Tennis news

Great tennis returns to both tours

Some great tennis play returned to both tours this week.  Rafa Nadal totally overwhelmed Dominic Thiem, one of the world’s best clay courters, in the final of Barcelona.  Barring injury or some other unpredictable event, he will be a favorite, perhaps the favorite, to win the French Open.  Whatever Nadal’s problems have been over the last year or so, they appear for now to be over. 

In Stuttgart, Maria Sharapova returned to the women’s tour.  My hopes that she would use her suspension to get rid of her grunt (or perhaps we she call it her shriek) were in vain, as she was as noisy as ever.  She made it to the semis with some excellent play, going down in the penultimate round to Kristina Mladenovic, who has been one of Sharapova’s harshest critics.  The tour needs Sharapova right now, with Serena and Azarenka out of action.  As a former French Open champ, Sharapova should add a lot of interest to that tournament, where she is a wild card entrant.

Nastase is too nasty.  Ilie Nastase revealed his true self during the recent Fed Cup encounter between Great Britain and Romania.  He issued a racist remark about Serena Williams’ pregnancy, calling the future baby “chocolate with milk” in reference to the fact that Serena’s fiancé is white.  He also called Johanna Konta a “fucking bitch” for complaining about crowd noise, and publicly asked for the hotel room number of Anne Koethevong, the GB Fed cup captain.

Nastase later apologized for his remarks about Serena, calling them “spontaneous”.  This statement hardly qualifies as an apology, since spontaneity would rather suggest that his remarks reflected his true feelings.   This blog has stated before, and reasserts now, that there should be 0 tolerance for racism anywhere, tennis tours included.  Nastase has been suspended by the ITF, but given his history of bad behavior and this disgusting display of bigotry and sexism, it is my opinion he deserves a lifetime suspension.  At some point someone needs to stand up and say that there is no such thing as an acceptable level of prejudice.  I think Nastase should be suspended indefinitely and not allowed to return unless he can prove he as effectively addressed his mental maladies. 

We now have a president of the United States who was elected despite making remarks that were called “textbook racism” by a member of his own party, Paul Ryan.  The peril exists that the acceptance of racism in people with authority in our society will lead to a more general tolerance of the intolerable. 

The ITF, like the rest of us, should push back against this trend!