and the girlish conduct. . . . The girls are not on the road to maturity. They’re in a time warp. I feel sorry for them.”
Earl Woods on Richard Williams’ parenting
KING RICHARD is the perfect feel-good movie of 2021. It checks all the industry boxes for a successful, mainstream feature: based on a true story, features a mostly female BIPOC cast, and comes with big-name attachments in front of and behind the camera. Of course, Will Smith will earn several nominations for his performance. And of course, the writer of The Black List script will have a successful career ahead of him. It’s the kind of script I could only hope to write, if I believed in happy endings for happy families. Kudos to all involved. It’s just that I couldn’t finish it — I tried twice.
Each time, I stop at the same moment in this hagiography of the dogged, indefatigable black father. Ninety minutes in, marital tensions between Williams and Oracene, the family matriarch, drawn as a modest, God-fearing ‘strong black woman’ who relentlessly calls out her husband, yet always stays by his side, flare. By this time, Venus and Serena’s careers and earnings have netted them a bigger house — they are finally out of the hood. She was angry that his other, previous kids found him. RECORD SCRATCH.
The beautified underdog tennis enthusiast at the heart of this biopic had other kids, that he presumably abandoned? Papa was rolling stone? The great King Richard fathered other kids and then deprived them of his patriarchal designs?
Most men, black and white, suck at being fathers, that’s if they stay around long enough to be evaluated for their paternal abilities. It’s estimated that (33%) of US children live absent their biological father. And, racist GOP talking point or not, 57% of black children, as opposed to 20% of white children grow up without their fathers. I can’t speak to the latter, but I know a lot about the former. I’m one such child, a statistic, abandoned by a black father.
Although not completely pre-determined, there are clear socioeconomic links between fatherlessness in childhood and poverty, as well as a host of other qualitative challenges in teen years and adulthood: substance abuse, crime, poor academic achievement, and above all, mental health issues. I can’t help but trace my lifelong battle with depression, not to a chemical imbalance, but to these existential circumstances. I remember the sadness I felt when my father’s scheduled visits never came to pass. I’d wait for him on my grandmother’s porch, tearily insisting that he was on his way even though he was already 3 hours late. That absence, the never-ending waiting for something that will never materialize has lingered my entire life.
For female children, in particular, fatherlessness is linked to low socioeconomic status, compromised earning power, and anecdotally, daddy issues that play out in the poor choice of mates. It always struck me as odd that Black Lives Matter and its matriarchal leadership designated the disbanding of the nuclear family unit as a pillar in their movement. Was it a desire to honor bohemian mores, or implement the West African dictum “it takes a village?” Or was it a realpolitik acknowledgment, that after generations of examples to the contrary, it was too unrealistic to expect a reversal in black paternity stats?
Of course, itinerant black fatherhood has its roots in the prison industrial complex and structural economic patterns. It also has as many roots in hip-hop. ODB and Flavor Flav have how many kids? With the notion of baby mommas so normalized in hip-hop, who bothers counting the fatherless, except for the abandoned? I’m aware that it’s considered transgressive, a lack of fealty to blackness, to highlight such a phenomenon, that I’m supposed to carry water and support propaganda that contradicts the low-points of my life. I’ve never cared much for blind racial solidarity, and certainly won’t support and protect a group that’s never supported or protected me.
For the branch of the Williams family tree blessed with Venus and Serena, King Richard is a present father to his five girls. Bravo. Is he a good father, though?
A few scenes before the whopping admission of bastard progeny, Williams, characterized in solid Brer Rabbit-like fashion, always oscillating between Uncle-Tom and megalomaniac, plays a nasty trick on his girls. After one of Venus’ earliest junior tournament victories, when the tweens celebrate her hard-won victory, the girls are chastised for their lack of humility. Richard drops them at a bodega to get sodas, but takes off, abandoning them, so they’ll have to walk home and learn their lesson. The giggly gaggle exit the bodega to find the family Volkswagen long gone. “Where is daddy?” their eyes beg. The mother, in true form, demands that King Richard U-turn back to his girls. It’s a chilling moment.
Was this scene a subtle wink to the other family of girls Williams is accused of fathering and abandoning, without sending child support? One of King Richard’s abandoned daughters alleges there are 19 others. That’s a lot of tears, but who’s counting? Is the suffering of abandoned little girls not inspirational enough in this tale of ‘black excellence?’
The King’s preceding acts of parental overreach and overbearing micromanagement pale in comparison to that moment of grandiose, if not, malignant narcissism. Narcissists are legendary for holding one to a standard, and then changing the goalposts. Malignant narcissists can’t help but punish those who don’t follow orders. What a sucker-puck, what a mind fuck for the hardworking girls. They’d lived under draconian strictness, spent years at grueling physical conditioning to achieve success on the court, only to learn it’s forbidden to celebrate that success. No doubt helicopter parents, especially the least aware among them, applaud this scene of Pavlovian training.
KING RICHARD premiered on HBO MAX, into a pop culture orbit rife with the echoes of bad fathers. Will Smith, in his blitz of self-promotion for a Netflix show and memoir, confessed a desire to kill his father as a teen — retaliation for beating his mother. A few nights after my first attempt at KING RICHARD, I watched MALFUNCTION, The New York Times documentary about Janet Jackson’s nipplegate fallout. Though treated as a footnote, how can one discuss any member of the Jackson family without a nod to Joe Jackson, the notoriously archetypal showbiz dad, only recently eclipsed by James Spears? In a brief interview clip, Janet Jackson, in the hushed, apologetic tone of a scared little girl, admits to receiving beatings from her father, but added “only when she deserved it.” The source of her fear was clear to this fatherless daughter.
Then a few days later, Tiger Woods announced his return to golf after another leg surgery, after an accident, allegedly not related to his substance abuse struggles. In the early aughts, Richard Williams and Earl Woods were pitted against each other, neck and neck, as poster dads of “black excellence” in sports. What the HBO documentary TIGER weaves is a far less flattering portrait of Earl, an overcontrolling drunk and serial philanderer who exerted extreme pressure in the life and psyche of young Tiger. It’s hard not to remember the tragic origin story Tiger recounted about growing up in Orange County. When the young golfing enthusiast was tied to a tree and called racial slurs by kids, Earl didn’t offer a shoulder to cry on, a moment of commiseration, he simply ordered, ‘“Suck it up and be a champ,” in true The GREAT SANTINI fashion.
It’s expected that a proud operator like Earl would feel threatened by the momentum of Richard Williams. Unlike Woods, Williams never hid or whitewashed their shared humble beginnings — both were born in the Jim Crow South. While Woods urged his biracial son to create a new multiracial category, Williams notably criticized the tennis world’s Waspy airs, even suggested they borrow from the exuberance of gospel choirs to boost ticket sales. Woods’ quip, perhaps delivered in a soused state, feigns concern but maybe he had a point. Like the thesis tepidly advanced by MALFUNCTION, Janet peppered her albums with outré sexual references, all in a desperate attempt to liberate herself from Father Joe, thus how ironic and tragic that she was punished by the patriarchy at CBS.
The parallels between Williams and Woods, and Jackson, the abusive father who mocked little Michael for the broad shape of his West African nose, who according to LaToya, made his children play Russian roulette, draw themselves. And then there’s Beyoncé’s father. Matthew Knowles entered the pantheon of showbiz dads with the finesse and elegance of a corporate PR executive, only to be fired and banished by Bey when she learned of his philandering and swindling. I’ve never been a fan of R&B girl bands, but I was a stan for that bold reckoning.
As an abandoned daughter and armchair Freudian, I like to think that all women, deprived of Oedipal catharsis by the saccharine devotion of the Electra complex, should kill their fathers, and their mothers for that matter. Symbolically, of course. As a rite of passage, it ranks high on my list. In my life and work, I’ve offed my parents several times, symbolically, of course. That Venus and Serena officially gave their seal of approval to the film by signing on as producers strikes me as exotic. They seem sincerely proud to sing their father’s praises. Were these dutiful daughters ever tempted to take the reins of the film for a MOMMY DEAREST dishing of the dirt on the man who choreographed every moment and movement in their lives? I can’t imagine that kind of love and affection for a man, a character whose very notion is an absence in my life, as is the expectation of a happy ending for a happy family.
