July 03, 2017
John McEnroe
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The current year is 2017, people, so why are we still segregating male and female athletes? Don”t they know that gender is a social construct and everyone’s equal?
Legendarily ill-tempered tennis champ John McEnroe outraged gender-deniers across the planet last week when he said that black female tennis champeen Serena Williams was not the world’s best tennis player. He said she’s the best female tennis player of all time, but that was not enough to appease the rabid egalitotalitarian hordes.
The now-infamous (if entirely reasonable) exchange happened between McEnroe and Lulu Garcia-Navarro of NPR:
Garcia-Navarro: Let’s talk about Serena Williams. You say she is the best female player in the world in the book.
McEnroe: Best female player ever”no question.
Garcia-Navarro: Some wouldn’t qualify it, some would say she’s the best player in the world. Why qualify it?
McEnroe: Oh! Uh, she’s not, you mean, the best player in the world, period?
Garcia-Navarro: Yeah, the best tennis player in the world. You know, why say female player?
McEnroe: Well because if she was in, if she played the men’s circuit she’d be like 700 in the world.
Naturally, the pro-fem harpies began yipping like the spoiled Chihuahuas that they are. This was a horrible comment, they said”undeniably “sexist,” and also probably at the very least a little bit racist.
Never mind whether it was factual or not.
In 2015 at age 56, McEnroe told talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel that he could possibly still beat Williams, who was then 33, in a tennis match but added that she”d cream him in a boxing ring. He also said that around the year 2000, Donald Trump offered him money to play Williams in a “Battle of the Sexes,” but he balked because it wasn”t enough money.
Four years ago, Williams told David Letterman that she wouldn”t play an exhibition match against male champion Andy Murray because he’s a boy and she’s a girl:
For me, men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely, almost, two separate sports. If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes. No, it’s true. It’s a completely different sport. The men are a lot faster and they serve harder, they hit harder, it’s just a different game. I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls, because I don”t want to be embarrassed.
Perhaps she”d learned her lesson when she and her sister Venus”both of whom have been repeated world champions”bragged back in 1998 that they could beat any male player ranked under the world’s top 200. At the Australian Open, a male German player named Karsten Braasch“who was ranked #203 in the world at the time”took the bait and challenged both sisters. He allegedly played them after finishing a round of golf and drinking two beers. He beat Serena Williams 6-1 and her sister Venus 6-2. The Williams sisters then downgraded their boast and claimed they could beat any man ranked outside the top 350.
But late-stage egalitarianism is a form of mass insanity, and there still remain true believers and nutjob misfits who insist that women can do everything a man can do except when it comes to being innately evil. In that case, men corner the market.
In the 2009 book Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is not Equal in Sports, two female authors argue that the only reason women appear to be athletically inferior to men is that society unfairly segregates them due to outmoded patriarchal beliefs. An exceedingly dumb 2013 article in VICE magazine says the idea that boys are better athletes than girls is “fucking bullshit“ and that the “games are rigged.” Naturally, there is no statistical evidence to buttress this non-argument, only the usual frothing about sexism and patriarchy and what impenitent assholes men are.
In a 2005 book called Genetic Technology and Sport, authors Claudio Tamburrini and Torbjorn Tannsjo make a bold and potentially humiliating proposition for the gender-equality fanatics:
The present authors have questioned the practise of sexual discrimination in sport. We have argued that it should be abolished. Women and men should compete against one another on equal terms on sport arenas. The reasons for giving up sexual discrimination within sports, and for allowing individuals of both sexes to compete with each other is simple. In sports it is crucial that the best person wins. Then sexual differences are simply irrelevant.
Hmm, what might happen if the Athletic Gender Wall were to be razed?
