Sports Talk — Serena
Is Serena Williams being singled out for drug testing?
In historian Randy Roberts’ inaugural examination of a sports icon, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson, the first black man allowed to fight for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world, Roberts noted one reason black fighters had not been afforded such an opportunity was because they were thought to be innately advantaged by thicker skulls and a lack of sensitivity to pain.
In his most recent sports biography, released last March, A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle, Roberts told me he and co-author Johnny Smith found the opposite.
“No one tried to make a genetic explanation for how Mickey Mantle hit a baseball a mile from both sides of the plate,” Roberts said. “That takes place more with black athletes than with white athletes. There’s always that, ‘How do we explain it?’ ”
The website Deadspin revealed data earlier this month that suggested tennis was trying to explain how Serena Williams is so great, still, even as a new mother in her mid-30s after a dangerous delivery of her baby girl. Deadspin showed that Williams was tested for banned performance-enhancing drugs significantly more often than her competitors.
Williams finally responded to the report Tuesday on Twitter, where she wondered whether she was a victim of discrimination. “… it’s that time of the day to get ‘randomly’ drug tested and only test Serena. Out of all the players it’s been proven I’m the one getting tested the most. Discrimination? I think so,” Williams tweeted.
It is difficult to prove whether Serena has been singled out for any reason: her nonpareil excellence, her continued success at an age most tennis players are done, or, most disturbingly, her status as a racial minority in the predominantly white sport. We do know that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency tested her five times this year thus far, or more than twice as much as her competitors and more than the top five U.S. men’s players.
We don’t know yet about the International Tennis Federation, which reports only at year’s end and only provides ranges for how many times it tested any athlete, but a recent ESPN.com report suggested the federation didn’t test Williams disproportionately more than others. We don’t know yet about the World Anti-Doping Agency, which can test any athlete in any sport at any time.
No matter, it is fully understandable that Williams would react to the allusion of the data as aspersion against her accomplishments. There is a long lineage of black athletes, going back at least to Jack Johnson, whose excellence has somehow been met quite publicly by suspicion.
“This crops up from time to time,” Damion Thomas, the curator of sports at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said. “Suspicions about whether African-American athletes are cheating, or have some sort of genetic advantage, or superiority somehow tied to slavery.”
To be sure, Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, sitting in Washington’s now-defunct famous eatery Duke Zeibert’s back in January 1988, infamously ascribed the talents of black NFL stars to breeding in the antebellum South. He lost his analyst job previewing NFL games on CBS shortly after.
Any number of newspaper stories, academic journal articles and books, like Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, have been published arguing that black athletes’ success may be a product of genetics rather than diligence and, most disconcerting, intelligence.
“There’s an insidious quality to it,” Roberts said. “They’re saying they’re [black athletes] better because … they’re not like us.”
The Ghanaian-American Freddy Adu’s prodigious talent as a teenage soccer player in the early 2000s generated loud rumors that he couldn’t be 14 years old.
Tiger Woods stood out on the golf course because of his black and Thai heritage, winning 12 majors in nine years, and a physique highlighted in a red shirt on Sundays that led some the whisper he was on steroids or HGH. A book written in 2014 linked Woods to a Canadian doctor busted at the U.S. border for smuggling HGH though no proof of Woods receiving PEDs was compiled.
Former longtime NBA coach George Karl stated unequivocally in his 2017 memoir Furious George: My Forty Years Surviving NBA Divas, Clueless GMs, and Poor Shot Selection that NBA players were juicing, taking direct shots, it seemed, at Kobe Bryant, who sought medical treatment in Germany, and even LeBron James, whose physique has generated rumors of PED use.
“It’s obvious some of our players are doping,” Karl wrote. “How are some guys getting older — yet thinner and fitter? How are they recovering from injuries so fast? Why the hell are they going to Germany in the offseason? I doubt it’s for the sauerkraut.”
“One of the things that hasn’t trickled down to the public,” Thomas said, “is the training regimen [of athletes]. It’s so different than what it used to be.”
Thomas noted, too, proactive surgical procedures, most notably Tommy John surgeries on pitchers, in some cases, in their teens.
“Part of the issue with Serena, and Venus [the older Williams sister], is so many things they did are outside the orthodoxy of the game. They get otherized because of that.”
Of course, there have been standout black athletes who’ve proven to be pharmaceutical cheats, just like Lance Armstrong or Mark McGwire. Most infamously, they are slugger Barry Bonds and sprinter Ben Johnson. But Serena’s sin? “She’s … just better than anyone,” Roberts said. “She is what she is.”