Victoria Azarenka

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Without the benefit of hindsight I write this on Monday, the 7th—Serena Williams, according to some commentators the greatest woman who has ever graced this earth of ours, will be completing the calendar-year Grand Slam of tennis by winning the United States Open. Even to my trained eye, she looks pretty much unbeatable, although tennis is a game in which one’s mind can play tricks galore. The reason I prefer martial sports is simple: It’s slam, bang, and you either are put to sleep or put the other guy to rest for a bit. Not much brainpower needed. I spent 50 years playing competitive tennis, both on the circuit and on the veterans’ tour. I hated every minute of it when I was on the court. There was too much time to think. And the mind does tend to wander, especially mine. I was absolutely no good as a match player, looking at the fans on the stands, dreaming about the logical consequences of a victory against an opponent with a beautiful girlfriend, you get my gist. Mind you, I had good strokes, especially my backhand, and could cover court with the best of them, but with a few exceptions I never lived up to expectations. When I won the Sudan open in 1959, the president of the Sudanese tennis association, who handed me the cup, predicted I would win Wimbledon. I never passed a round at SW19, but it shows what a crystal-ball genius he was.

But back to Serena, the greatest female since the Sumerian high priestess who invented the written word 4,000 years ago. Now, some of what I’m about to say might sound racist to you, but it’s not meant to be. Anyway, even if it is, so what? I’m a Christian first and then slightly racist. Not enough, however, to slight Serena’s achievements on the court, just the idolatry of the sportswriters and other know-nothings who cover her, especially in the Land of the Freebie and the Home of the Depraved. Here’s a black female, a cancer survivor, as she calls herself, writing in The New York Times: “Imagine that you have to contend with critiques of your body that perpetuate racist notions that black women are hypermasculine and unattractive. Imagine that there were so many bad calls against you, you were given as one reason video replay was invented…” Really? I was aware of Serena telling a tiny Oriental lineswoman that “I swear to God I am f—-ing going to take this ball and shove it down your f—-ing throat,” but not that she had been unfairly singled out for bad line calls. Never mind, it was written by a black cancer survivor in the Times, so it must be true. But it gets better. The black female cancer survivor goes to watch Serena play in the finals of the U.S. Open a couple of years ago, where our heroine is playing Vika Azarenka, a sexy Belarusian bitch. She notices that the man next to her is rooting for the sexy one. “We’re at the U.S. Open,” she tells him. “Why are you cheering for the player from Belarus?”

The man, an American, gets up and leaves. He was probably the kind who wears both a belt and braces, or suspenders, as our American cousins call them. “Why look for trouble?” I suppose he told himself. Only a nutter would ask why one roots for a certain player. But the nutter, both black and a cancer survivor, is given a full page in the N.Y. Times to write how unfair our white society has been to…yes, you guessed it, Serena Williams. As some would say, you couldn’t make it up.

Then there’s the Serena look, and why white corporate America has chosen Eugenie Bouchard, a real looker, instead of Serena as a poster gal. Some immediately called it racist; I call it common sense. Eugenie is beautiful, 21 years old, blond, and soft-spoken. She shows avian grace floating around the court, as Steffi Graf did once upon a time. Serena bludgeons the ball and throws herself around the court like a Panzer. Nothing racist in that—I loved the Panzers, especially when going through the French lines—but try and tell it to the race gestapo. One’s a plow horse, the other a thoroughbred; advertisers prefer the latter to the former, c’est tout. All I know is that this constant onslaught of racism accusations can be extremely tiresome as well as totally unbelievable. It has become as predictable as Serena’s Turkish coach leaving his wife and children for far richer fields of conquest.