Only a Man Could Forget When Women Rules Tennis
Of all the sports platforms from which to suggest that women “go down every night” on their knees and “thank God” for male counterparts to whom, they owe, in effect, their livelihoods, the last one we might have expected it from was tennis.
Because if there were a Supreme Court presiding over global sport, the matter of gender equity as it applies to tennis would for years have been settled law. During the Open era of spiraling commercial gain, Chris Evert brilliantly made that case, forever paired with Martina Navratilova, along with Steffi Graf, Venus and Serena Williams, and Monica Seles, among others.
Did Raymond Moore, the now-former tournament director of the BNP Paribas Open, who on Sunday claimed that women “ride the coattails of the men,” forget that the tennis facility in New York that serves as America’s national center is named for someone named King?
That would be Billie Jean, spiritual queen of the women’s sports gender equity movement.
Moore, 69, is South African but also the director of a major tournament based in California. His comments inspired Navratilova to say, in a text message: “It would be hard to imagine any women wanting to go and play at Indian Wells if Moore stays as the tournament director.”
Moore soon apologized for his statements, which seemed intended on one level to pay tribute to the long runs at or near the top by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.
Good for him, but from what kind of throwback value system did such language originate? The comments went way beyond awkward and well into misogynist. Coming from a man who is no newcomer to the sport or to this particular tournament, they betrayed a remarkable case of amnesia relating to what tennis was like before Federer began channeling Baryshnikov in sneakers, joined later by Nadal, the swashbuckling Spaniard.
Does Moore remember that equal pay for women at the Grand Slam events — passionately championed behind the scenes by Venus Williams — grew in large part out of that pre-Federer era when the women were carrying the sport in terms of diverse playing styles, personality and, yes, a healthy dose of competitive hostility.
A few months ago, Martina Hingis spoke to the point apparently lost on Moore — the sport’s cyclical nature — when she told me, “I know it sounds like a past player saying, oh, our era was better, but for a few years we were like the men are now, only I think even more different in style.
“You had the Williams sisters’ power and movement, Lindsay Davenport’s skills, my kind of chess game and Monica Seles still really good after all she went through.”
In that turn-of-the-century era, there was even one transcendent player who never won a tournament. Referring to Anna Kournikova, Hingis giggled and added, “And Anna looked pretty — it was nice to see her.”
O.K., so even a woman can stoop to the perils of objectification. Moore was guilty of that, too, when he referred to the promising young players Eugenie Bouchard and Garbiñe Muguruza as “physically attractive and competitively attractive.”
Mary Jo Kane, an activist in the field, doesn’t consider herself the world’s greatest tennis fan. But as the longtime director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, she is more focused on actions, attitudes and, yes, language.
After reading Moore’s comments, she said in a telephone interview that she wished someone had asked him: “Every time Serena plays a match that overshadows the men, should they drop to their knees and thank God for her? And should the top five men in the United States — and I couldn’t even tell you who they are — drop to their knees and thank God for Federer and Nadal? Why just the women?”
She said it was good to hear Moore apologize quickly; she hoped he was an outlier with such thoughts, but “even if that’s the case, he’s also in a position of power.”
To which Nancy Lieberman, the pioneering women’s basketball legend who was with the Sacramento Kings on Sunday night at Madison Square Garden as the N.B.A.’s second female assistant coach, said: “It’s sad that a man in his position would have such a shallow opinion of women, especially standing next to Serena Williams.”
Lieberman, who once trained Navratilova, added, “I’m surprised he was able to keep his job.”
Until late Monday night, when Moore stepped down from his directorship and chief officer positions. Given the crudity of his assertion, he and other tournament officials had to know that the imagery of women on their knees, supplicant to men, at a major coed tournament could not linger, apology notwithstanding. He had to go.
Written by Harvey Araton for the New York Times. See the main article here.
