What he likes best is to get people off balance. One day he'll be talking about buying the Rockefeller Center for several billion dollars. The next day he might be explaining how he starts three new businesses a year.
And then he told the world that he wasn't going to watch his daughters battle each other for a place in Thursday's Wimbledon semi-final because he planned to attend the funeral of a stranger, the friend of some chap he met while watching the tennis just the other day.
Any of this might happen, or none of this. Yet no one stops listening and turns away, because this is some kind of father that Venus and Serena Williams have, an American original whose drive and vision have helped carry his family from the cotton fields of Louisiana to the lawns of Wimbledon in three generations.
Is Richard Williams all the things they say he is? Is he a Jehovah's Witness who is not averse to a drink, a black supremacist who records a diatribe against race-mixing on his answering-machine message, a fanatically ambitious father who plotted his daughters' destiny with disturbing precision?
We do know that, unlike certain other tennis dads, Williams is not the subject of court orders restraining him from associating with his daughters. He has not been thrown out of tennis clubs for behaving violently while under the influence of drink. He did not expose his daughters to the pressures of the professional tennis circuit before their characters had been formed.
They may have made history as the first sisters to meet in a Wimbledon semi-final (with Venus winning to go onto the final), they may have established themselves remarkably quickly as top-10 fixtures, but he believes that they should have things on their minds other than playing tennis.
They were no more than four or five years old when he put rackets in their hands, becoming coach and mentor as well as their father. He has certainly made wild claims - that Venus would be the world No 1 before she was 18, for instance, which did not come true - but none of them seem to have had an adverse effect.
These girls are not victims or casualties. They show no sign of being in thrall to his presence on court. Their independence of mind is among their most powerful characteristics, in life as well as on court.
"My dad's a man who's really into education," 18-year-old Serena, the younger of the two, said at Wimbledon this week. "He'd like to see us kids succeed in things off court because sports can only last for so long. You never know what can happen. We're trying to do our best. We're trying to go to school. When we have time, we're trying to get our degrees, to have something to fall back on."
Both women are studying at the Art Institute of Florida, near their home in Palm Beach. Venus, now aged 20, has at various times expressed an interest in becoming an astronaut, an architect, an archaeologist and a dress designer. She is a linguist and her interests include Russian history and Chinese culture.
Serena's declared interests are less cerebral - surfing, swimming and playing the guitar - but she has enough of a sense of humour to observe that her most memorable experience was receiving an A-grade in geometry.
Having taught them to hit a ball before they could even draw a straight line, Richard Williams's master stroke appears to have been his decision to hold them aloof from junior competition. While other prodigies were honing their competitive instincts to screaming pitch, the Williams sisters were retaining the sense of sport as play.
"In our spare time," Serena said, "we don't go out and say, `Let's go play tennis'. We're more like, `Let's go to the beach'."
Nor has he created a couple of clones. Serena, the shorter and more powerfully built, resembles her mother, Oracene, with a straightforward, tenacious and vivacious temperament. She was the first to win a major tournament - last year's US Open.
The six-foot, one-inch Venus, of the wonderful movement and astonishing reach, is like her dad: a dreamer and free spirit, a stranger to orthodoxy. "I get bored easily," she said, in response to a question about whether it was a healthy thing to have her father as her coach, "and my dad understands that. He knows how to work with me. He's a great coach. All of our losses, I can never blame on my dad. I would definitely blame myself as a bad student."
Williams is anything but a constant presence at his daughters' tournaments. In 1997, when Venus crossed the Atlantic to make her debuts at Roland Garros and Wimbledon, Oracene did the chaperoning while he stayed at home to mind his businesses.
He is here this time, but only at the request of Venus, who asked her sister's approval before presenting the idea. "My Mom says a lot, lot less," Venus said. "At a grand slam tournament, I want more input."
Their father's drive to succeed is said to derive from the character of his own mother, a Louisiana sharecropper who remains a constant presence in his conversation.
"My dad always talks about how she helped him be the person that he is," Serena said. "I was pretty young when she passed away, but I remember she was always smiling. He's a very positive person, the type of person who wants to be the best at whatever he does. I imagine her to have been the same way."
There are, they claim, no rows on the practice court. "We weren't taught to be that way," Venus said. "We were taught to pay attention, to listen, to be quiet. Naturally, you voice your opinion at times. Usually I stay quiet, try to listen. It really turns out best that way."
But the Williams family's closeness has led to accusations of arrogance. Both of the sisters responded this week to John McEnroe's suggestion that they would earn more respect if they showed a little more humility in the locker room.
"I'm always around my Mom, my Dad, Venus, my whole family," Serena said. "The world is not perfect. Just stick close to yourself and be not too friendly. That's why a lot of people have a problem with us, because we're not too friendly with anyone. We're cordial, we say `hi', etcetera. But I'm really serious about doing well here. If that's what it takes, to have your game face on the whole time, that's what I'm trying to do. I don't want to come all this way to get only so far. I'm ready to go all the way now."
Venus explored another dimension. "I believe that Serena and I are very polite," she said, "because that's the way our parents taught us. I believe also that most of the time when Serena and I lose a match it's because we beat ourselves, not because the other player beats us. I've been beaten about four times, and there was nothing I could do [but] wave the white flag. But most of the other times I've beaten myself through unforced errors."
"Humility comes with age," the ninetimes singles champion Martina Navratilova said after she and her partner had been eliminated from the women's doubles by Venus and Serena. "You don't see too many humble 18-year-olds out there. I'd rather see too much confidence than not enough."
This week the sisters refused to talk about their contest. "Tennis is just a game, but family is forever," Serena said on Tuesday, when they learned that they were to meet. "Ten years from now I don't think I'll even be playing tennis. I don't want to ruin something that should last a lifetime for something that just lasts a few years."
"We meet our match," Venus added, with a calm certainty that would delight her Dad, "whenever we play each other."