Wildchild – "Renegade Master (Fatboy Slim Old Skool Mix)" (2000)

Back once again

With the ill behavior

With the ill behavior

With the ill behavior

With the ill behavior

With the ill behavior

In 2009, Serena Williams met Kim Clijsters in the semifinals of the U. S Open.  Clijsters won the first set, and was leading six games to five and 30-15 in the second set.

Williams was serving, and her next serve was long.  A lineswoman then called a foot fault on her second serve.

Serena went ballistic.  “I swear to God I'll f*cking take the ball and shove it down your f*cking throat,” she roared while shaking her racquet at the lineswoman.

Williams shakes her racquet at lineswoman
who called her for a foot fault in 2009

Verbal abuse of an official is a violation of the tennis code of conduct.  Because Williams had already committed one violation in that match – she had angrily broken her racquet earlier in the match – the rules called for her to lose a point for the verbal abuse violation.

Which meant that the match was over, and Clijsters was the winner.

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Earlier this month, Serena Williams – who is arguably the greatest female tennis player of all time – faced off against Naomi Osaka in the 2018 U. S. Open women’s singles final.

Williams entered the match as the winner of a staggering 23 Grand Slam singles titles – more than Steffi Graf, or Martina Navratilova, or Chris Evert, or any other female pro – and 49 other professional singles titles.

Surprise 2018 U. S. Open winner Naomi Osaka

Not surprisingly, Williams was a heavy favorite to win over her opponent, who was a 20-year-old who had previously won exactly one professional tournament.

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Unless you live under a rock, you probably know that there was quite a brouhaha during the Williams-Osaka match. 

Here’s the Washington Post’s account of what happened:

Emotion first bubbled up at 1-1 in the second set, when Williams exchanged words with chair umpire Carlos Ramos.  

[NOTE: Osaka had won the first set, 6-2.]

Ramos had assessed Williams a coaching violation after her longtime coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, motioned from the player’s box that Williams should go to the net more.  Williams, 36, disputed the violation and then told Ramos that she is not a cheater.

Williams was under the impression that Ramos had taken back the violation, but he had not.  Mouratoglou later admitted on ESPN’s broadcast that he had been coaching.

The six-time U.S. Open champion received another code [of conduct] violation four games later, leading 3-2 in the second set.  Osaka had just broken her serve, and Williams smashed her racket onto the court so hard that it broke.  Ramos assessed her a point penalty under WTA and Grand Slam rules, the second code violation of the match.

Williams smashes her racquet

[NOTE: The relevant rule provision, which is titled “Abuse of Racquets or Equipment,” reads as follows: “For the purposes of this Rule, abuse of racquets or equipment is defined as intentionally and violently destroying or damaging racquets or equipment or intentionally and violently hitting the net, court, umpire’s chair or other fixture during a match out of anger or frustration.”  The penalty for such a violation is a $20,000 fine.  And because Williams had previously been assessed a coaching violation, the rules provided that she would also be penalized one point for racquet abuse.]

Williams and Osaka played two more games, then during the changeover with Osaka leading 4-3, Williams spoke with Ramos again, demanding an apology for “stealing” a point from her.  “You will never, ever be on a court of mine as long as you live.  You owe me an apology,” Williams said to Ramos.  “Say it.  Say you’re sorry. . . . I have never cheated in my life.”

[NOTE: Williams broke her racquet after Osaka broke her serve in the fifth game of the second set.  Williams had been leading 3-1 – if she had held her serve, she would have led 4-1.  Instead, she led 3-2.  She berated the official after losing the next two games and falling behind, 4-3.] 

Williams berating umpire Ramos

Williams called Ramos a “thief,” and he assessed her a third code violation for verbal abuse, resulting in a game penalty that put Osaka up 5-3 and one game from the championship.

[NOTE: The relevant rule provision, which is titled “Verbal Abuse,” reads as follows: “Players shall not at any time directly or indirectly verbally abuse any official, opponent, sponsor, spectator or other person within the precincts of the tournament site.  For the purposes of this Rule, verbal abuse is defined as a statement about an official, opponent, sponsor, spectator or other person that implies dishonesty or is derogatory, insulting or otherwise abusive.”  Verbal abuse also results in a $20,000 fine.  And because it was her third violation, the rules provide for a game penalty – making the second set score 5-3 in Osaka’s favor instead of 4-3.] 

