Final whistle
Eloquent Gauff joins hallowed tennis ranks of ‘difficult women’ Teenager’s speech on US racial injustice showed up the game’s male players, writes Simon Briggs
On Wednesday, 16-year-old Coco Gauff delivered a speech of beautiful simplicity at a Black Lives Matter rally. At an age when your average adolescent is still forging fake IDS, she is already the most eloquent athlete on the subject of George Floyd’s death. A sporting Greta Thunberg, if you will.
Within a few hours, Gauff ’s stand had caught the attention of Martina Navratilova (who posted the video on Twitter with the caption “Coco you totally rock”) and Billie Jean King (who saluted her for fighting injustice). Even before winning her first major, Gauff is thus graduating into the ranks of tennis’s “b----difficult women”. I use the term – coined by Ken Clarke in relation to his old comrade Theresa May – as a mark of admiration.
But while Gauff and fellow campaigner Naomi Osaka stand up for the black community, where are their male equivalents?
With the honourable exception of Frances Tiafoe – the American son of immigrants from Sierra Leone, who put together a moving video entitled Racquets Down, Hands Up – the guys are just too comfy to risk linking their brands to a controversial political cause.
They might offer lip service, as the “Big Three” did this week when they each posted a black square on their Instagram pages to mark “Blackout Tuesday”.
But the locker-room credo once identified by John Mcenroe – “deep down, nobody gives a s--- about anybody else” – still applies.
When asked about public disturbances in the United States this week, Rafael Nadal replied: “When you see all these disasters on the streets, my feeling is: that is not the way to protest.” Which was a reasonable point.
But when Nadal added, “We are getting there [closer to a fair society] in all ways”, it was hard not to catch a whiff of unconscious privilege.
The tone of this conversation recalled the words of anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass. “Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing the ground.”
The women tend to be more outspoken. For them, tennis has always been political.
The recent debate over a merger of the two tours is only the latest skirmish in a conflict that has been bubbling away since the 19th century.
It is worth remembering that the very first thing the Lawn Tennis Association wanted to do, on its formation in 1888, was to fob off females with a downsized version of the game: lighter balls and rackets, a smaller court, maybe even two bounces.
The plan might have succeeded but for the first true women’s champion: Lottie “Little Wonder” Dod. In that same summer of 1888, Dod put in a sparkling performance in the original “Battle of the Sexes” against Ernest Renshaw. With her speed of movement and weight of shot, she silenced the chauvinists who had been deriding women’s tennis as “pat-ball”.
Dod – who was only 17 at the time – knew she was fighting for equality when she went out to face Renshaw at Exmouth. Just as King would, when she overcame Bobby Riggs in the modern “Battle of the Sexes” almost a century later. Navratilova was also taking a stand, in 1981, when she came out as sport’s first self-declared lesbian.
Through the 130-odd years separating these two brave teenagers – Dod and Gauff – runs a long and glorious tradition of rebellious womanhood.
Even Edwardian icon Dorothea Lambert Chambers, who dominated Wimbledon in the lead-up to the First World War, was not above taking a potshot at the patriarchy.
“Woman,” she wrote in her coaching manual Lawn Tennis for Ladies, “is a second edition of man, if you like, and, like most second editions, an improvement”. On the political awareness front, at least, the case is hard to dispute.
More details of Lottie Dod and the early days of women’s tennis are included in “A People’s History of Tennis” (Pluto Press, £14.99), by David Berry