Bloodless Coup

I don't buy it. Nor does Paul Campos.

Paul Campos sure does love violence and/or threats of violence: "�If I could, I would take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat� - represented a regrettable loss of composure, but one that, under the circumstances, was somewhat understandable."

Of course that's not all she said, but even if it was, to say that, to an official, in the middle of a match, is a "regretable loss of composure"? Please. She broke the rules and deserved to lose a point. I think enforcing the rules in this case was totally justified given that having watched it lots of times it was indeed a threatening tirade. And if we are going off patterns of behavior, she's done this before.

And if Campos is crying double standards I'd be interested to hear when Agassi did something similar and wasn't punished. But to me it's pretty simply, break the rules, lose a point. McEnroe did indeed lose a point during some of his jackass moves of the past - and Williams deserved to lose a point this time.

Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff in here I find dubious:

* "in a sport like tennis, which still retains a faint whiff of the country club, and in which women are still more or less required to prettify themselves when performing (short skirts and makeup remain standard equipment),"

Who's making women wear make-up and earrings onto the court? A) Martina and others have worn shorts plenty of times onto the court, and B) today's female players wear shorts underneath their skirts, which are as superfluous as collars are on men's traditional shirts. Granted, those shorts are tighter than the men's, but again, see Martina. The athletes choose. And I don't see attractive second-tier female players declining centre court primetime appearances when much more highly ranked men are relegated to court 2 or 3 and less watched timeslots.

* "After her relatively brief fit of temper, Williams was preparing to serve again, when the linesperson left her chair and approached the match�s umpire"

I don't know what video Campos watched, but the one I see clearly showed the original threat (which Campos characterizes tendentiously as "reported" when he damned well saw and heard the same words everyone else did), Serena returning to the line, her pausing to look generally toward the same official and mouth off again, and the official going back to report the comment. It's not hard to imagine that Serena made another threat, since everything else out of her mouth had been threatening, and it's not surprising that the official reported it. Serena having already threatened the official, she has far less credibility in the moment than that official in a he-said-she-said situation.

* Then there's the arbitrariness of Campos' claims regarding the call itself, and his suggestion of some unwritten rule about rule enforcement in critical situations. That's true up to a point on subjective calls, but has nothing to do with objective yes/no sorts of calls. The strike zone might grow a bit late in game 7, but either you're out at first or you're not; that call never changes. Ditto a basketball player going out of bounds, which is analogous to Serena's fault.

And so what if no camera picked it up? Every video angle I saw was oblique to the line or too low to the court (or both) to afford a clear view. Meanwhile the official was positioned at the line, with no other role in that moment but to observe Serena's feet. Replay has taught us how remarkably often officials get much higher-speed calls than that correct -- 120mph balls skidding across lines, for example. Whether toes hit a line before the hitter jumps to serve is slow and straightforward by comparison. Even in sports where replay applies, the official is presumed to be correct absent incontrovertible video evidence to the contrary, absent here. I sincerely doubt that they just rotate any official in for the later matches; those folks have done their time, eaten players' shit ad nauseam with little complaint, and proved their skill and reliability or they wouldn't be there -- another point in favor of the official's credibility.

Serena threatened to harm an official, an oldish and quite diminutive woman. Binky, you'd be going apeshit if a guy had done the same thing to the same official, and even if he'd been sanctioned as harshly as Serena, I doubt you'd think it was enough. She indisputably physically threatened an official. If Campo or anyone else can provide me one instance in which that was tolerated from a male player that deep in a grand slam, one with equally conclusive evidence that a deadpan and vividly articulated physical threat was conveyed for all to hear, I'll shut up.

But without a scintilla of evidence that a male athlete in any major sport has ever threatened to harm an official and gotten off without a sanction (and in tennis, context notwithstanding, a single point is the slightest sanction that can be imposed), simply characterizing this as a "tantrum" a la McEnroe is just bullshit. None of Mac's tirades, to my knowledge, involved a threat of violence. As McEnroe often did, she might have castigated the official's eyesight, her professionalism and judgment, her discretion, and there's no way she would have lost a point. She could have mocked and cajoled and tried to enlist the crowd's sympathy and she wouldn't have lost a point. But that's not what she did.

I've been watching sports all my life, and I've never seen an outburst like that that wasn't penalized on the spot. I don't think Serena should miss any more tennis over it, because obviously she just had a very bad moment and on balance she goes about her game professionally -- but her fine and the on-court sanction looked proportionate to me.

Perhaps you should google 1991 US Open Jimmy Connors.

I still don't buy the critique. Yes there were some assholes playing 20 years ago. That's not what the men's side looks like today (of course it's also interesting that Serena or the better-mannered men of today could beat those whiny blowhards to a bloody pulp if they wished to). There isn't a tradition of that - much less that being tut-tutted - in the Sampras, Edberg, Federer, Nadal era. And the notion (that Campos brings up) that this is permissible in other sports is silly. Guys get thrown out of (both kinds) of football games for such behavior.

I'll say one thing for that card though - I think Conners, Mc, and Serena are about the last people the sport would ever punish for this kind of thing. Remember she almost got away with it. She did get to stay in the tournament and win a championship with her siste. I'd readily believe that anyone who brings so much money into the game will get special treatment - but that's as true of her as the male hotheads of the Reagan era.

I will though readily agree that there is a double standard we can see here. There's a ready audience and fanclub for certain male athletes who behave in odious ways. There doesn't seem to be such a fanclub ready to embrace and love similar misbehavior by female athletes. But that's not the same thing as a double standard being at work in how the games are called.

In any event my original point stands - it's bad for tennis and really unfair to Kim Clijsters.

You mean this?

'Jimmy Connors played a memorable match against Aaron Krickstein during the 1991 US Open. Among Connors's opponents in the match, apparently, was the game's umpire. "Kiss me before you do that to me!" he exclaimed after one contested call. "You son of a bitch! You're an abortion!"'

If there were a direct threat of physical harm to the official in there somewhere, the example would be responsive to my point. As it stands, it's evidence of precisely what Serena could have, probably would have, and certainly has in the past gotten away with, and is entirely consistent with my main claim: that verbal abuse is permitted up to a threshold for athletes in all sports. Threats of violence, however, are not, never have been, and shouldn't be.

Binky, I posted a slightly longer riposte, which I suspect got eaten as spam.

I googled Connors in 1991, and all I found was that he called the ump some really odious names (an "abortion" and a "sonofabitch," I believe were two of the more notable ones). That's non-responsive to my point, because I have maintained -- and the Serena instance says nothing to the contrary -- that name-calling by and large is tolerated (albeit not in baseball, once the names pass a certain threshold of decorum), but that threats of violence are not. Serena's called refs plenty of names without sanction; it's the threats that were punished in this instance.

Nonetheless, find a prominent man (or woman for that matter) in _any_ major league sport who demonstrably threatened violence against _any_ official (not just a diminutive, older woman, that is to say (and where would you stand if a man had made the same threat and been sanctioned identically -- would you be complaining that it wasn't harsh enough?) and was not sanctioned as severely (relative to the competitive context) as Serena and there's a conversation to be had. Absent that -- and Campo certainly doesn't provide or even hint at an analogous instance -- I'm standing on my points, to which you haven't responded.