Sorry, but Serena hasn’t ridden anyone’s ‘coattails’
Perhaps we should not be surprised that a 69-year-old white man from South Africa is not a great source of enlightenment on issues of equality.
And yet, the comments on Sunday from Raymond Moore, chief executive of the Indian Wells tennis tournament, were still beyond what we have come to occasionally expect in sports, where dudes remain overwhelmingly the focus.
Moore, if you are late to this, said the WTA “ride (s) on the coattails of the men” and that a “lady player” should “go down every night on (her) knees and thank God” that Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were born because they have carried the sport.
It’s particularly perplexing the director of a prestigious American tournament would say such things because if you asked a casual tennis fan to name three active American players, the answer would be: Serena Williams, Venus Williams, and I don’t know can you give me a hint? James Something?
Serena, on the other hand, is a global star. At Wimbledon in July and the U.S. Open in September, her matches easily had as much attention on them as anything the men did, as her Grand Slam bid fell a couple of victories short. If anyone was riding the coattails of those tournaments’ most dramatic moments, it was the guys in shorts. (Williams called Moore’s comments a disservice to women, saying “we shouldn’t have to drop to our knees at any point.”)
But this isn’t about which tennis draw is more interesting. Serena Williams’s late-career Slam bid was riveting, while the men’s game has provided years of great theatre, from Federer and Nadal to Novak Djokovic. Each has been good for the other, and has drawn people to the sport who wouldn’t otherwise have been interested. That seems so obvious that it doesn’t need to be pointed out.
And yet it does. What’s most distressing about Moore’s comments is the way in which he gave the game away later in his session with reporters, where he said that after Serena and Maria Sharapova retire, that the WTA has “a handful of very attractive prospects that can assume the mantle. You know, (Garbine) Muguruza, Genie Bouchard. They have a lot of very attractive players.”
Wait. Did he just say that women’s tennis will be fine because they have some hotties coming along? No, no, no, Moore said. “They are physically attractive and competitively attractive.”
I see. Because that’s how I always think of Roger Federer: competitively attractive.
This is where Moore’s attitude gets exposed for what it is: The men are the real athletes, and the women can do their thing and
that’s nice, but it helps if they’re cute.
Women’s sports, with pro leagues that for the most part started many decades behind those established for men, are not going to rival the male behemoths anytime soon. You can’t snap your fingers and declare the WNBA the equivalent of the NBA, no matter how much you might believe in the importance of gender equality. If a girl dreams of being a pro hockey player, you can’t say she’ll have the same options as a boy today, but at least she’ll have some options. That wasn’t the case very long ago.
Tennis, though, is the rare sport where athletes of both genders have access to the same big stages. Aside from the Olympics, it’s as close to parity as we’re going to get. And yet, here we are: “lady players,” says the tennis guy.
In Canada, the prize money for the men’s Rogers Cup winner last year was US$685,200. For the women, it was US$490,200.