Williams only grew more irritated and said she was being treated differently from male players who, she argued, get away with much harsher language and behavior on court. . . .

Osaka won the match soon thereafter as boos cascaded from the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

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A number of sportswriters and former players quickly echoed Serena’s “double standard” argument.

Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins’s rant about the clash between Williams and the umpire made the front page of the Post the day after the match.  (With all that is going on in Washington and the world these days, I’m a little surprised that a column about a tennis match was deemed worthy of the front page.)

Columnist Sally Jenkins

Jenkins went all in on Serena’s claim that she was the victim of sexism: 

Chair umpire Carlos Ramos . . . took what began as a minor infraction and turned it into one of the nastiest and most emotional controversies in the history of tennis, all because he couldn’t take a woman speaking sharply to him. . . .

[Ramos] marred Osaka’s first Grand Slam title and one of Williams’s last bids for all-time greatness.   Over what?  A tone of voice.  Male players have sworn and cursed at the top of their lungs, hurled and blasted their equipment into shards, and never been penalized as Williams was in the second set of the U.S. Open final. . . .

[Ramos] wasn’t going to let a woman talk to him that way.  A man, sure.  Ramos has put up with worse from a man. . . . But he wasn’t going to take it from a woman pointing a finger at him and speaking in a tone of aggression.  So he gave Williams that third violation for “verbal abuse” and a whole game penalty, and now it was 5-3, and we will never know whether young Osaka really won the 2018 U.S. Open or had it handed to her by a man who was going to make Serena Williams feel his power. 

USA Today columnist Christine Brennan echoed Jenkins’s sentiments:

Serena is absolutely right to say that men could get away with it and women could not.  This is a sport that gave us John McEnroe, the sport that gave us Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors – I could go on and on.  Men who have gotten away with far worse.

(Brennan must have forgotten that McEnroe was once disqualified from a Grand Slam match for bad behavior – that’s a much more serious penalty than losing one game.  And later in his career, McEnroe was suspended from the tournaments for TWO MONTHS.  He may have behaved much more badly than Williams, but he certainly didn’t “get away with it.”)

Billie Jean King took to Twitter on Serena’s behalf:

Not surprisingly, the National Organization for Women jumped on the “double standard” bandwagon.  Ramos’s decision to issue the game penalty was “a blatantly racist and sexist move,” according to NOW.  “This would not have happened if Serena Williams was a man.”

I could cut-and-paste quotes like these until the cows come home, but what’s the point?  EVERYONE KNOWS that female tennis players are victims of a double standard, and that Williams was penalized by a sexist umpire for doing what male tennis players routinely get away with!  

Case closed – right?

*     *     *     *     *

While Sally Jenkins, Christine Brennan, and Billie Jean King said that Williams was a victim of sexism, others disagreed.

For example, all-time tennis great Chris Evert pointed out that Ramos had never hesitated to penalize male players for misconduct.

“No sexist issue there,” Evert said the day after the Williams-Osaka match. “His history with men players shows that.” 

Mary Carillo (left) on MSNBC

Former pro Mary Carillo – who covered the U.S. Open for CBS for almost 30 years and has also worked as a tennis analyst for NBC, HBO, PBS, and ESPN – told MSNBC that Ramos was a “very, very respected” official.  She put the blame for the kerfuffle on Williams: 

At her very best — and she is very often at her very best — I respect and admire Serena beyond measure.  She is so powerful, she’s an important voice, she’s a ferocious competitor.  But at her very worst, as she was on this night, she acts like a bully . . . you cannot talk to [bullies], you cannot reason with them. . . .

The tension got to her, the pressure got to her.  I’m sorry it ended that way . . . [but] if you follow tennis at all, you know those rules.  They are inviolate. . . . 

A lot of these people that are weighing in and saying “double standard.”  I’m saying, you know what? This is not the hill you want to die on.

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The comments from Evert, Carillo, and others who questioned the sexism narrative helped slow down the “double standard” train.  It was derailed entirely a few days later by some cold, hard facts on the tracks.

The day after the match, New York Times tennis reporter Christopher Clarey reported that umpires called 86 code of conduct violations on male players in the 2018 U.S. Open, but only 22 violations on female players.  (Men play best-of-five matches at the Open, while women play best-of-three.  That might explain men having somewhat more violations, but it doesn’t explain them getting penalized four times as often.) 

