ABOUT RIGHTS, OR JUST WRONG?
It’s Serena vs. The World — again
In the press room at Wimbledon a few years back, one of the first questions for Serena Williams after a tough victory was about the volume of her grunting. She waited a bit, wearing an expression of someone who was weary of always having to avoid the bait, and said: “I’m done with controversy.” If only.
At a time when Williams should reasonably be expected to be only working her way back into tennis form, after a harrowing childbirth that resulted in multiple surgeries, she lost the U.S. Open final to Naomi Osaka on Saturday night and touched off a conflagration that was big even by her standards.
A simmering dispute with chair umpire Carlos Ramos that began when he penalized her for receiving coaching led to her eventually being docked a full game — a penalty that provided the winning margin in the second set of Osaka’s straight-sets victory.
Afterward, Williams was very much not done with controversy.
She said men often say much worse to umpires than she did — she called Ramos a “thief ” right before he dinged her the game penalty — without such dire consequences. “I’m here fighting for women’s rights and for women’s equality and for all kinds of stuff,” she said. “For me to say ‘thief ’ and for him to take a game, it made me feel like it was a sexist remark.”
The 23-time Grand Slam champion has found allies and enemies with that statement.
Billie Jean King, who has literally battled for equality on the tennis court, thanked Serena for “calling out this double standard” in which women are called hysterical and men are called outspoken for the same behaviour. Another retired legend, Margaret Court, said it was too bad that Williams was trying to be “bigger than the rules.” (Being on the opposite side of an argument with Court is usually a good place to be; she has decried modern tennis as “full of lesbians.”)
For every person who criticized Ramos for not swallowing his ego when Williams lost her cool, there was another who blasted her for showing him up and distracting from Osaka’s big moment on the stage. Only Ramos knows if he took particular umbrage at being upbraided by a woman, but would he have been so quick to issue such a rare penalty if he was being chewed out by Roger Federer or Rafa Nadal? My opinion only: I highly doubt it.
Williams is not entirely blameless, either. She no doubt lost her cool, and made some strange claims in her various on-court diatribes, including that she wouldn’t cheat because she now has a daughter. Parenthood does not automatically make one incapable of the odd swindle.
But considering anything Serena Williams does has to be taken in the context of being Serena Williams. Despite compiling all kinds of records over a career that included dominant runs an absurd 12 years apart, she has been doubted and scrutinized pretty much from the jump.
Among a field generally populated by the lithe and the white, she’s been subjected to racial abuse and been criticized for being too muscular or, alternatively, too fat. She’s been ridiculed for her choice of outfit — the French Open this year decided to ban future appearances of her one-piece “catsuit” — and even ridiculed for the fact that she has spent so much time interested in fashion. She’s not the only female player to be dismissively told that she should focus on tennis, but she’s certainly the best one to receive such dumb advice.
Could a chair umpire have acted in a sexist manner in dealing with her? Consider that this is a sport in which women often receive less money than their male counterparts at the same tournament, in which they are criticized for playing fewer sets if the prize money happens to equal that of the men, and in which they are often asked why women have an excessive-heat rule while the men do not.
This is a sport in which a former tournament director said two years ago that women “rode the coattails of the men” and that a “lady player” should “go down every night on her knees and thank God” that men like Federer and Nadal had been around to stoke interest. It’s a sport in which an on-court interviewer three years ago asked Eugenie Bouchard to “give us a twirl.” (He was, surprise, an older white man.)
It often seems like every major tennis tournament brings reports of a sexism row and, while some of that is a result of a frisky press, one way to have fewer sexism rows is to have less sexism. Even when the tennis world is largely celebrating another Serena feat, someone makes a point of trying to assess where she would rank among men.
It is no wonder that Williams often seems so weary at those press conferences.
From the moment she arrived to dominate tennis like no other, there has been a bit of Serena Versus the World about Williams. I cannot say that I blame her.