Serena: A coloured view

Serena Williams, according to some commentators the greatest woman who has ever graced this earth, finished the calendar year of Grand Slam tennis with a tally of 21. Even to my trained eye, she looks unbeatable, although tennis is a game in which one’s mind can play tricks galore. The reason I prefer martial sports is simple: it’s slam, bang, and either you are put to sleep or you give the other guy a bit of a rest. Not much brainpower is needed.

I spent 50 years playing competitive tennis, both on the circuit and on the veterans’ tour. I hated every minute of it when I was on court. There was too much time to think. And the mind does tend to wander, especially mine. I was absolutely no good as a match player. I used to get distracted, looking at the fans in the stands and dreaming about the consequences of a victory against an opponent with a beautiful girlfriend. Mind you, I had good strokes, especially my backhand, and could run with the best of them. But with a few exceptions I never lived up to expectations.

When I won the Sudan Open in 1959, the president of the Sudanese tennis association who handed me the cup predicted I would win Wimbledon. I never passed a round at SW19, so that shows what a genius he was.

But back to Serena. Now some of what I’m about to say might sound racist to you, but it’s not meant to be. Anyway, even if it is, so what? I’m a Christian first and then slightly racist. Not enough, however, to slight Serena’s achievements on the court, just the idolatry of the sportswriters and other know-nothings who cover her. Here’s a black female, a cancer survivor, as she calls herself, writing in the New York Times: “Imagine that you have to contend with critiques that perpetuate notions that black women are hypermasculine and unattractive.” And then there’s this: “Imagine that …there were so many bad calls against you, you were given as one reason video replay needed to be used on the courts…” Really? I was aware of Serena saying to an oriental lineswoman, “I swear to God I’m f***ing going to take this ball and shove it down your f***ing throat,” but not that she had been unfairly singled out for bad line calls.

Never mind, it was written by a black cancer survivor in the Times, so it must be true. But it gets better. The writer goes to watch Serena play in the finals of the US Open a couple of years ago, where our heroine is playing Vika Azarenka, a Belarusian. She notices that the man next to her is rooting for the sexy one.
“We’re at the US Open,” she tells him. “Why are you cheering for the player from Belarus?”

The man, an American, gets up and leaves. He was probably the kind that wears both a belt and braces, or suspenders. Why look for trouble, I suppose he told himself. Only a nutter would ask why one roots for a certain player. But the nutter is given a full page in the New York Times to write how unfair our white society has been to …yes, you guessed it, Serena Williams.

Then there’s the Serena look, and the question of why white corporate America has chosen Eugenie Bouchard, a real looker, instead of Serena as a poster gal. Some immediately called it racist; I call it common sense. Eugenie is a beautiful, softly spoken 19-year-old blonde. She shows grace floating around the court. Serena throws herself around the court like a Panzer. Nothing racist in that but try and tell that to the race Gestapo. One’s a plough horse, the other a thoroughbred — advertisers prefer the latter to the former, c’est tout. All I know is that this constant onslaught of accusations of racism can be extremely tiresome as well as unbelievable. It has become as predictable as Serena’s French coach leaving his wife and children for far richer fields of conquest.

Serena’s father’s autobiography doesn’t mention tennis until 150 pages in. Up to that point it is an account of “his acts of defiance against whites.” He calls Christmas a holiday created by and for white people, and says that the fact that his daughters are good runners is due to his own running away from white oppressors in the south. What I find surprising is that the book did not win a Pulitzer prize in view of the race climate in America and Europe at present. He also attributes his daughters’ dazzling deeds to his gathering of ghetto children to shout racial slurs at them as they practised.

Once upon a time sport was not political. Nowadays expressing anything that can be construed as orthodoxy is hate speech. Serena is an all-time great, but I’ll pick Steffi and Eugenie over her, one on grace, the other on looks. See ya!

By arrangement with the Spectator