For many Australians, the week kicked off with the delicious news that none other than an Australian had pipped the odious Serena Williams of equalling, let alone beating the great Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles. Of course, Yanks being the piss-poor sports that they are, they desperately tried to re-write the record books.
Many tennis commentators have parroted one of Mrs Court’s contemporaries, Billie Jean King, in dismissing the Australian’s achievements in the pre-Open era as being minor league.
Yes, well, Margaret Court won 24 Grand Slam singles: how many did Billie Jean King win at the same time? Just 11. Less than half of Court’s. Go away, you bitter old Yank.
In any case, who really takes notice of stats in women’s tennis? Billie Jean King at the height of her career was lucky to beat a has-been men’s player who’d been retired for decades and barely bothered to sober up for the match. Let’s face it: women’s tennis is all about looking fetching in short skirts. Serena Williams looks about as appealing as George Foreman in a tutu.
And while beauty may be skin-deep, ugly, as they say, goes all the way through. From her on-court tantrums and sulks when losing, to cheating, and threatening a (female) judge, Williams was an ugly, ugly sportsperson.
In a rare interview, conducted with the Telegraph UK, Mrs Court, who dominated the game through the 1960s and 1970s countered: “Serena, I’ve admired her as a player, but I don’t think she has ever admired me”.
Williams is notorious for sulking and snubbing players who beat her, from Naomi Osaka to Australia’s Ajla Tomljanovic, who so beautifully ended Williams’ career. She is just a symptom of a wider culture of tacit bullying that has subsumed tennis, where one either toes the woke line or gets un-personed.
Mrs Court, now 80 […] revealed she has been subject to “a lot of bullying” because of being a Christian Minister in Perth and for making a stand for her beliefs, which included being against same-sex marriage.
She said: “I have had a lot of bullying. But we should be able to say what we believe. I’ve got nothing against anybody. I respect everybody, I Minister to everybody. I love the game still. I teach a lot of young people today, and I use illustrations from tennis about the discipline, the commitment, the focus. Sport brings so much to your life.”
And let’s not hear any more of this self-serving guff about Williams being some kind of beacon for women in sport. Anything Williams tries lay claim to, Margaret Court and others did, decades ago.
While much has been made of William’s continued tennis stardom after motherhood – she had daughter Olympia in 2007 – Mrs Court, as well as another Australian tennis legend, Evonne Goolagong-Cawley, also came back from having had a child to win Grand Slam singles titles. In Mrs Court’s case, she won the 1973 US Open, the French Open and the Australian Open a year after her first child.
“Serena has played seven years more than I did,” Mrs Court noted. “I finished in my early 30s. People forget that I took two years out. I first retired, like Ash Barty, when I was 25, thinking I would never return to tennis. I got married, had a baby, but then had one of my best years, winning 24 out of 25 tournaments,” she said.
The Australian
By any metric, from athleticism to sportsmanship to just being a decent human being, Margaret Court has nothing to fear from Serena Williams.