Serena Williams v. John McEnroe is a publicity war worth watching.
Ihave to admit I would love to see Serena Williams vs. John McEnroe on the tennis court, as a curiosity. Since that’s never going to happen ( although they said the same thing about Conor McGregor boxing Floyd Mayweather!), I suppose we will have to settle for the current Serena vs. Mac publicity war.
This is nothing to sneeze at. Their greatness in the field of attracting media attention is, among tennis players, unsurpassed — by others of either sex. McEnroe vs. Serena on the court might be an embarrassment for one or the other. Purely as celebrity conversation-starters they are Bird vs. Magic.
McEnroe is in a familiar, mostly consequence- free sort of trouble for an interview he gave to National Public Radio that aired this past Sunday. McEnroe is flogging a book, and NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro read a quote from it, asking him why he had described Serena Williams as “the best female player” ever. Maybe, Garcia- Navarro suggested, Serena is just “the best player in the world.” “Why say female player?”
McEnroe immediately answered that if Williams played tennis on the men’s tour “she’d be, like, (No.) 700 in the world.” He added that, “That doesn’t mean I don’t think Serena is an incredible player: I do.” He specified that “700” was not an exact guess — “perhaps it’d be a little higher, perhaps it’d be a little lower.” And he noted that Williams’s supreme mental rigour would enable unexpected victories over male pros.
In a later talk- show appearance, McEnroe got more headlines ( or, I suppose, spun more memes) by refusing to apologize for his opinion. He also made the less well- publicized observation that, at age 58, he himself would now probably rank “about 1,200 in the world” as a men’s player. So McEnroe, never slow to display ego, tacitly admits Serena would probably crush him in 2017. ( Reminder: this old ditherer once had a calendar year, 1984, in which he won 82 matches and lost 3.)
In the past, while providing commentary on TV tennis broadcasts, McEnroe has called Serena Williams “arguably the greatest athlete of the last 100 years,” and “the greatest player to ever play the game.” None of his words are those of someone who lacks respect or love for women’s tennis. And I suspect his guess as to how many men would have an advantage over Serena cannot possibly be too far off.
It so happens that when Serena was 16 and participating in the 1998 Australian Open, she and her sister Venus boasted that they could probably beat the 200thbest men’s player in the world. A German named Karsten Braasch, once number 38 in the men’s ranking, but by then a bit dissipated, stood 203rd at that moment. He got word of the Williams’ challenge. Indulging in his trademark habit of smoking cigarettes during breaks in play, Braasch beat Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2.
The sisters revised their claim to superiority over men outside the top 350, before deciding not to speak of the match again, nor to repeat it with a different male opponent. Braasch was quoted as saying “500 and above: no chance.”
It might be objected that Serena was “only” 16 at the time, assuming anyone had dared to mention Karsten Braasch at all this week, but female tennis players seem to experience pretty much the earliest chronological peak of playing ability outside gymnastics or thoroughbred horse racing. Being 35 years old, as Serena is now, doesn’t help anybody win in a sport involving strength and speed. McEnroe has clear justification for his belief that Serena would not be one of the 500 best players in a world of wideopen, all-genders tennis.
( I am assuming for the sake of argument that his tennis expertise doesn’t deserve any deference in itself. But, then, it is not as though Serena has said she disagrees with his assessment. She instead asked him on Twitter to respect her privacy — at almost exactly the moment she is appearing nude and pregnant on a magazine cover. Dudes have no monopoly on disingenuousness.)
No one is bending over backwards to be fair to McEnroe here, and — well, he is John McEnroe. Because he is one of the most notable loudmouths of the 20th century, his media career is probably somewhat immune to political destruction over a remark like this. He has a sort of jester’s licence, within obvious limits. Experience suggests that if he did apologize, it would only make things worse for him.
It is still worth observing that NPR’s question was about whether Williams is the “best” tennis player ever. McEnroe himself has called her the “greatest,” and sports fans, who are accustomed to Jesuitical debates over terms like “Most Valuable Player,” understand that this is a meaningful semantic difference. Arguing over such distinctions is arguably the ultimate purpose of sports.
Can Serena be the “greatest” tennis player, even though there are hundreds of people who could beat her under either men’s or women’s rules? She absolutely can. She has a good argument. Can she be the “best”? Like McEnroe, I do not quite see how. Should he have lied?