From Africa To Australia, Serena Finds Calling

They write, not with a pen or pencil but a stick, not on paper but into dry dirt.
"It nearly brought me to tears," Williams tells The Daily Telegraph.
"To see these kids do their homework and writing, using a stick as a pen and the dirt as their paper and they were bending over doing their maths sums in the dirt."
It is a concept that is not confined to her racial roots but her cultural and professional tennis beginnings as well.
"We never forget where we come from," continues the tennis star, referring to Compton, the notorious suburb of LA where she was raised and the needle-littered courts where she and Venus were coached from a tennis manual by their father in the late '80s.
"We never forget our roots and we always try to remember that and we always try our best to get back to the community that we came from."
It is with this sense of reconnecting with her past that Williams thinks of the city that ignited her tennis career - Sydney.
While she was immersed in the sport as a child, she says she cannot remember watching it on TV or reading about it in magazines. Just practising.
That said, she was acutely aware at the time of US champion Lindsay Davenport and the greatest player in the world, Steffi Graf.
Serena was just four-and-a-half years old when she won her first tennis tournament.
Home-schooled by her father, she had played 49 tournaments by the age of 10.
Of those, she won 46 - and it was not long until she was sharing the court with her heroes Davenport and Graf.
Williams this week spoke of those fond early memories that still remain vivid.
She was 16 years old and yet to establish herself with a big win on the WTA tour.
But that year in Sydney she strung together five consecutive WTA victories for the first time - and can remember the excitement of stepping on to the court against Davenport.
While that in itself was a thrill for the young American, it was soon surpassed by the the elation of walking off the court having beaten the world No. 3 in what was a spine-tingling comeback.
Williams leapt around centre court with unbridled joy after her 1-6 7-5 7-5 quarter-final upset. She stills ranks it ahead of most of her grand slam victories as one of her all-time favourite triumphs.
Williams says the following year was equally memorable.
This time, though, it was Graf across the net.
It was the first time Williams had played her in a WTA match and, while the result did not go her way, her performance in the epic three-setter left nobody in any doubt she was a champion-in-waiting.
By the end of the 1999 season, Williams would win her first grand slam, the US Open. Within three years she would dethrone Davenport and Graf as world's No. 1.
"Some of my greatest memories are in Sydney, no doubt," Williams says.
"It is the place where I really jump-started my career and I played some of my greatest matches there. Steffi Graf was always a player I looked up to and I remember that match well and playing Steffi for the first time.