Stop Making Excuses For Serena Williams, She’s A Spoilt Brat And A Bully

‘You are racist and sexist and this is a vendetta and, and, and I’M TELLING MY MUM! WAAAAAAH!’

Another day goes by and still snowflakes jump in to defend the indefensible all because Serena Williams once more has played the ‘victimhood’ card to excuse her Veruca Saltiness.

Remarkable – but in many ways illustrative – of the manner Americans treat their sports celebrities in comparison to the rest of the world – is the differing media reactions.

What planet are you on? Pretending to be nicey nicey to a mortified opponent after pulling every dirty ‘gamesmanship’ trick in the book to stop losing a match to the same old opponent again is not ‘kindness’, it is borderline psychotic.

In the States, plus the left wing media outside of it who will champion anyone so long as they are a member of some ‘persecuted’ group (unless they are Jews, in which case it has to be the far-right doing it otherwise they somehow ‘deserve it’ for being ‘Zionists’), they are swallowing her steaming bullshit about it being about sexism and a ‘vendetta’ against her and her sister Venus (walking once again the ‘race’ ghost both have played as part of their fake ‘ghetto child’ mythology long taken apart by investigative journalists).

Elsewhere on planet Sanity, it’s a different matter, for those with longer and less selective memories. In Australia in particular they’ve been especially vicious, having long grown tired of their own local diva Nick Kyrgios as well as ten years earlier the whole Jelena Dokic circus, something the snowflakes fell for when they screamed ‘racism’ after cartoonist Mark Knight lampooned Williams – days after he’d done the same (for the fourth time this year Kyrgios), and long tired of sporting divas across all disciplines.

When you live in the nation which produces more world class athletes per head of population than any other, you earn the right to call out those not fit to kiss the feet of Evonne Goolagong Cawley – an aboriginal who took fourteen Grand Slam titles in only sixteen years in the game without attracting a single court violation or calling ‘racism’ – despite losing four U.S. Open finals in a row largely overlapping the same time she was winning four Australian Opens.

What stung so much in the Williams case was not so much the supposed racial caricature, but the judge’s comment ‘can you just let her win?’, a little too close to the truth for the American sporting establishment – where winning isn’t the icing on the cake, but the only thing. This is after all the nation not only of Tonya Harding, but of Mary Decker (never mind she later tested positive for banned substances – so if ever there was a moment of karma, the 1984 Olympics were it), where athletes are ‘cheated’, never defeated – a ‘mental attitude’ those elsewhere in the world are expected to grow out of after the age of ten, professional or otherwise.

Leading up to the final, Williams had once more played every dirty ‘victimhood’ trick in the locker with the press to ensure a crowd not merely partisan, but openly hostile to her opponent. In a game still haunted by the ghost of Monica Seles – stabbed by an irate fan in the middle of a match and who never recovered as a player from it – turning a tennis court into a Roman Amphitheatre with a blood baying mob as a tactic is not only beyond shameful, it could be classed as incitement.

Her muted tweet to winning her first Grand Slam tournament spoke volumes.

No wonder Naomi Osaka was a wreck by the end of it: she would have had reasonable grounds to fear for her safety after Williams’ tantrums. It’s also not too far to suggest that was Williams intention, to intimidate her opponent into throwing away her first Grand Slam title.

In the ‘Land of Nothing For Free’, it’s called ‘psyching out’ the opposition. Everywhere else, it’s called bullying.

From 2009, showing some things never change.

It’s not as if any of this is news. The Venus sisters line – especially Serena – consists of much the same excuses John McEnroe made when the International Tennis Federation finally tired of his antics on the court. The whole world being against them and it all being about fighting ‘The Man’ – despite the multiple Grand Slam wins.

WTA officials have tired of the Williamses in the same manner they tired of Anna Kournikova’s mercenary money grabbing antics where they put their own profit ahead of the good of the sport: faking injuries to pull out of tournaments clashing with advertising or sponsorship commitments, then demanding wildcard entries after the inevitable ranking crash because of who they are – and ever ready to play the race, gender or any other card to cloud over their actions in an era where you can get away with anything you like if you play the ‘victimhood’ card every chance you can, even when you’re so much part of that elite you pretend to despise you demand special treatment from it.

