Renee by Eric Drath is the story of Renee Richards which is one of the strangest tales in sports history.  This story begins with the life of Dr. Richard Raskind.  Dick Raskind was born in New York City and was the second child of two renowned doctors.  Dick excelled at everything he ever did.  In high school he was an ace on the pitching mound as well as the schools number one tennis player.  Despite being scouted by the Yankees, Dick decided to focus on tennis, and enrolled in Yale University.  Despite being an outstanding student, the captain of the tennis team and extremely popular among the female students at Yale, Dick begin realizing at the age of nine that he had a secret desire to be a woman.  It was while still in Yale that he began to refer to himself as Renee which is french for “Reborn.” While Dick struggled trying to hide is alter ego he became a star surgeon as well as star tennis player in the amateur circuits.  He went all the way to Casablanca to have the surgery but chickened out, came back to New York, married and had a son.  He tried to live the normal life but after five years he simply couldn’t do it anymore.  He divorced his wife and had the operation that gave birth to Renee Richards.

Unlike last weeks episode I knew absolutely nothing about this story going into it.  At first I had very mixed feelings but after watching it I was really blown away.  Renee Richards is an extremely interesting person and her story is simply amazing.  She went from living the life that anyone would dream of to being the subject of persecution and faced constant scrutiny once becoming a woman.  She may have claimed that she moved to California to live a private life but I believe her friends were right about her having the alpha male personality subconsciously.  She went to the local tennis tournament and dominated because despite changing her anatomy to that of a female she still had the male competitiveness in her brain.  The constant criticism she received was somewhat understandable of the time period, but it had to be horrible to deal with.  Eric Drath really does an excellent job of making you feel what Renee was going through at that time.  Not only was she dealing with the changes her body was going through, and the challenges of her troubled son, but she was in the spotlight because of her professional tennis career and under constant scrutiny because of it.

There is one very sad note that goes along with this story and that is what happened to Nick Raskind, Renee’s son.  Renee states during the documentary that she believes her son struggles with addictions.  She never says what he may or may not be addicted to but when watching the interviews with him, something seems to off.  Drath makes it pretty clear that their relationship is an estranged one, and understandably so.  I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like to have your father not only leave you in New York to move to California but become a woman in the process.  Some of Renee’s closest friends say in their interviews that Nick was always a “daddy’s boy” too, which had to make that move and transformation that much harder for him to handle.  It is pretty clear in the recent interviews with Renee that this is something she deeply regrets about her decision.  Her sons life has not been an easy one, it is hard to say what has happened now and he has possibly turned his life around but by the end of this documentary he has certainly hit rock bottom.

At this point in Renee’s life she is very reflective.  She has certainly led an extraordinary life and in many ways has two incredible life stories to tell.  She claims that she is now paying for her sins in the form of her relationship with her son.  She may be right and I think more than anything else Drath was trying to show that she now feels like what she did was selfish, but at the time Renee claims that she was either going to have this procedure or she was going to kill herself.  Suicide probably would’ve been a lot harder for her son to deal with but, no little boy ever wants their father to become a woman.  Drath ends the documentary with the reflective Renee saying that she would “like to be remembered as a great parent, a great optometrist and for her friends to remember that she was pretty good at tennis.”  While most people will remember her for her unique professional tennis career, after watching this, I will most certainly remember her as a truly incredible human being.