Sport
Female foreplay
by Paul Lewis
Women’s tennis has had a bad rap, but it’s not all sex.
Tennis has always been a sport steeped in sex. We can forgive the annual gushings from Wimbledon about who is wearing what because it somehow manages to successfully combine fashion, money and ummm – oh, yes – sport.
While men’s tennis is mostly about the enormous rivalry between the likes of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and, increasingly, Novak Djokovic, women’s tennis has more of a Sex and the City feel to it, complete with bitchiness, flouncing fashions and marketing-speak – even aside from the interesting race to see who will consistently take over from Justine Henin as the world No 1.
This means matters are not usually complete without a rogue male coming along to make an idiotic pronouncement about how slack it all is, and how bad women’s tennis players are.
The fact is, before Federer and Nadal, women’s tennis was far more interesting than the men’s – although it lost its way a little as top players such as Serena Williams forgot they were athletes and pretended they were fashion designers or actresses.
But it still didn’t deserve the lunatic ramblings of Justin Gimelstob. He is the former tennis professional, now an official of the Association of Tennis -Professionals, who never won a singles title and was famous only for being Martina Hingis’ ex-boyfriend and Venus Williams’ mixed-doubles partner when they won titles at the Australian and US Opens.
Mixed doubles is to major sporting titles what Pol Pot was to tolerance and understanding, but that didn’t stop Gimelstob from gobbing off about under-achieving Russian clothes horse Anna Kournikova.
Speaking of a mixed-doubles event at which he was to face Kournikova, he declared: “She’s going to be serving 40 miles an hour and I’m just going to be plugging it down her throat.” He wouldn’t aim at her head, he added. “I’m going to just serve it right into the body, about 128, right into the midriff.” He wouldn’t touch Kournikova; her face was “only a five” he explained as he continued to make disparaging remarks about her.
Gimelstob also prattled on about -various women tennis players being “sexpots”, drooled over Nicole Vaidisova and made unflattering remarks about others.
There is a case to answer that the media, spectators, sponsors and players have all fanned the flames of fancy over women’s tennis – to the point where what Maria Sharapova wears (a kind of nightie one year, a tuxedo and a see-through outfit this year) is more important than her tennis. Her conqueror at Wimbledon – a rather, shall we say, plain girl – told reporters that she’d tried hard against Sharapova because she didn’t like her outfit.
Women tennis players have been tarred with the sex and fashion brush since Gertrude “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran outraged/delighted fans by wearing a skirt short enough to show the frilly bits of her knickers. That was 1949 and now, nearly 60 years later, the media are driven to ever more prurient coverage of Wimbledon.
Some players play it up, of course – Kournikova, Sharapova and Serena Williams among them – as they cement a career beyond tennis. New French Open champion Ana Ivanovic appears to be heading the same way after she left Wimbledon this year, beaten – according to some cynical coverage – “by her own loveliness”.
But, to go back to our starting point, tennis has always had a slightly racy side. In days of yore, it was one of the few games a man and woman could play unchaperoned. That calls to mind John Betjeman’s famous poem, called A Subaltern’s Love Song but which most people know as “Joan Hunter Dunn”.
It’s the true story of a game of tennis where Betjeman supposedly fell in love with his opponent, Joan Hunter Dunn, who died in April this year, leaving behind fans who never quite believed that she and Betjeman weren’t lovers.
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
There is in those lines and others a sense of the inherent sexuality of women’s tennis. It is true that the game would benefit from more sport and rivalry between the women players, and less of being weak from their own loveliness.
But the plain fact is that, whatever is achieved and whoever achieves it in the women’s draw at Wimbledon this year, it will be of incalculably more significance than anything ever said or done by Justin Gimelstob.
Email: sportscolumnist@listener.co.nz
