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Serena Williams beat Lucie Safarova to win the French Open Saturday. Her reward, at least on social media, came in the form of some of the same racist and sexist comments that have followed her for her entire career.
In the moments surrounding her win, Williams was compared to an animal, likened to a man, and deemed frightening and horrifyingly unattractive. One Twitter user who wrote that Williams "looks like a gorilla, and sounds like a gorilla when she grunts while hitting the ball. In conclusion, she is a gorilla." And another described her as "so unbelievably dominant...and manly". ESPN sports commentator Bomani Jones responded to those reactions — as well as to the ones that dismissed them as subjective commentary — with a series of tweets..
Tweets and Facebook posts from anonymous computer users means nothing to me. People are judgmental and always have been.
It may be for you, but that doesn't take away the sting and hurt from reading racist and other degrading/demeaning remarks directed at you, anonymous or not.
Sure some can laugh it off, but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with people who do take offense at such things.
If anything, we have seen that words DO carry a lot of meaning, even with the relative anonymity the internet provides us. We've seen people take their lives from online bullying and harassment.
Why Steffi Graf? Steffi is #2 on the all-time list with 22 majors... wouldn't Margaret Court with 24 majors be the ultimate one to pass?
The open era is generally considered the meaningful time frame. Margaret Court won a lot of her titles prior to that, and her 11 Australian open wins were in the days when most of the top players didn't make the trip down under. Basically she just had to show up and collect the trophy.
Technically she is the record holder, but few people take that seriously.
It should be noted that Margaret Court was a great, great player, one of the greatest women's players of all-time. However, it is unlikely she would have won 24 Grand Slam titles had professionals been permitted to play in the Grand Slam events prior to the 1968 French Open. (As it is, she still won 11 Grand Slam titles in the Open Era, including a calendar year Grand Slam in 1970.)
Incidentally, Bobby Riggs (who was a great tennis player as a young man in late 1930s and much of the 1940s), the guy who lost to Billie Jean King in the famed "Battle of the Sexes" match in 1973, played and easily beat Margaret Court, ranked #1 in the world at the time, in an exhibition match prior to playing King, despite the fact Riggs was in his mid-50s. That was a key part of the context of the Battle of the Sexes match with King. (Court and King were contemporaries, and Court was almost definitely a better player than King, though King was also a great player.) Riggs' easy win over Court and subsequent loss to King IMO also plays a role in the long-time allegations that Riggs threw his match with King to pay off gambling debts.
Incidentally, even though I'm not a Serena Williams fan, I have tremendous respect for her accomplishments. I also get appalled at the frequent sexist and racist comments directed towards her, just because (in the case of the sexist comments) that she is muscular and well-built. All great athletes in all sports have/had to work hard to achieve their accomplishments, no matter what genes they received biologically, and Serena Williams is no different in that regard.
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