Certainly the game isn’t foolproof, but it has come a long way from its 1970s watershed when in the era of colour television matters which had been accepted for too long now were beyond excuse. Both Jimmy Connors and Ilie Năstase (the latter known as ‘Mr Nasty’) had long complained about the professional game employing decrepit old fossils as line judges for top tournaments as rewards for long service as back office administrators (it wasn’t unknown for line judges to be caught having nodded off mid-match) long before McEnroe made it a personal crusade.

But what started as exasperation about antique tennis federation practices, where court officials were regarded more as an honour guard than professional referees (if you think that’s bad, until its closure the ballboys at Wimbledon were unpaid ‘volunteers’ from a Barnardos orphanage – it was somehow considered a ‘privilege’ to do it) had now become ‘gamesmanship’, a way of putting opponents off their stride when they were winning matches. For every ‘chalkdust’ incident, there were dozens more tantrums, elongated shoelace tying, toilet breaks and other matters, particularly as Old Father Time caught up on McEnroe – who unlike Connors and Năstase (but ironically like Bjorn Borg) proved unable to grow old gracefully. Martina Navratilova behaved in much the same manner in the late 1980s when her star waned to Steffi Graf: snapping at the crowd for slow hand-clapping her as she made a mess of tying her laces.

The difference is Navratilova took a long look at herself, accepted her best days were behind her and her days as a challenger were long gone. Younger, fitter women with faster reflexes and better coaches had rendered her obsolete. Ironically it was accepting this and adjusting her game accordingly which brought her to one last Wimbledon Singles final five years after she was considered ‘finished’ – four years later after this she was to hold both the Wimbledon and Australian Mixed Doubles titles with the legendary Leander Paes, three years later, she added the U.S. Open Mixed – one month short of her 50th birthday – and this was a woman who had to put up with hostile crowds everywhere she went during her golden era – simply because she was a lesbian (actually worse than that, she came out as bisexual initially, which still gets a far rougher ride).

If you think attitudes have changed, look no further than Amelie Mauresmo – who for all her ‘Xena’ persona was a soft centre who blubbed when she won Wimbledon in 2006, and had to put up with Lindsey Davenport, Martina Hingis and yes, you guessed it, the Williams sisters bitchiness over her sexuality which may have played no small part in her notoriety as a series ‘bottler’ in semi-finals and finals.

Serena showed her class in lampooning Mauresmo long after she’d retired from women’s tennis in a Fox TV sketch a mere five years ago:

https://twitter.com/AnnaK_4ever/status/1039168112485167104

What was all that she was claiming again about her tantrums being all about wanting to stand up for the way women are treated in tennis?

Most damning of the lot Serena Williams was fined for her behaviour back in March when after being given a ‘wild card’ to enter the Miami Open, she was beaten convincingly 6-3, 6-2 in only the first round, and returned the kindness of the organisers allowing her in by storming off, refusing to do the contractual post-match press conference all players in the event must do.

Her opponent? The same Naomi Osaka she lost to in the U.S. Open final.

Coincidence? Or for all her accusations of prejudice, does someone perhaps have a bit of a problem with losing to mixed-race players, especially ones part-Haitian, part-Japanese (Americans tend to look upon Haitians as Voodoo obsessed bumpkins. As for American-Japanese relations, let’s not even go there…).

Whilst in the UK, being mixed-race (or ‘half-caste’ as it used to be referred to as) is no big deal anymore (the 1980 hit song ‘Embarrassment‘ by Madness about Hayley Thompson, shaming prevailent attitudes within indigenous, Afro-Carribean and Asian communities towards miscegenation, proved something of a cultural watershed), over the pond they have still a long way to go. Just ask Aarin.

Williams and her team were caught out cheating – full stop. That ‘everyone is doing it’ is no excuse, ever. That she still cannot admit to being in the wrong and in fact is throwing out a series of ever increasing counter-accusations without a shred of hard evidence other than hearsay and conjecture to back them up – rather than apologising in the slightest for her behaviour is a watershed moment for the game. For those who are indulging her faux-rage, they need to take a good look at themselves in the mirror.

If they don’t make an example, a proper example, of Sulky Selena, there is the risk of the game’s umpires and line officials refusing to officiate any games in which she plays and the entire game being thrown into disrepute over a refusal of those running the sport to clamp down on bad behaviour because it upsets the media corporations who love a sporting diva, and more sinister elements wanting to use it for other ends.