I had thought of making a similar point before I posted. If for instance Serena had had a quiet, calm discussion with the umpire, and had not broken her racquet, this would have been out of bounds, sexist, and quite possibly racist.
Here is a thread I made on the cartoon in GD, so as not to derail this thread.
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
It’s fascinating how MMV. I see the long, high-powered but tactical rallies of today’s tennis as absolutely gripping, sensational entertainment. (If we were talking about women’s “moonball” tennis in the ‘70s, that might be different.)
I actually felt in the 1990s we seemed to be evolving toward a troubling trend of men’s tennis being dominated by tall, fast-serving Terminator types, with short points and service games rarely being broken. There are still vestiges of that today (John Isner being my least favorite player for precisely that reason), but I’m very thankful the pendulum switched back for the most part.
Although I still think tennis would benefit from a complete change in its scoring system so there are fewer points that don’t really matter (for instance, in a men’s tennis match the result of a rally at 40-0, or even 40-15 or 30-0, will have very little correlation with the ultimate outcome of the match).
You didn’t ask me, but I’ll still answer:
No. You cannot draw caricatures of nonwhite people without it coming across very badly. Which is actually, surprise surprise, a double standard I agree with. Although maybe we should dispense with the double standard by creating a new social norm that caricature is generally seen as bad form, even with white people as subjects.
It’s an appealing art form in some ways, and one that tells us something about human perception and psychology. But on the whole, it’s just not worth it.
ETA: Years ago, I coached a guy who played at the very bottom tier of the ATP Tour. One day he tried goofing around with a T-2000 I had picked up for five bucks at a yard sale. I could never do much with the tiny sweet spot, but he hit laser winners with the thing! It was incredible. He actually contemplated using it in serious competition.
For the sake of argument, lets say that Serena is right. Women tennis player’s behavior is judged more harshly than Men’s tennis players.
So how is that a competitive disadvantage to Serena? She is not playing against men. She is playing against other women who are judged on the same criteria as Serena.
Suppose that women are punished for throwing tantrums, while men are not.
If you are a woman and prone to throwing tantrums, then I you can claim to be suffering from sexist bias.
But, logically, if you are a man who is not prone to throwing tantrums, you can equally claim to be suffering from sexist bias, because you have to put up with tantrum-prone men not being punished.
So… yeah, even if she’s right that the women’s game is policed more strictly, the “sexism” claim doesn’t really hold up in the sense that it’s harming women overall relative to men. Unless you think that tantrum tolerance is not zero sum, and that it adds to the spectacle of the game overall, so that somehow all women are suffering from the lack of tantrums in the women’s game. Seems a bit thin to me.
Today, the New York Times has published an article showing that, in the last 20 years of Grand Slam events, men have been fined for code violations significantly more often than women, even given that men play more tennis (due to five-set matches and larger qualifying fields) than women in those events. So much for bias against women by chair umpires.
If the men behave significantly more rambunctiously than the women (which is true in my viewing experience), then this would not invalidate the accusation of bias against women.
The level of rambunctiousness is not the issue though. It is the amount that is the determinant factor. Players realize (or should realize) that if they keep going they will lose a point, then a game, and then possibly be defaulted. So if you use an audible expletive once, then you will get fined (it happened to Federer during the 2009 final), and or warned, or lose a point, or lose a match, and possibly even be banned from competition (see Fabio Fognini). The player should realize as soon as the first warning is issued that they are now on notice and should not do anything further. In the majority of the cases, that is enough, but some take it further and are penalized accordingly, men and women alike.
//i\
What does “more rambunctiously” mean? and how would you write that into the rules? (is it already in there?)
Do you at least accept that the charge of sexism is weakened by the actual facts?
Since when were the facts at issue here? Cause if they were, Team Serena would have no case, except maybe she got way too much leeway.
Serena is from all accounts, a pretty unpleasant person to deal with, for officials, sponsors and colleagues. This has been whispered about for years. (Her sister is FWIW, well liked and thought of as respectful and polite, so, can’t all be race based hate). She does have an excellent public reputation and is linked with causes like feminism and black advancement (both good and perfectly legitimate causes for the record), which means that a lot of press that she gets is through those lenses, which leads to the current mess, with lots of her support being from people outside the game who see her that way, which leads to ridiculous assertions like “men never get punished”, and “McEnroe was never cautioned”.
well quite.
I wonder, I haven’t seen anything in the press from Serena since the original kerfuffle. Has she come out and backed up her assertions since the penalties and fines?
It means they behave a lot worse than the women, with a lot more abuse of officials and other examples of the type of behavior we’re talking about.
And no, I don’t accept that, because those facts could be consistent with the charge.
But men are penalised more than women, that indicates that they do behave a lot worse and in fact do get punished more because of that.