New York Times headline

A few days later, he reported that since 1998, male players have been fined 1517 times for code of conduct violations in all Grand Slam events.  Female players have been fined only 535 times over the same time period.

Alexis Ohanian, the ultrarich husband of Serena Williams, went all Donald Trump on Clarey and the Times when he read that article.  He argued that those numbers don’t mean anything because we don’t know how many times male tennis players committed violations compared to females.

What if male tennis pros scream obscenities, break racquets, and otherwise misbehave five times more often than females, Ohanian asked?  Then they should be fined five times as often – not only about three times as often, as the data indicate.

In theory, Ohanian is absolutely correct.  The problem is that he offers absolutely no evidence that males violate the code of conduct five times more often than females.  He simply pulled a number out of thin air.  (I was going to say he pulled the number out of something else, but this is a family blog.)  

Alexis Ohanian cheering for his wife

I’m guessing that Ohanian – he’s the gazillionaire founder of Reddit (which is a social media website whose purpose I’ve never been able to figure out), Hipmunk (a travel search website), and Breadpig (which calls itself an “uncorporation,” which it isn’t) – figured that people might call “bullsh*t” on him if he posited that men broke the rules ten times or a hundred times more frequently than women.  (When you make stuff up, you can’t go overboard if you expect anyone to believe you.)

Without such evidence, his argument is worthless.  The data prove that males competing in Grand Slam tennis events have been fined for violating the code of conduct significantly more often than female players.  That calls into serious question the assertion by Williams and her apologists that male players usually go unpunished for far worse behavior than she was guilty of.

*     *     *     *     *

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova made another point in an editorial she wrote for the New York Times that criticized Williams’s “double standard” defense:

I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of “If men can get away with it, women should be able to, too.”  I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this:  “What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?”

That is an excellent point, Martina.

Navratilova and Williams in 2015

If you get drunk at a party and get pulled over for DUI while driving home, does it matter that a whole bunch of other people got drunk at that party but didn’t get pulled over?  Of course not.  

Serena Williams thinks that she shouldn’t have been penalized because male players do what she did all the time and don’t get penalized.  That’s not true, of course – as the statistics cited above demonstrate.

But even if it were true, the question is whether Serena Williams violated the code of conduct and deserved the penalties that were assessed.  She did.

*     *     *     *     *

A lot of people think that Carlos Ramos should have turned the other cheek to Serena’s outbursts – perhaps given her one or two or even three warnings before assessing code of conduct violations.

But let’s not forget that Serena Williams wasn’t the only player in the match.  A tennis umpire’s job is to apply the rules fairly and give both opponents an equal chance to win – not bend over backwards to avoid penalizing a big star (and crowd favorite) who is guilty of flagrant misbehavior.

It’s interesting that Serena’s violations all occurred in the second set of the match – after she had lost the first set, 6-2.

Osaka cries as pro-Williams crowd boos her
 after she won the 2018 U. S. Open final

Maybe she became so frustrated at her poor play that she lost control.  If that’s the case, she has no one other than herself to blame for the code of conduct violations – she has played in dozens of Grand Slam finals, and she should be able to keep her composure no matter how high the stakes are.

Or maybe she was trying to throw her inexperienced 20-year-old opponent – who was playing in the biggest match of her life in front of a large and very vocal crowd that was almost unanimously behind Serena – off her game.   

I have no evidence whatsoever that Serena’s behavior was gamesmanship intended to discombobulate her opponent.  But Carlos Ramos’s critics have no evidence that he is a sexist who applies a double standard in women’s matches.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

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Today’s featured song is Fatboy Slim’s 2000 remix of Wildchild’s 1995 hit single, which was released on the Fatboy Slim/Norman Cook Collection compilation album.  (Fatboy Slim’s real name is Norman Cook.) 

Wildchild was the nom de plume of Roger McKenzie, who died from an undiagnosed heart condition just a few weeks after “Renegade Master” peaked at #11 on the UK singles chart.  He was only 24.

McKenzie’s girlfriend gave birth to their child a few months after his death.

Click here to listen to “Renegade Master (Fatboy Slim Old Skool Mix).”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: