> The idea that the guy who had a tennis idea just happened to come by two daughters who were already possesing 85-90% god given talent for the sport he just happened to specifically pick is hard for a human to wrap their mind around I think.

1) You've got it backward. If that hadn't been true, you'd never have heard about them.

You could drop the Williams sisters in practically ANY power sport given their size and build (Venus is REALLY BIG for a woman--she's 6' 1" and could likely play in the WNBA--Serena isn't exactly tiny--she's 5' 9"--that puts them at 3 and 2 standard deviations out, repectively) and they would dominate very quickly.

If the Williams sisters played basketball or soccer, for example, they'd be a hugely dominant force there, instead.

2) Training did a big shift right about the 1990s when people like the Williams sisters were coming up--especially for female training.

Navratilova was really the first female tennis player to adopt more scientific power training and reap the benefits. The players in the next generation (which includes the Williams sisters) that were steeped in that idea and put it into practice did very well in a LOT of different sports. They also easily blew through competitors who didn't do that--and at that point in the 1990s there were still a lot who didn't.

It's bound to happen because you don't hear about all the scenarios like this that failed.

Serena and Venus were clearly phenomenal pure athletes. Serena is arguably the strongest womens player ever.

The Williams dad basically coached Venus and Serena. Think about it, he's not even a professional coach. Think about all the thousands of privileged tennis players that get unlimited professional coaching, facilities, Boletteri academy, etc.

I will grant you that tennis is a sport where overwhelming athleticism is not the primary attribute. But right after hand-eye coordination comes athleticism, and after that is top-tier endurance.

There is no shortage of athletes in high-revenue sports that will literally run through walls (see: rugby, american football) to succeed. And the vast majority of them don't. Look at Division I college sports: full of totally dedicated elite athletes receiving top level coaching. How many of them move onto the lower tiers of pro tennis?

Don't be fooled by the lottery winners / survivor bias of the top players. Yes they worked hard to get where they were. Yes they may work harder or smarter than some of their near-peers with equally flaggergasting natural talents. Yes it fits into a popular American narrative of hard work == success.

But look at Nick Krygios. I don't follow the guy's training, but it's pretty clear that he is as apathetic a top player as there is. Every tennis observer knows he has the physical gifts of an all-time great, almost naturally given.

Donovan Bailey was a Canadian sprinter that won the 100m in the Olympics in the 90s (no, not the steroid guy Ben Johnson). He was basically not training and goofing off a year before the Olympics and someone finally got through to him to actually train for it and got him focused, and boom a year later he was Olympic champ in the most selective, widely contested, pure athletic event in existence.

A lot of my frustration with the youth coaching sports pipeline is that they tell the parents to focus on one sport to exclusion. There is a racket where the high school teams will only have players coached by the coach in the offseason, "paid his dues".

So kids don't get a wide variety of sports exposure and don't have fun. Which is dumb. Sure there are these youth sports coach vampires making a buck off of the hopes and dreams of the parents, but it comes down to the idiot parents not realizing how things really work.

>Serena and Venus were clearly phenomenal pure athletes

I don't think it's helpful to assert true the point that's trying to proven. The point is Richard Williams made a decision before it could possible be known that both daughters just happened to be pure phenomenal athletes at that young an age for that specific sport. There is no evidence that this is not s case of nuture overcoming nature since the absence of similar successes could just as easily be chalked up to shitty coaching of what were incredibly talented youths who were more pure athletes than either of the Willams sisters instead of an indictment of the lack of god given talent those other failed youths originally possessed.

>But look at Nick Krygios. I don't follow the guy's training, but it's pretty clear that he is as apathetic a top player as there is.

The point of contention is not whether naturally talented athletes can become pro with minimal effort, which I think hardly anyone would disagree with in theory. The contested point is whether the parent is condemning their children to failure if they do not rack up successes at a very young age.

There was a piece a while back ago attributing the success of notable famous people like Einstein to the presence of all consuming private tutors, where the tutor in question was either a very close family friend, a family member, or a relative. These people just didn't quit when other tutors with less skin in the game would. How do we know 50% natural talent is not enough and the rest cannot be overcome by nuture, and that it has to be 90% natural talent from the get go?

I agree that regardless of success such a life might be subpar. But whether a parent should subject their kid to such a life is a related but a separate issue to the question of their potential success.