So John McEnroe has gotten himself into all kinds of trouble this week.
While out promoting his new book, McEnroe did an interview with NPR. Here’s where things went sideways:
If you listen closely to the audio, you can almost hear the NPR interviewer’s head exploding.
For reasons I’ve never quite understood, tennis is the most SJW-y of all the major sports. Diversity and equality and feminism and progressivism are baked into it at some molecular level. And a big part of the liberal orthodoxy of tennis is that the women players are just as good as the men.
The iconic, unquestionable parable here is the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes.” Billie Jean triumphed, feminism won, and the idea that women could beat their male counterparts became enshrined as dogma by people who casually follow tennis. That lesson has become so enshrined in the orthodoxy, that after it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Riggs had thrown the match, feminists claimed that even if the match was fixed, it didn’t matter.
What’s strange about all of this is that people who actually understand tennis know that McEnroe is absolutely, totally, completely correct. Serena Williams is probably the greatest female player ever. (You could mount an argument for Steffi Graf, but at this point Serena probably gets the nod.) And if she played the men’s circuit, she’d get killed. According to . . . Serena Williams.
Four years ago people became obsessed with the idea of Serena playing an exhibition against Andy Murray. Serena’s response was entirely sensible:
She’s right, of course. Whatever PC Principal says, men and women have innate, immutable physical differences. For instance, the fastest any woman has ever run the 100m is Flo-Jo’s amazing 10.49—a time so fast that her record has stood for 29 years (and counting). I live in Virginia, where at the high school state championships a few weeks ago, the boy who won the 100m ran a 10.41. These are just the facts of life.
I doubt Serena could get a game off of anyone in the top 300. Early in her pro-career she challenged Karsten Braasch to a pro-set. At the time, he was ranked #204 in the world. He the match so seriously that he drank beers and smoked cigarettes during the changeovers. He beat her 6-1. Today, Serena might be competitive with the #900 player on the men’s tour. Maybe.
And you know what? That doesn’t matter. It does not diminish Williams’ accomplishments at all to admit that she is not The Best Tennis Player Ever of Either Gender. She’s the best to ever play the women’s game and the women’s game is great and why can’t we just leave it at that?
But the SJW’s can never just “leave it at that.” At some deep level, modern progressivism is about insisting on the total plasticity of the individual. Innate differences—differences that cannot be imagined away—are anathema to the entire project.
By the by, I respect Serena as a player, but I’ve never loved her the way I love her sister, Venus, whose game is just beautiful. On top of which, Venus has never been anything but a tremendously gracious and admirable sportsman. And on top of that, Venus gave us the best answer any athlete has ever given when being pushed to pontificate about politics.
It was January 2009 and Venus won a match on the day of President Obama’s inauguration. The tennis press—because they are a bunch of liberal activists—were obsessed with Obama all day long. At her post-match press conference, Venus was asked about Obama. Here’s the exchange:
That’s one of the most remarkably candid and sensible things you’ll ever hear from a professional athlete.
For 20 years the tennis establishment has tried to dragoon the Williams sisters into playing a part in their political theater. And the Williams sister have, at just about every turn, refused. They just wanted to play tennis. How do you not love that?
We don’t have to pretend that Serena is the best player to ever pick up a racket in order to appreciate her (and her sister’s) greatness.
