Serena Williams is certainly the most successful tennis player in the modern era. But is she the best tennis player ever? She is one short of equaling Margret Court’s 24 Grand Slam title record. This certainly makes her the most successful tennis player ever. After her recent meltdown at the US Open finals, it gets a bit complicated for me to accept her as a great player. There’s one certainty in my mind – she’s a sore loser! To be the best player in the world, you need to be humble in victory and graceful in defeat. You need to play by the rules. You cannot choose to hide behind examples of other players who may have gotten away with bending the rules just because you got caught doing it.
This is straightforward – the referee issued her a warning for coaching. Right or wrong, this is the referee’s discretion as per the rules and this was just a warning. Any champion will take that warning as a “slap on the wrist” and move on. The expected reaction from Serena should have been to transform this anger into aggression and turned the match around in her favor. Rather, she reacted by smashing her racket, although that was not an atypical reaction from her either. She drew a second code violation and a point penalty due to this. If you’re fighting after being down a set, every point is crucial. You’d expect her to know that, and you’d expect her to know the rules! But, she doesn’t stop there. She yells at the referee and draws another violation. That’s a game penalty. This obviously results in her throwing the match away.
Here’s my main problem with this entire episode. She spins this into an “equal rights for women” deal. No way! This is an equal rule for players deal. Any sport, every sport has rules and sometimes rules are broken or bent because of over-sights by referees. There are numerous examples of such incidents in any sport. The cricket player who didn’t get caught for ball tampering because there’s such a fine line between shining the new ball and altering its condition. The soccer player who didn’t get penalized for a foul because there’s such a fine line between an aggressive tackle and a foul. But if you’re caught with your pants down, you don’t get to make an excuse on “whataboutism”. You don’t get to tell the referee – “what about the time when you didn’t see the other player serve a foot fault.” You don’t get to tell the referee – “what about when you had to over-rule an incorrect line call.” You cannot point to other people’s mistakes to cover your own.
Coaching violations are straightforward in tennis. If a coach signals the player and the referee notices it, it’s a violation. It doesn’t matter whether the player saw the signal or not. This is to protect the rule’s effectiveness otherwise every player will deny seeing any signal from the coach. The player is solely responsible for his/her coaching staff and entourage’s conduct. Serena Williams is a 23-time grand slam champion and knows this rule very well. Her argument on not seeing the sign even after the coach admitted to signaling her does not hold any ground.
Not only does she try and spin this thing into an women’s equality issue, she even feels she’s entitled to an apology from the referee! She goes one step further during her rant and she warns the referee that he would never get to sit-in for one of her matches, ever! It couldn’t get more preposterous than that, and it couldn’t be a more blatant sense of entitlement than that. What has been equally appalling is the support Serena has received from some in her fraternity. I don’t buy the argument that Men have been receiving coaching during matches illegally or Men have used flagrant language with the umpires for years so that makes it okay for a woman to do it too. No, it does not make it okay for anyone to do it! Just because one person does something wrong it does not justify for others to follow or to expect to get away with it.
Lastly, a word for the eventual Champion Naomi Osaka. This brave girl played a great match. She won fair and square. After taking the first set, she was down 1-3 in the second set and broke Serena’s serve to rattle her completely. Kudos to her. But, she sheepishly side stepped any questions about how she felt about what was going on in front of her on the court. “My back was towards her”, she says. Well, let’s just say well played Naomi and good thing you chose to shut yourself out of all that negativity.
Vikram Anand
