i still don’t like him
OK, OK, OK I admit he’s a half-decent tennis player and his performance almost made our annual two week obsession with SW19 tolerable, even interesting. Almost. But I still don’t like him and what choice have we of doing so when, with that whiny monotone voice of his, even he didn’t sound as though he’d enjoyed himself. And what’s more even his pretty girlfriend looked as miserable as he does. Well-suited me-thinks.
Mind, the one conversation of his that did catch my eye, so to speak, was when he was asked if he would play Serena Williams in a head-to-head, man vs woman, winner-takes-all match in Las Vegas. Now that would be something to behold and I’m sure the whole world would tune in to witness such a spectacle. This precedent however was set several decades ago.
It is almost 30 years since bespectacled Billie Jean King stepped into the Houston Astrodome to play the single most watched match in tennis history. Her opponent, 55 year old former Wimbledon champion, Bobbie Riggs, had come out of retirement with the promise that no woman could beat him. Uh oh, pride before a fall and all that. A long-standing advocate of equal pay and equal treatment, Billie Jean realised that, if the womens’ game was ever going to stand a chance of equality the challenge had to be accepted, and so, the Battle of the Sexes was on.
To big-up the exposure and in pure theatre, King entered the stadium on a sedan chair carried by four bare-chested hunks; Riggs in a rickshaw pulled by scantily clad nubiles. They exchanged suitably chauvinistic gifts: a lollipop and toy pig…and then she went on to completely destroy him in three sets! Tennis is now the only sport in the world in which men and women receive the same pay and prize money. So what would the outcome be today? Andy Murray would of course stuff Serena off the court but at least both would appear to be as glum as the other irrespective of the prize money!
