Serena Williams' Meltdown At The US Open Final Was Fucking Awesome
Tennis is a sport that maintains an expectation of decorum. Like golf, the fans have to be quiet while points are being played; the players are expected to carry themselves with a reverence for tradition and propriety, even while acts of rebellion are often championed. Nick Kyrgios is a lunatic who will tell his opponent that someone banged his girlfriend mid-set, but we tune in to watch him with the hopes that he’ll blow up; we enjoy seeing players balk at the strictures of Wimbledon’s all-white dress code; Serena Williams remains the face of the sport not just for her dominance, but also because she’ll occasionally tell a diminutive line judge that she plans to shove a ball down her throat.
On Saturday, Serena had a bit of a meltdown in the U.S. Open final. Hubbs explained it here. But the aftermath has turned into a debate on gender inequality in tennis, a sport that has served as a platform for discussions of gender inequality perhaps more than any other. Famously, Billie Jean King won the “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973 (solid movie). Serena’s sister Venus led the campaign for equal prize money at Wimbledon, the final grand slam to institute an equal purse, in 2007. This all stems from the fact that women’s tennis garners some of the highest TV ratings among women’s sports, with the women’s finals sometimes having more viewers than the men.
Serena is entirely justified in her frustrations. Sure, she received coaching, but so does every single player. Her outburst was neither threatening nor profane. This umpire is a little bitch, and awarding a full game to Serena’s opponent at this stage in the match should only happen if Serena is holding a blowtorch to the leg of his lifeguard chair. We’ve seen men break rackets and unleash profanity-laced tirades against umpires, only to receive multiple verbal warnings. Djokovich actually went after this same umpire, Carlos Ramos, at the Wimbledon quartfinal this year. He received multiple verbal warnings but was not docked a point, let alone a full game.
You can find tons of examples where an umpire seemingly applied a more lenient penalty to a male player versus what happened to Serena on Saturday. Maybe it’s indicative of an unbalanced system of on-court punishments. When the men flip out, it’s passionate; when women have similar outbursts, it’s “unladylike.” Either way, the bottom line is that you don’t dock Serena a game at this stage in the match, in the U.S. Open final. The umpire strongly influenced the outcome of the match, and that is bad for tennis. Nobody walked away from this final with a good taste in their mouth. The entire tournament was soured because of five minutes that should have been a minor exchange between a frustrated star and an inconspicuous arbiter, but instead saw Serena lose a game en route to the match.
Would Serena have won had the umpire not docked her the game? Probably not. She lost the first set 6-2 and was down 4-3 when the game penalty was given. But the fact that it happened placed an asterisk next to Osaka’s first grand slam victory and had the crowd booing the outcome during the trophy ceremony. Serena was classy as hell in comforting her opponent and asking the fans to celebrate her accomplishment. But a cloud of sexism hung over the entire proceeding, and I would imagine the next match that Carlos Ramos oversees will be between two 13-year-olds at some summer camp in Arizona.