A new book shows how on-court talent seems secondary to off-court shenanigans
Stephen Bierley
Here is a reminder: Anna Kour-nikova is a star. This might have escaped attention since she has played three competitive tennis matches only in the past eight months and lost them all. But it is of little or no consequence. For, as the 20-year-old Florida-based Muscovite once famously remarked: “Please, we are not tennis players. We are stars.”
Athletes are judged on skill, mastery of form, power and guile. We judge stars on their personality, their clothes, very often their sex appeal and also their private lives, or those bits they reveal, willingly or unwillingly. The dividing line has always been blurred but these days women’s tennis seems as much about what happens off the court as on it more backhand remarks than backhands.
It has been deliberately encouraged and marketed. For, as Jim Fuhse, the director of player promotions and special projects of the women’s professional tennis tour, said: “Fans expect athletes but we’re never going to stop selling sex.” And this is the fundamental issue at the heart of a new book, Venus Envy: A Sensational Season Inside the Women’s Tennis Tour, by L Jon Wertheim.
Forget the “sensational” bit for there is little new. But the telling part is in the detail of some of the gossip. And hardly surprisingly, Kournikova is well represented. Her screaming argument with Martina Hingis in South America and the hatred she engenders among more talented players, who despise the way she puts her own interests well ahead of the sport, are all catalogued. “She does whatever she wants,” moaned one WTA tournament promoter. “But you take it with a smile because you want her to play for your event in the future.”
Indeed, as might be expected in a world of such fierce, dollar-grabbing competition, not one of the leading players emerges without a little mud clinging, although Wertheim clearly has a special liking for Lindsay Davenport, who according to the author, “takes to putting on make-up the way cats take to baths”.
Those who have watched over the years the tall Californian fight a losing battle with her hair might tend to agree, although she can be as bitchy as anybody when pressed even if she does have an alarming habit of denying everything later.
But then these taunts and the tantrums, these petty jealousies and minor spats, have largely been blown up out of proportion to disguise the extremely thin nature of competition on the women’s circuit. It was all very well for Time magazine to run a front page during the United States Open which declared: “The Sisters vs The World Why the women, led by Venus and Serena Williams, are pushing the men off the centre court.” But it is very much a half-truth.
The women’s entry for the four grand slam events could be reduced from 128 to 32 with no great loss, given the one-sided nature of most matches during the opening week, while leading players are spread so thinly on the WTA Tour that true competition is all but non-existent.
How else could they have a world number one, Hingis, who has not won a major tournament since the 1999 Australian Open? It is simply because she plays more events than most of the others, notably the Williams sisters, so does not have to play her main rivals very often other than at the grand slam championships, where she patently cannot cope.
And pity the poor tournament directors on the women’s tour, struggling to fire the fans, a dwindling group, and appease the sponsor. At the recent Japan Open Monica Seles was the only top-10 player competing. The organisers must think they are being taken for a ride.
The bottom line for any sport’s success is the quality of its players. Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert had no great liking for each other but it is the nature of their rivalry on court which remains vivid in the mind. At present, or so it seems, any on-court rivalries take second place to what is going on in the locker room and beyond.
Mind you, this does have its moments. Who will forget the words of Kournikova at a sponsored pre-Wimbledon press conference? “My life is private,” she said. ” I am here to talk about bras.”