Slate: The Furor Over Serena William’s Catsuit Continues Tennis’ Policing of Black Women’s Bodies
That doesn’t seem right to me.
Let’s say you have a player like Andre Agassi, who is a highly-ranked player, and he gets tested 5 times in a year.
Then you have Joe Blow, a low-ranked player who doesn’t win tournaments and barely qualifies. He’s a doping fiend with very little talent and not much of a work ethic but has chemically-enhanced athletic ability which carries him in his career.
Then you have Jim Smith, who is more talented than Joe, works hard, trains constantly, but stays clean. He can’t qualify because he can’t meet the standards of the Joe Blows of the sport.
If you only target the top players, the Jim Smiths of the world are out of luck. That seems unfair. Maybe that’s not really an issue and I’m making assumptions that don’t have any basis in reality. But again, if you’re not testing much at that level how would you know?
There’s only so much testing you can do, so one way to ration it is to make sure no one won because of doping. In the Olympics there’s random testing but the medalists all get tested, aiui.
And doping is not going to get a guy with little talent and no work ethic on the circuit.
Players should be able to wear what they want, as long as there’s no indecent exposure. Just because Serena’s outfits are a deviation from what traditional tennis attire has been on the pro circuit, she shouldn’t be restricted in wearing it. A lot the female players wear outfits that I would deem more ‘skimpy’ in terms of skirt length. Why do they need to interfere in something like this? Just let the woman play!
Wow. A woman wears a modest outfit to play tennis - and gets punished for not being sexy enough.
That’s patriarchy for you.
I personally do not see any advantage of any athlete wearing an all black suit on a hot sunny tennis court. Id be afraid of getting overheated. But if Tennis wants to keep the few fans that they have interested in the sport, they would be best served to carefully lay out their dress codes ahead of time, rather than picking on the biggest meal ticket in the Woman’s side of the sport.
Wimbledon has cracked down. At one time players were allowed a lot more colour than is the case now.
Wow, I hope nobody ever had any intention of reading anything in that article past the second picture. Whenever I attempt to scroll down past it, it expands the top of the article to the point where I’m just looking at the second picture again.
I don’t know about disrespectful but I saw Serena’s outfit the other day with the tutu nonsense going on and I think that, regardless of dress codes, she has utterly dreadful taste in on-court sportswear.
I can’t think of another tennis player that has made me think “what the hell are they wearing?”
Roger’s cardigan or Stan’s shorts are mild in comparison.
The only things comparable to me are John Daly or Ian Poulter’s trousers.
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The first outfit looks like it’s made to let him blend in with the Partridge Family’s tour bus. 
That was the point…
What was the point?
Those are images I’m never getting rid of.
I’ve seen it…I can’t unsee it!
I think the tutu was Williams trolling the French officials: “OK, you say I must wear a skirt? Well here’s my skirt, how do you like that?”.
well if she was “trolling” the French officials that rather lends weight to the charge of being disrespectful to the dress codes.
I have no idea if that was her intention
The basic gist of the “disrespectful” commentary mainly boiled down to “she doesn’t have a skirt on”. So she put on a skirt, in the most mocking fashion she can come up with, to show how ridiculous the complaint was. Is there anything in ANY dress code that says tutus are not acceptable skirts, especially the tournament she was playing in? No?
That’s what it would have looked like if Bob Ross became one of MC Hammer’s backup dancers.
It’s meant to be a Mondrian, or an homage to Mondrian, isn’t it?