Venus and Serena Williams have traveled a tough road

When the last ball is struck and Venus and Serena Williams embrace at net, they will have finished facing off in a Grand Slam final for the seventh time, the third time on British soil. This is a supremely consistent duo: A Williams sister has played in the Wimbledon women's singles final every year this century but one.

We've grown accustomed to seeing these two powerful women hoist gleaming trophies and smile those big, bright smiles and fight for each point like it is some sort of golden nugget. So accustomed that we take the Williams sisters for granted. We tend to forget the obstacles they've faced, how they've persevered, and the fact that what they've been doing all these years defies expectations.

Think about the odds. When they were little girls, Venus and Serena's enigmatic father told everyone who would listen that his girls would one day take professional tennis by storm. He was castigated and scorned. Fact is, given how difficult tennis is, even if Richard Williams had been a wealthy, suburban dad audacious enough to say that his girls would one day earn tennis scholarships to Weber State, he'd have been branded delusional.

Venus and Serena weren't daughters of a suburban dad. They hail, we know, from the hard Southland flats and they spent their formative years learning tennis in South L.A.'s most difficult neighborhoods. Compton and its environs are a maze that must too often be moved through with caution.

I know this. Not long ago a member of my own family was murdered there, a baby caught in a crossfire in front of my great-aunt's well-tended home.

Venus and Serena know this, too. Tennis prowess allowed them to leave Compton for Florida just before they reached their teens. They made it out, partly because of the tightly focused gaze of their parents. But that focused gaze, and that discipline, couldn't keep Venus and Serena's sister, Yetunde, from being gunned down by a gang member as she innocently drove on a dark South L.A. street five years ago.

No, in some parts of L.A., strong parenting is often not enough to protect. But it did help Venus and Serena form the inner strength necessary to succeed despite the odds and critics and naysayers, of which there have been many along the way.