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The bad boy does not have a female counterpart.
Historically, we have not left room in our hearts for women who are reckless. Quick-to-anger. Irrepressible and unpredictable.
We fled these women. We scolded these women. We have decreased these women.
We did not celebrate them.
They offer us nothing we need. Nothing we want. Nothing that comforts us. They terrify us.
Bad boys, we love.
They are dark and smoldering and fearless and misunderstood and should not, of course, be required to abide by the rules. They are bigger than the rules. They are bigger than life.
We watch them with fear. We are lucky to testify.
READ MORE: Alize Cornet did not violate a tennis code – she violated the code that tells women to keep their bodies scandalous under the seal of secrecy "
This is nowhere more true than in sport, where one expects to see superhuman strengths and endurance housed in bodies at the edge, at any moment, of combustion.
Rage? The rage is good. Men, we get it.
If that means shrugging off the alarming rates of domestic violence in the NFL, so be it.
If that means joking, you bought tickets for a fight and a hockey game broke, huh. It's the NHL for you.
If that means the occasional brawl in baseball, what can you do?
If that means André Agassi – who has already asked an arbitrator: "Are you beating me?" Cried the word F, muttered "son of b —-" and spat at the foot of his opponent – is labeled a "rebel" and awarded a Canon contract … well, you knew where I was going with that.
Tennis is filled with bad boys. Agassi. John McEnroe. Jimmy Connors. Benoit Paire. Andy Roddick.
They shout They swear They spit. They kick They break the racket after snowshoeing after snowshoeing. They get slapped with an occasional fine. Or not.
We applaud these rascals! What show!
But the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos, was not in the mood to let Serena Williams do a show at the US Open on Saturday. He called for coaching, breaking his racket and verbal abuse – three separate code violations that cost him a match, and added up to $ 17,000 fine and, more serious , an unfortunate permanent cloud between Williams and Naomi. Osaka.
"Osaka claims open title in US after Serena collapses," snorted Reuters.
"Serena has the mother of all crises in the final defeat of the US Open," jubilant the New York Post. (Get it? She's a mother now.)
It was nothing at all, of course. As the arguments on the court go, it was rather sweet. She called Ramos "a thief." She asked for an apology. She did not have one.
"Male players cursed and cursed loudly, threw and shattered their equipment, and were never penalized because Williams was in the second leg of the US Open final," wrote the columnist. sportsman at the Washington Post. Saturday.
Chris Evert, commenting on the game, said, "I have been in tennis for a long time and I have never seen anything like it."
"Ramos crossed the finish line," tennis legend Billie Jean King said Sunday night. "The rules are what they are, but the referee has full discretion and Ramos chose to give Williams a very low latitude in a match where the stakes were the highest."
Especially after daring to reveal her anger – an emotion that is recoiled when it comes from a woman. It's unseemly. This is contrary to reality. This is unacceptable.
"All Ramos had to do was sit up, and Williams would be back in the game," Jenkins said. "But he could not take it. He was not going to let a woman talk to him that way. A man, of course. Ramos has borne the worst of a man. At the 2017 French Open, Ramos inflicted a penalty on Rafael Nadal in a timely manner, and Nadal told him that he would ensure that Ramos did not referee any of his matches.
"But he was not going to take it from a woman who was pointing at him and was talking aggressively. So he inflicted on Williams this third violation for "verbal abuse" and a penalty for an entire match, and now he was 5-3, and we'll never know if the young Osaka really won the US Open in 2018. Serena Williams was going to feel her power. It was a much worse offense than Williams had committed. "
At a press conference after the match, Williams was asked what difference she would make if she could go back in time.
"I can not sit here and say I would not say he's a thief because I thought he was taking me a match," she said.
She said she saw much stronger words from male players.
"Having to go through this is just an example for the next person who has emotions and wants to express themselves and wants to be a strong woman," she said. "And they will be able to do it because of today. Maybe it did not work for me, but it will work for the next person. "
It changes the game – by changing the heights we know as a player capable of reaching, by changing our assumptions about age and tennis after motherhood.
It also changes the way we speak and talk about female athletes. Slowly. (The speed is on us, not her.)
And maybe if we make room for women to get angry in the sport, we can give them room to get angry. Maybe eventually it will not be a fire that we rush out. Maybe eventually we will let it burn old and give way to the new.
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