No place for little girls
Michael Henderson
NO matter how snootily some people may dismiss Wimbledon, the annual festival of tennis on grass remains a magnificent event. You can grumble about the cliché of strawberries and cream, and mutter dark thoughts of the media's obsession with 'Tim' and 'Greg', but, as people from Torquay to Timbuctoo know, this tournament is a world classic.
It is worth putting it so graphically because one or two observers clearly take a different line. Wimbledon, they feel, represents something malign and class-based and desperately old-fashioned. You have only to wander around the courts of an afternoon to recognise that the spectators have come from all parts of the kingdom, and do not necessarily share the views they may read in their newspapers.
That is not to say that Wimbledon occasionally offers a less attractive side. Although the first week of this year's tournament provided some notable surprises — as Pete Sampras, seven-times champion, slipped to defeat against a no-hoper, and Andre Agassi did not outlast him — it also supplied the latest chapter in the unappetising tale of Anna Kournikova, the Little Girl Blue of ladies' tennis.
Kournikova is not so much a serious tennis player as a fashion accessory. The Moscow born, American-based player has acquired a kind of celebrity by looking striking, rather than striking many winners. She has never won a major tournament, and she never will, but she has earned millions in endorsements and sponsorship contracts from people who wish to be associated with her for reasons that have little to do with sport.
This year the pouting madam went out to Tatiana Panova, a different sort of Russian, who will never be invited to pose for magazines or be written about in the gossip columns. Good for her. She plays tennis to the best of her ability, like most of the other ladies on the circuit, who are heartily fed up with the well-publicised antics of one of their number.
Kournikova, one gathers, is not the most popular member of that troupe. Her selfregard is so overpowering, and her achievement so modest, that it is a wonder anybody wants to be seen in the same room as her. Regrettably, it is the way of modern sport that celebrity, by itself, can confer an entirely fraudulent glamour on the undeserving.
Nobody is more undeserving than Kournikova, who is not only a poor player but also makes a pretty ordinary object of desire. When viewed close-up, away from the manipulating lens, she is not all that attractive. Indeed, her speciality is a sour look, not far off disdain, that gives the game away. Tin special,' she seems to be saying. 'and you're not.' Think again, little girl.
One of these days, and possibly sooner than she realises, an adviser will tell her to pack it in and do something else, though what a former player of little ability can do in the wide world is a mystery. She won't break into the media, because her name carries no clout, and people will not easily forget the sight of her walking out of a BBC interview last week simply because she didn't care for the question.
Whatever she does, there should be no place for this poser at Wimbledon. The greatest tennis tournament is no arena for a showpony to go neighing about the court, simply to provide a few mildly titillating images for the cameras. Goodbye, Miss Kournikova. You flounced in. Now you can flounce out.
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