I’m not sure I understand what you are saying. The evidence of the penalties seen suggests that there is more bad behaviour in the men’s game, hence the greater amount of penalties.
What are expecting to see? what evidence would you need to accept that men are held to the same standards and punished in the equivalent way to women?
Well, if a man had threatened to physically assault a female official, like Serena has, I doubt the punishment would have been a mere fine…
I think you are right, Even if a male player had spoken to a female umpire with exactly Serena’s words and exactly her ferocity and over the same period of time they’d have been given a much harder time than Serena was.
I confess, I just don’t see the evidence of bias that people suggest.
Certainly being black, and a woman, and having as much success as she has had, she is linked to the causes you mention, and deservedly so. Not having followed her or tennis much for the last 20 years though, does she regularly fight for those causes off the tennis courts explicitly, in the way that say Billie Jean King does? I don’t expect you to research this for me, so feel free not to answer. 
One thing about the whole Serena controversy that I feel has not been adequately addressed/rebutted has to do with what appears to be a lack of understanding of tennis by a lot of people in the peanut gallery. It’s something I have seen over and over in descriptions of events, claims to the effect of “once the game penalty was assessed, it made it virtually impossible for Serena to come back” or “at that point, for all intents and purposes, the match was over.”
:smack: This is ridiculous.
I will elaborate, but first I need to explain a key aspect of tennis that casual fans or non-fans might not understand: “holding serve” and “breaking serve”.
In tennis, players alternate who gets to serve each game. At the beginning of the match, they flip a coin and the winner gets to choose either to serve or which side to start on, kind of like in football. Players usually choose to serve first because this provides a slight advantage. For the rest of the match, they just alternate.
In high level tennis, the server has the advantage. It is expected that most games will be won by the server. This is why if the server wins, that is called “holding serve”. If the returner wins the game, they are said to “break serve”. At the U.S. Open, if both players hold serve throughout a set, neither one will be able to win the set in the conventional way (winning six games before the other player wins five, or seven games before the other player wins six) and they will play a tiebreaker, which has complicated rules we don’t need to get into.
If a player breaks the other player’s serve and has held serve on their own service games in the set, they are said to be “up a break”. The other player is said to be “down a break” for obvious reasons. If you are down a break, you will lose that set unless you break back before the other player gets to six games (sometimes seven if the break happens at 5-5). If neither player has broken, or they have each broken the same number of times, the set is said to be “on serve”. If you are up a break, you will win the set as long as you keep holding serve; it doesn’t matter what happens on the other person’s serve (although if you do break them again and go up a “double break”, it is called an “insurance break” because you can then win the set even if you get broken once).
This may sound arcane to some people, but it is the essential dynamic of tennis.
Now, back to the match in question. Serena got up a break on Osaka early in the set, but then was broken, and broken again (I believe it was the first of those two breaks that spurred the racquet abuse, which incurred a point penalty, which caused her to start going off on the umpire). Right before getting the game penalty, it was Osaka’s turn to serve, up a break at 4-3. This meant Serena had two more chances to break Osaka (assuming she could stop getting her own serve broken) to stay in the match. The umpire gave that game penalty, meaning Osaka automatically got to hold on the first of those two chances. Then Serena served and held easily. At this point it was 5-4 and Osaka was serving for the match. But if Serena could break her serve, as she did earlier in the set, it would be tied at 5-5 and she would have a perfectly good chance to come back and play a third and decisive set with momentum and the crowd on her side.
But of course Osaka did hold serve, and won the match.
So what it seems these people are missing is that a game penalty when it was Serena’s turn to serve would have been far more damaging. A game penalty to give a player an automatic hold of serve, early enough in the set that the other player still has another chance to break back, is a much lighter version of the penalty and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ramos knew this and purposely assessed it at this time rather than having to deide whether to do it later when it would be far more consequential.
And the logic of “she had two chances to break back, but Ramos reduced that to one, therefore it was impossible” is just silly. I doubt people really think that—they just don’t understand tennis and think it was more like putting Serena in a deeper hole than she was already, and that is decidedly not the case.
Right? As I’ve said upthread, if a man did all that the #MeTooers would be beside themselves if he were allowed to continue playing, and they would certainly call for boycotting his sponsors.
Stop confusing us with facts!
Other than when it affects her personally? Not that I’ve seen. Did you see my cite above for her defense of the Steubenville rapists and the criticism of the victim? Not too feminist IMO.
I did see that, and I agree. As for her activism off the court, that’s my perception too, though again I am far from an expert…
Just to add to the excellent summation by SlackerInc as to where everything stood in the match, it should be pointed out that both in the Quarter Finals and Semi Finals, Osaka did not have her serve broken (also true during the first set in the final). This was especially impressive in the semi-finals where there were 13 break points against her. So in all likelihood, even without the game penalty, she would have held and the score would have been 5:3 in her favor anyway.
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