http://foxsports.news.com.au/story/0,8659,5851242-23216,00.html
Lady who swears by Christianity
By Jeff Wells
January 17, 2003
WELL, I'll certainly be wary next time there is a knock on the door. It could be a Jehovah's Witness ready to give me a gobful.
And a pretty foul gobful at that. Open this ....ing door m........... and read this stuff about God or I'll punch your ....ing lights out.
The JWs used to be earnest but boring. Now we get the Serena Williams version.
It makes you wonder just what you are supposed to believe any more in this sport. It is just getting totally full of bull. Everybody is treated like a mushroom.
We keep hearing that the Williams sisters are, among other things, good Christians. But a good Christian would not have got busted for yelling an obscenity -- and copped a $2550 fine -- at little Frenchwoman Emilie Loit the other day just because she had dropshotted to save a match point. And a good Christian wouldn't have denied it to the world press later.
Just what are we supposed to be believe about these women? Every line they spin gets taken as gospel by the American media which is terrified of criticising them for fear of being branded racist. It then goes into the manual. It becomes lore.
If they tell us they are poets they are poets. If they tell us they had to dodge bullets on the courts when they were kids in Los Angeles -- before they were hustled off to flash tennis camps in Florida -- they dodged bullets. If they tell us they are famous fashion designers they are famous fashion designers.
If they tell us they are art connoisseurs, linguists, philosophers, philanthropists, actresses or Egyptologists they are all of the above. If they tell us they can juggle 10 bowling balls and teach nuclear physics to hamsters, who are we to quibble? If Serena enters her weight in the media guide at 59kg we should all be begging her for her diet -- I could look like Johnny Depp in a week.
But at least we now know that not absolutely all of the Williams story has to be swallowed hook, line, and sinker. Serena can be one mean queen. The golden aura now has a big brown stain.
Yesterday we attended centre court to watch her play spindly 32-year-old Belgian Els Callens, who gave her her toughest match at Wimbledon last year. Callens was there to give it a shot. She took first serve on the baseline and moved in for the second and tried to get to the net for her nice volleys.
As long as she kept the pace off the ball she stretched Serena and made her look cumbersome. But once she tried to match power she was overwhelmed 6-4 6-0. Serena mooched around with a sour puss, holding her tongue, until the winning point and then, undergoing the usual instant personality transformation, danced and blew kisses, like it had been a pleasure for us to be there.
But she is far from the only credibility worry. She was followed by mad melon-slapping Marat Safin who pulled out of muggy, windy Sydney last week with an alleged shoulder injury, leaving the promoters to lament. But there he was, in a four-set doddle against Spanish journeyman Albert Montanes, hammering his groundstrokes, bashing 207km/h serves, and doing the Pete Sampras leaping smash.
Did he really have an injury? I don't know. But he certainly wasn't protecting one. And nobody really knows about injuries any more. Are they real? Are they tactical?
PLAYERS now blatantly take injury breaks when under pressure to break an opponent's concentration. They accept the hospitality of tournaments but dud promoters when they feel like it.
Was the great elder statesman Andre Agassi really hurt when he scuttled home from the Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai last November, with a match still to play, after his chance of winning and getting No.1 was gone?
I don't know. Only Agassi does. One official told me that all a player in that situation has to do is say he is hurting and the tour doctor has little choice other than to believe him.
Now we get the great drug debate. The authorities state -- without really knowing -- that there is no great problem, but nevertheless they will be vigilant.
The odds, of course, are that tennis, like every other big money sport, has plenty of cheats. We have recently seen biographies published in which the steroid and cocaine use among the top male players of the '80s was laid bare. And 1998 Australian Open champion Petr Korda was done for steroids.
And we have see the body shapes of some of the prominent women change in ways that made them immediate suspects. It will be fascinating to watch the results as the EPO testers move in.
And a growth hormone test might really set the cat among the pigeons.
Conclusion about tennis in the new millennium: believe nothing of what you hear (apart from audible obscenities) and about half of what you see.