Its time to talk tennis

It is arguable that this magnificent sport came of age in the recent French Open at Roland Garros. For sheer sporting drama the men’s matches were a match for anything served up in any sporting genre. The same, however could not be said of the ladies competition where the headlines were all about the refusal of the favourite to do the obligatory post match interview with the press. The sport is now at a crossroads and needs to ask itself if it is in its own best interests to continue the present model whereby both the male and female finals are run simultaneously. There is a fair argument that the ladies competition is piggybacking on the back of the men’s tournament by leveraging the momentum of the latter to generate interest in the former. This is the footballing equivalent of playing off the men’s and women’s euro finals at the same time while telling the tv viewers that the price of this arrangement is that they don’t get to see any of the qualifiers! Because make no mistake, the absence of any exposure of the men’s qualifiers is hurting the sport greatly. There are reports that the men’s game is prone to corruption as participants place bets on their own matches. This is driven by the simple reality that the guilty (who are magnificent tennis players at the top of their game) just can’t make a living from the sport. This bizarre state of play coexists with a scenario where average female stars are multimillionaires on the back of the sport. What was instructive about the recent refusal of a top female player to talk to the press was the lack of support from her fellow professionals beyond the obligatory nod to her reasons for her stance. The press of course in the opinion sections rounded on the French tennis authorities but this was a no lose position for them. The much riskier position taken by very few was to say that the same rules are there for everyone and that it’s a bit of a stretch to accept that a person who can serve out tennis championships cannot answer a question from a hack just trying to meet a deadline and do his job. Bear in mind that the aforementioned suspended tennis players would die to get any exposure whatever on a mainstream tv channel. All this moves me to regurgitate an article written recently by Paul Kimmage who wrote about a famous US sports reporter called Gene Collier. He was a sportswriter for the Pittsburg post Gazette and wrote a column once after spending an hour waiting for a word with the quarterback. He begins to reflect on a life spent, ‘waiting for athletes to get showered, get dressed, get treatment, get ice, get heat, get taped, get whirlpooled, get out of a meeting or just get familiar with the common courtesy of making themselves available to someone who needed to talk to them. And then the futility of it all hit him. He walked out of the stadium and quit and realised that ‘an actual living hero is 10 times as likely to walk down your street, sit next to you on a bus or do you a favour than to appear on your tv at the Super Bowl or Roland Garros. So he started writing about them: a blind man who did nothing but talk to troubled and terminally ill children on the phone; a Holocaust survivor who’d been hidden by a nun in a Lithuanian basement; some
Women who gathered surplus medicines to send to poor countries. He wrote about the sense of entitlement which top athletes suffer from but are largely unaware of. This is as a result of the culture they operate in which fawns on them while ignoring the negatives. As far as the questions that are upsetting Naomi are concerned well here’s a sample: do you have a lot of input with the designs you wear for Nike? Is it hard to be a business woman as well as a top player? You are the new face of Louis Vuitton. Are you coming out with a collab soon?
Plenty more in this vein. I suppose it might give you a headache alright but it’s not exactly the Spanish Inquisition is it? Of course the games rulers are not immune from criticism. In 2016 for instance the offered a wildcard to Sharapova to play the IS open. Now the Russian had just served a ban for drug violation but that didn’t prevent the US open people from putting her on centre court straightaway for two matches. All this while the number five seed was out in the boondocks late at night playing her game. The sport is now at a crossroads, not unlike where English football found itself in 1992. It’s time to make the break lads.🎾