Is teen pin-up Anna Kournikova bad for women’s tennis? Jon Henderson looks at the triumph of style over substance
When word reached the photographers in the Wimbledon press restaurant that Billie Jean King’s opponent was in trouble on an outside court, they barely looked up from their games of cards. After all the year was 1979. King was going for her seventh singles title and her second-round mismatch against 18- year-old Californian Linda Siegel was never going to make front page – or even back page – news. “No, I don’t mean she’s in trouble with her tennis,” the messenger persisted. “It’s her dress. She’s falling out of it.”
Out on court, sure enough, Siegel’s generous embonpoint was proving more than a match for her borrowed, low-plunging dress and suddenly the awkward silence of an embarrassed crowd was filled with the clatter of Nikons. The next morning’s papers revealed far more of Siegel than she would have liked. The “Thanks for the mammary” headlines deepened her blushes.
Such innocence. A borrowed dress, a reddening cheek. In the 21st century, women’s tennis does things a little differently. Fashion faux pas are as carefully guarded against as an incorrect ball toss, and, even if something did come undone, you wouldn’t expect one of today’s carefully marketed professionals to mind too much. Just another photo opportunity.
The rise of the women’s game from being the men’s shy little sister to at least its equal, flaunting its sexi-ness with as much pride as its unprecedented array of outstanding young players, has gone virtually unopposed. Until last month, that is, when one of the leading players in women’s tennis broke ranks and issued a spirited challenge to the game to decide whether it really does want to make as much of its carnal assets as its athletic ones.
For much of her career Nathalie Tauziat has toiled among the game’s supporting cast – her cousin, France’s World Cup- winning football team captain, Didier Deschamps, is rather better known – but in 1998 she transcended all of her previous performances by reaching the Wimbledon singles final. Not one of the game’s pin-ups – she can appear a little stern on court – she has always been an independent soul and her explosive book is a reflection of her character. At 32 this is likely to be her last year on the tour and if so Les Dessous du Tennis Feminin (The Underside of Women’s Tennis) represents a thundering parting shot.
In it, Tauziat attacks what she sees as the cynical practices that have helped to transform the women’s game (she thinks) for the worse. As she puts it, “aesthetics and charisma are winning out over sporting performance”. In an extraordinarily forthright attack, which has produced angry responses from her rivals, she reserves some of her harshest criticism for tournament directors and agents, whom she sees as having colluded in marginalising her in favour of more marketable players. The book, a must-read on the tour, sold 25E000 copies within weeks of publication in France and has sparked an international debate on the role models within women’s tennis.
Inevitably, the K word never seems far away from Tauziat’s argument though she makes clear in the book that she rather likes Anna Kournikova: it is just the way that the Russian is being promoted and manipulated that she feels is damaging women’s tennis. Tauziat uses Kournikova as the clearest example of how the tennis circuit is now fixated on the style, and not substance, of the women’s tour. The passages on Kournikova are the most outspoken: reinforcing her view that the young Russian – who has yet to even win a singles title on the senior tour, let alone a Grand Slam event – is financially rewarded not as a great tennis player, but for her role as a cheerleading mascot.
“For the Women’s Tennis Association [WTA] Anna is a real cash till, a blonde windfall,” Tauziat writes. “I watched a match between her and Lindsay Davenport from the players’ lounge in the United States two or three years ago. It was a lynching of Lindsay by spectators spellbound by the Russian girl. I went to the WTA office to see how they felt.
“One of them said: ‘Oh, you know, Anna is so pretty. Lindsay felt diminished and could no longer play. It is nothing serious.’ I was furious. I told them: ‘What do you think tennis is? A casting ground for the next James Bond?'”
Tauziat is critical of the circus that surrounds Kournikova, whose fame is such that her on-off marriage to a professional ice hockey player is the subject of much media coverage. For a successful (but by no means all- conquering) Russian tennis player to have catapulted into A-list celebrity is indeed remarkable, and Tauziat is in no doubt that it has been engineered by the money men in tennis – at great cost to other figures in the women’s game.
“If Anna appears to have a life as exciting as a film star, it is because those around her are busy building a myth while cultivating her mystery … and she adds her bit, too. And it is only just beginning. Everyone around her competes with each other to sell her image as the Lolita with the perfect figure. Who else but Anna could inspire a TV programme on the trouble line judges have in concentrating when they are seated behind her?”
