Williams demands an apology from Sandgren for tweets
Controversial American Tennys Sandgren may be out of the Australian Open but Serena Williams has delivered another serve, calling for him to apologise for his past tweets.
Sandgren made a quarterfinal exit on Wednesday and then used his post-match press conference to fire back at critics of his personal views.
The world No 97’s run from obscurity to the big stage put a spotlight on his polarising politics as detailed on his Twitter account, most of which has since been deleted.
The tweets included homophobic and anti-abortion comments, supportive exchanges with alt-right figures and his endorsement of ‘‘pizzagate’’, a debunked conspiracy theory that claimed former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was linked to a child sex-trafficking ring run out of a pizza restaurant.
It also aired his volatile history with Williams — he once tweeted that ‘‘any day Serena loses is a good day’’, and he also called a video of her yelling during her match with Roberta Vinci at the 2015 US Open ‘‘disgusting’’.
Williams, who sat out of the Australian Open after the birth of her daughter hit back this week when she tweeted ‘‘Turns channel‘‘, when Sandgren took to the court for the quarterfinal match with Korean Hyeon Chung.
Overnight Williams wasn’t finished, tweeting that ‘‘an entire group of people need an apology’’, appearing to interpret his ‘‘disgusting’’ comment as a racist slur about the champion’s skin colour rather than her on-court behaviour.
Williams tweeted an image saying, ‘‘Maturity is being able to admit when you’re wrong because you know that your mistakes don’t define you.’’
She accompanied the image with a statement: ‘‘I don’t need or want one (an apology). But there is a entire group of people that deserves an apology. I can’t look at my daughter and tell her I sat back and was quiet. No! She will know how to stand up for herself and others — through my example.
After his loss on Wednesday, Sandgren opened his post-match press conference by reading a prepared statement in which he blamed the media for exploiting his politics.
He said the media seek to ‘‘dehumanise with pen and paper and turn neighbour against neighbour’’.
‘‘You seek to put people in these little boxes so that you can order the world in your already assumed preconceived ideas,’’ he began..
‘‘With a handful of follows and some likes on Twitter, my fate has been sealed in your minds.
‘‘You would rather perpetuate propaganda machines instead of researching information from a host of angles and perspectives while being willing to learn, change, and grow.’’