Dilettante Serena Williams is happy to admit she loathes tennis ? so what does that say about the women's game?
Considering all the doping and match-fixing and racist abuse and whatnot, it's rather sweet that a top sportsperson disdaining their sport is still such a taboo. This week it was busted by Serena Williams, who casually announced in the wake of a win in Brisbane after her latest sabbatical that she doesn't love tennis.
"It's not that I've fallen out of love," the winner of 13 grand slams went on to muse. "I've actually never liked sports, and I never understood how I became an athlete. I don't like working out, I don't like anything that has to do with working physically. If it involves sitting down or shopping, I'm excellent at it."
You have to laugh. Or do you? After all, it's not as if anyone who has followed Serena's career in recent years would not have surmised she wasn't that bothered. But when such declarations are made openly by any major star, it is difficult for the fan not to take them personally.
If someone whose prowess has enthralled you confesses to having been bored most of the time, it's almost instinctive to wonder ? if only fleetingly ? whether that doesn't reflect badly somehow on you. The confirmation that they were merely going through the motions while oblivious schmucks like you were gripped and awestruck is, as Spinal Tap's David St Hubbins memorably observed, "too much fucking perspective". At least they were getting paid. But as I say, that window of clarity is usually only fleeting, and any feelings of foolishness swiftly spill over into mindless recrimination. Thus the reaction to Serena's casual admission is not unexpected, despite her caveat that she cannot live without tennis. To read the comments beneath various reports is to wade through the effluent of people who feel bitterly insulted by her revelation and are consequently seething about her "ingratitude", "arrogance" and other misused abstract nouns. (That said, the tale did inspire this week's Daily Mail commenter of the week. "I have a lot of sympathy with her position," wrote one Kerry Livermore of London. "Many of my friends tell me that I could have made the British Olympic team in sprinting, but I've never been too bothered. Usain Bolt is lucky that some of us care more about living than about sport.")
We've been here before with tennis, of course, but far less convincingly, in Andre Agassi's autobiography. "I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have," wrote Agassi, or rather his ghostwriter. Yet on and on he had gone, playing the "hated" sport well past typical retirement age ? keeping schtum until looking like a fascinatingly tormented soul would sell his book.
In contrast, Serena opted to drop her admission into a free-for-all post-match press conference. Hopefully she won't feel pressured to retract it in future. Last month, snooker's Ali Carter appeared to be announcing his retirement, declaring: "Life is too short to do something you don't enjoy," only to backpedal later. "Maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself," he said. "They were obviously in the heat of the moment."
Secretly, of course, we suspect that many athletes have a horribly dysfunctional relationship with their sports. But the real unique delight of Serena's admission is that it appeared to have nothing to do with sour grapes or inner torment. This is seldom the way with those who publicly disdain their sports. Following the saga of Stephen Ireland's multiple dead grandmothers, which turned out to be a cover for the then Manchester City midfielder wanting to be with his girlfriend after she had suffered a miscarriage, Ireland posted a message on a social network site which read: "Football is shit why did I get stuck doin it." That did not have Serena's cheery insouciance, in the circumstances. And for all Chris Eubank's pweposterous postuwing, his serial insistence that he loathed boxing and only did it for the money did little to jolly up a sport famously cast as two black men beating each other up for the benefit of a largely white crowd.
Serena appears not remotely tortured, merely bored and very cheerily lazy, which is perhaps the most withering put-down of her rivals, and of the women's game in general. Indeed, were you one of the players who devoted the entire year to playing tennis as opposed to faffing around with fashion lines and NFL team part?ownerships ? which is to say, were you anyone else in women's tennis ? this casual admission by one of the game's most enduringly explosive stars could send you finally round the twist.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/jan/04/serena-williams-tennis
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