Tauziat suggests that the Kournikova phenomenon has been fuelled by carefully orchestrated gossip and rumour, “from her supposed passionate kisses with Mark Philippoussis to the mysterious reason which apparently stopped her travelling to Russia to play France last year in the Fed Cup. I heard she gave that up because the Mafia wanted to kill her … later she told me she had just been injured.”
And she singles out an incident at last year’s French Open as symptomatic of the hype at the heart of women’s tennis: “The business last year of selling little pieces of her dress at Roland Garros was, for me, an insult to sportswomen. Sure, Anna pleads: ‘I want to be a tennis player like the others. Stop making me out to be different on the pretext I am pretty.’ But, when she accepts her part in such a stunt; is she really a player like the others? It is very probable that Kournikova has earned much more from sponsorship than on the tennis court since the start of her pro career in 1996.”
Tauziat’s attack has been portrayed in some quarters as the bitterness of a player whose Indian summer has been granted neither the rewards nor the recognition that she feels it deserves. In fairness, though, her analysis of Kournikova is tempered with genuine warmth; she says she feels protective towards a young woman who she feels is being – frequently unwittingly – exploited by the people who run her life and those who run the game. “If she obtains results to match her beauty, Anna will be the most adored player in history,” Tauziat concedes. “If she fails, the system can crush her.
‘The day when the press, tired of being scorned by her and reduced to the role of fan club, start to treat her with as much indifference as they do Conchita Martinez, I am sure Anna will feel very alone.”
Tauziat’s book comes at a remarkable time for women’s tennis. Since the establishment of the women’s professional tour it has never enjoyed such popularity. Over the past 30 years, although it produced universally recognised superstars, it was still held back by the hegemony of individuals rather than a group of players challenging for supremacy. Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf and Monica Seles all enjoyed spells when they dominated the women’s game. But their domination was such that the women’s tour became a one-woman show. As recently as 1994, Navratilova, close to retirement, dismissively referred to the women’s tour as “Steffi and the seven dwarfs”.
The breakthrough into a less despotic era has taken place over the past five years – the old-style queendom giving way to an environment in which major titles are no longer concentrated in one or two pairs of hands. In 1998 and again in 1999, each of the Grand Slam titles went to a different player, something that was almost unheard of in previous years. Even the top men players, so often condescending towards the women, have been impressed. “You’ve got more depth, so you’re getting better match-ups,” says Andre Agassi. “The girls have established themselves as not just pretty good tennis players, but as pretty good athletes, too.”
Agassi and the rest of the men know, of course, that any complacency would be misplaced. In eight of the 12 Grand Slams from the past three years, more viewers watched the women’s final on American television than the men’s.
At the same time as achieving more broadly distributed excellence, the women’s game has shown a real determination to move with the times. In the American magazine Tennis, Robin Finn, analysing why women’s tennis had become more open and, at the same time, gathered as many plot lines and subtexts as an early-evening soap, suggested that: “The teen terrors, with their looks and end- of-the-millennium, techno-hip edge, have suddenly energised the WTA Tour. They speak in sound bites designed to empower. And they were weaned on The Simpsons and South Park, so family dysfunction -to them, at least – is less an aberration than an accessory.”
It is these irreverent and talented teen queens (the Williams sisters, Jelena Dokic, even Hingis) who have offered women’s tennis so many opportunities – sometimes, literally, just photo- opportunities – for increasing its profile. But in so doing they have caused people like Tauziat to question whether the circuit has come to resemble a somewhat demeaning beauty contest.
So far the WTA have declined to comment directly on the book on the – scarcely believable – grounds that it is written in French and they are having difficulty reading it. In so doing they are almost certainly being artful not artless, but they are unlikely to be sympathetic. Under Bart McGuire, its chief executive since January 1998, the WTA has become markedly less coy about rewarding what it would call femininity. “We have nothing to apologise for in having women who are attractive on the tour,” he says. “I think the promotion of that aspect in moderation is entirely appropriate. One of the things we should do on the tour is to encourage the players to depict themselves in a tasteful way.”
