Andy Capostagno Tennis
It’s just possible that you may have been lured into the belief that there is a tennis tournament going on in Johannesburg this week. Six of the finest players in women’s tennis are battling it out for $200 000 in prize money and you can witness all the action for as little as R65, or, if you’re feeling flush, as much as R200. That, give or take, is the gist of the advertising campaign put together by sponsors MTN and ESPN.
But a look at the roster suggests that the king, while not entirely naked, may be wandering around in his underwear. Let’s take a look at exactly how “classic” the MTN Women’s Classic is likely to be.
To start at the top, there are three players here who are currently in the top 10 in the world rankings. Local girl Amanda Coetzer is the highest placed at fourth, Mary Pierce of Canada, the United States and France is fifth and Conchita Martinez of Spain is eighth. So far so good.
Now we begin to struggle. Mary Joe Fernandez, born in the Dominican Republic, but based in Miami, is currently ranked 24th. She has won two grand slam doubles titles, but none in singles and is actually using this tournament to ease her way back into singles play. She has not played a singles match since wrist surgery in December.
Olga Barabanschikova of Belarus is ranked 58th, but, we are told, is a rising star. Last year she upset the 13th-seeded Brandea Schultz-McCarthy to reach the third round of the United States Open. In the 1997 Family Circle Magazine Cup at Hilton Head, she slammed down the eighth-fastest women’s serve on record. Impressed? I knew you would be.
Chanda Rubin of the US is ranked 66th. She has won a grand slam doubles event and the 1996 Australian Open with Spain’s Arantxa Sanchez Vicario. So far not even the ages add up to “classic”.
It is obvious from the above list that if this event is going to be a “classic”, it is unlikely to be through the quality of the tennis played. But before we all get too negative about this thing, let’s remember how it got off the ground in the first place.
Steffi Graf said yes, she’d love to come. You would be a fairly limp-wristed promoter to turn down an event based on the fact that the best and most charismatic women’s player since Little Mo Connolly was willing to be your star attraction.
On the back of Graf everything else fell into place fairly easily. And then Graf pulled out.
What would you do if you were a promoter in that situation? You’d probably do exactly what Franco Barocas did. You’d wind down the tennis and wind up the sex appeal.
When did sex become so important in the women’s game? Was it when Lottie Dodd showed an ankle at Wimbledon in 1887? Or was it when the hooped skirts were dispensed with altogether? Was it when Teddy Tinlen turned his girls into clothes horses in the 1950s, or was it when Chris Evert so capably provided the beauty to Martina Navratilova’s beast in their enduring rivalry of the 80s?
Actually, it’s probably much more recent than that, for while the men have attracted swoons from tennis groupies for decades, the women, until very recently, left very few of us male chauvinist pigs weak at the knees.
Before Evert, who in some respects was a fairly plain Jane, there was almost no one who would have you glued to the TV screen hoping for a glimpse of knicker elastic. Billie Jean King, Margaret Court and Virginia Wade were all fine tennis players, but none would have attracted the major sponsorships which have come the way of 16-year-old Anna Kournikova.
Which brings us to the late withdrawal of the lissom Russian. Imagine you are Barocas and your main star, Graf, has withdrawn. So you redo all the advertising and base it around sex appeal of la Kornikova, and then she withdraws! A man less secure in his estate than Barocas would probably slit his wrists.
But you don’t panic. You look at who’s available and you see that Irina Spirlea, Romania’s world number nine, is available. But Spirlea is a good tennis player, not Bo Derek walking down the beach in 10, or Ursula Andress emerging from the waves in Dr No.
But you hear about a girl who comes from the same part of the world as Kournikova, who is also teenaged and lovely and you discover to your absolute delight that she has a pierced navel.
Who do you go for?
The world number nine or the world number 58? Step forward Olga Barabanschikova in all your loveliness. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with any of this. Sex sells is a truism in the advertising business. Andre Agassi used to wear tight-fitting denim shorts on to the court and even had a range of shirts designed to ride up the front during his serve to show off his hairy chest. The funny thing is that tennis is probably the only game played professionally which sold male sex appeal ahead of its female counterpart.
But the ladies are now catching up, so if you see your neighbour bending low in apparent concentration at the MTN Sundome over the weekend, don’t imagine he is admiring Pierce’s forehand.
ENDS