SPECTATOR SPORT
Pouting diva, under-achiever
Simon Barnes
I WAS once described in the Guardian as 'a respected tennis commentator'. This is clear- ly defamatory as well as untrue, and I thought long and hard about legal action. Needless to say, this curious description was a device to allow the Guardian to take the moral high ground. The subject was women in tennis, and I was quoted at some length apropos remarks I made about Mary Pierce and her attempts to combine the role of glamour queen and tennis diva with pouts, struts and a melodramatic valley-of-doom cleavage.
Would I be so patronising about male tennis players? they demanded. Well, of course I would, and regularly am: writing about the Andre Agassi of old and not mentioning the painstakingly rebellious image would be like writing about Tony Blair's politics without mentioning spin. It is a question of journalistic completeness.
But women's sports have never worked out what to do about sex. Tennis has never had a clue: are pretty women a very good thing, or an extremely bad thing? The question has been asked ever since Suzanne Lenglen revo- lutionised the sport by refusing to play in corsets and wearing floaty Isadora scarves.
In the 1980s every Wimbledon supplement of every year carried on its cover a picture of Gabriela Sabatini. I once quoted Teddy Tin- ling, the tennis clothes designer, on Sabatini: `She's beautiful but she walks like John Wayne.' I received correction from the great man: 'What I said was, "She's beautiful but she walks like Robert Mitchum." ' These days the image of tennis is of the Russian Barbie doll, Anna Kournikova. If she loses a tennis match — something she does with comforting regularity — she invari- ably gets her picture in the paper, while her victorious opponent does not. To be contro- versial for a moment (respected tennis com- mentator), I would like to say that Kourni- kova is capable of wonderful tennis — inven- tive, witty and athletic — but she lacks the mindset required to beat good players.
And so all of Wimbledon is caught up, not with last year's worthy winner, Lindsay Davenport, nor even with the winner of the French Open, Mary Pierce. Pierce has been out-divaed. Everyone must write about how Kournikova has failed to fulfil her potential; and there she is everywhere in her Berlei sporting bra, for, oddly enough, Berlei, not being respected tennis commentators, chose her face and body to sell the bra rather than those of a successful tennis player.
Meanwhile, the one-time Wimbledon finalist, Natahlie Tauziat, has published a book called Les Dessous du Tennis Feminin, which translates as something like 'Beneath the Skirts of Women's Tennis'. It has been given a hefty publicity shove because every- one has homed in on her stuff about Kournikova and her off-court activities.
So we have, as the image of women's ten- nis, a pouting under-achiever who has sold out to her lesser gift. That leaves us with a sport half-delighted with the publicity and half-exasperated at its nature.
No sport is purely about sport, and no star fascinates purely because of his/her sporting abilities: Agassi, Beckham, Both- am, Gascoigne, Navratilova, Flo-Jo. But with Kournikova things have moved on: the sporting failure is the icon of success. And doesn't she know it as she walks past her admirers, squishing insects with every step.
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