"And the architect of a great American dream". New York Times

   On Dec. 21, 2000, Venus Williams stood before a throng of reporters who had come to record another first. Reebok was signing her to the largest endorsement contract signed by a female athlete: five years, $40 million.

Calling the day one of the biggest moments of her life, Williams said, “My life is one dream coming true after another.”

The architect of many of those dreams, Keven Joseph Davis, was in the room in Manhattan that day, standing off to the side, sufficiently in the background but looking on with pride as another piece of history was made. Davis, and Larry Bailey, a tax accountant he had brought into the fold nine years earlier, had negotiated the historic deal.

By then Williams, who was 20, and Davis had developed an unusual relationship, with Williams bouncing ideas off him. “He would come back to me and say this and that and the other; I would say, no, this, that and the other,” she said. “He would understand that and execute my vision and make it bigger.”

Williams remembers telling Davis to hold off negotiating with Reebok until after the 2000 Olympics “because I was planning on winning it,” she said in a phone interview. And she did.

The Reebok contract — indeed, how Venus and her sister Serena came to dominate women’s tennis — is a testament to believing in a dream and making it a reality. Two African-American sisters from Compton, a Los Angeles neighborhood with a reputation for violence and gang warfare, would take up a country club sport, circumvent its conventional conveyor belt, play on public courts and in a matter of 10 years rise to a level at which their only competition, at times, was each other.

The sad news is that Davis died two days before Christmas at age 54, after a battle with a brain tumor. There is something surreal about writing in the past tense about someone so full of energy, vigor and enthusiasm. But the story of Venus and Serena Williams would not be complete without talking about Keven Davis.

Davis met the Williams sisters in 1990 when Venus was 10 and Serena was 9. He had not sought out the family. His roommate at Loyola Marymount, Rodney Gabriel, now an orthopedic surgeon, had attended to Venus since she was 9. When Venus’s father, Richard Williams, “said that he was looking for an attorney to work with the family, I told him I had the perfect attorney for him,” Gabriel said in a phone interview. Gabriel called Davis, who was practicing contract law for Garvey, Schubert, Adams & Barer in Seattle.

Davis flew down, met with Richard and Oracene Williams and their daughters and agreed to work with the family pro bono. Richard Williams had a vision of greatness for his daughters but needed a strategist to help him achieve it. Williams wanted the girls to have their childhood and compete outside the pressure cooker of the traditional junior circuit. Executing this dream required patience and loyalty.

Davis was convinced from the outset that Venus and Serena would make history in a sport long resistant to black champions. Keven believed in the Williamses; he saw what Richard saw.

In those early days, Davis and Bailey had opportunities to move on to more lucrative projects but stayed the course. “They wanted to work with us, they saw something bigger,” Venus Williams said. “I thought that was so selfless — how they could see us and believe in us so much. Anything can happen in sports — you can lose interest, you can burn out, go crazy, break a leg. They were willing to take that risk.”

Venus did not have an endorsement deal when she turned professional. Richard Williams did not want the distractions and the pressure to win that come with sponsor obligations. Several management companies wanted to represent his daughters, but Williams asked Davis and Bailey to negotiate an early deal with Reebok in 1995.

Venus Williams won Wimbledon, the United States Open and the Olympics in the months before landing the landmark Reebok deal. Fourteen months later, in February 2002, she became No. 1 in the world, the first African-American woman to achieve that in the Open era.

I met Davis indirectly in 1998 by way of a letter. He wrote in reaction to a column I’d written about Venus’s loss to Lindsay Davenport in the 1998 United States Open semifinals. The column’s theme was that Venus should be patient, that her time would come. In his letter, Davis agreed that “as she matures patience (and hopefully more titles) will come.” He was prophetic. Venus has won seven Grand Slam titles; Serena has won 13 and has also been ranked No. 1.

Eventually, Davis assumed myriad roles for the sisters as events dictated. The difficult times included the murder of their sister in 2003, their parents’ separation and divorce, their refusal to play at Indian Wells after Venus pulled out of a semifinal and Serena was subsequently booed, and Serena’s eruption at the 2010 United States Open.       

“He was more than a lawyer, he was a friend,” Venus said. “He was always watching out for me and watching out for Serena.”

Invariably, athletes face health issues that threaten their careers. The sisters are no exception.

Venus, now 31, withdrew from the United States Open last year with Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that had been recently diagnosed. She was scheduled to play in a tournament this month in New Zealand but withdrew because of her health problems. A foot injury has led Serena, 30, to withdraw from the Brisbane International while preparing for the Australian Open.

Venus talked last week about how much she had learned from Davis, deriving strength from the way he faced death with courage and grace.

“He never complained one moment. He never said, ‘Woe is me,’ ” Williams said. “When he was sick and could hardly talk, he was still trying to figure out how he could help with whatever was going on at the moment.”

“I’m sure there were moments when he was afraid and regretful, but he dealt with it in a positive way,” she said. “So that’s given me courage, even though there will be some scary moments for me and I haven’t been able to do everything I’ve wanted to do.”

Davis’s résumé went beyond the Williams sisters. He earned his law degree from California-Berkeley, where he was on the law review, and became a highly respected corporate lawyer. He represented clients as diverse as the musicians Wynton Marsalis and Ludacris and the N.B.A. players union’s executive director, Billy Hunter.

But his work with Venus and Serena was the highest-profile accomplishment of his career.

“It’s difficult to describe with words who Keven is; he started out as our lawyer but ended up as something else,” Venus Williams said. “It’s difficult to describe; it’s just important that people know what a great person he was.”

Davis worked until he couldn’t anymore; he lamented that there was so much more work to be done. For the evolved soul, there always is.

But I think Keven Davis understood that he helped a family achieve an enduring legacy and that they helped make a sport better.

Lawyer, confidant, friend. And the architect of a great American dream.