On the other hand, Billie Jean King, conqueror of the luckless Siegel all those years ago and still a powerful figure in the game, while accepting that “sex is definitely an asset in selling the sport”, wonders whether the present crop of players, whose female counterparts in basketball, golf and football are competing less successfully for the same audience, have “any sense of mission for where the sport itself is going”.
Reaction from the leading players to Tauziat’s book has been led by her compatriot Julie Halard-Decugis, who is married to her coach and agent, Arnaud Decugis. She told L’Equipe: “A number of players have not appreciated her book and I am one of them. I do not appreciate someone judging the private life of others. Why does she let herself say bad things about me and others? She does not dare to put names to it but I’ve understood well enough she is referring to Arnaud when she talks about ‘this husband who lives his life on the back of his wife’s success’.”
Tauziat is unrepentant: “It is her [Halard’s] right to say what she has, but I think it would have been better if she had said nothing. People will now read my book because of what she has said and will imagine they know who I am talking about, even though I haven’t mentioned names. Generally, though, I have been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to my book. Everybody says I have been courageous to publish it before leaving the game.”
It has taken women’s tennis an age to grow into its high heels and off-the- shoulder couture that now characterises it. In the early years of the century, it gained only passing popularity through the performances of individuals such as the poised and unemotional American Helen Wills and the temperamental Suzanne Lenglen of France.
It was not until 30 years ago that the women’s game felt confident enough to make a concerted effort to confront the sport’s male domination. In September 1970, not long after Margaret Court had collected one third of the prize money for winning the US Open women’s title that Ken Rosewall had received for becoming men’s champion, they finally made a stand. Galvanised by the forceful American Gladys Heldman, nine of the top players signed token $1 contracts. Heldman then put up several thousand dollars of her own money to stage the first breakaway tournament.
Initial opposition from the game’s establishment, including the US Tennis Association, who suspended the nine rebels, receded, and in 1973 an extraordinary contest between an ageing chauvinist showman, Bobby Riggs, and Billie Jean King gave the women an unexpected boost.
At the start of the year, Riggs, who had won Wimbledon in 1939 but was now 55, had beaten the formidable Australian champion Margaret Court, then at the height of her powers, 6-2 6-1 to heap humiliation on the women’s game. King was so incensed she challenged Riggs to beat her as well, risking another crushing blow to the credibility of the game’s distaff side. The contest at the Houston Astrodome became massively hyped. A crowd of 30E472 – a record to watch a tennis match – crammed into the stadium and in homes across America 48-million watched on TV.
King won 6-4 6-3 6-3 and amid all the rejoicing, particularly on the women’s side, it was conveniently overlooked that all that had happened was that a frail and middle-aged former champion had lost to one of tennis’s greatest athletes who was still in her prime.
What the “Battle of the Sexes” did unquestionably do was convince agents and sponsors that the women’s game did have a future worth investing in and persuade tournaments that the disparity in prize money was unfair. King was soon earning more than $100E000 a year in winnings, a figure that placed her not only at the head of the women’s prize money list, but put her in the top 10 of the combined list that included the men.
But it is another list, Tauziat believes, that now characterises the spirit and priorities of the women’s game. The “Commitment List” is a confidential ranking system drawn up by officials of the WTA and tournament organisers at a meeting at each year’s US Open. It commits 20 high-profile players to a certain number of tournaments for the whole of the following year. These players, complains Tauziat, are ranked “on their ability to boost the sale of tickets rather than on their results”.
Tauziat, who was in the top 10 of the world rankings throughout 1999, was one of the spectacular losers, seeded commercially only at 15th, while Kournikova, who was rated 15th in the world at the end of last year, was up at sixth. This iniquity is reflected in financial terms: Kournikova’s placing qualifies her for $100E000 in bonus money at the end of this year, provided she plays all the tournaments she is committed to, while Tauziat’s entitlement is just $15E000.
One agent, who has a hand in drawing up the list, said the French player’s lowly placing on the list was out of line with her ranking because “she is older, is considering retirement and does not typically go out of her way to please tournaments and sponsors”. Which at least supports Tauziat’s view that “sports marketing companies in tennis do not appreciate me much”. She adds waspishly: “They know the feeling is mutual.”