JOIN USDelivering verbal volleys
The first audible obscenity in tennis history surely went unpenalised. In a sport where perfection is unattainable -- eventually you will miss -- the game’s earliest practitioners must have felt compelled to utter an oath or two, perhaps on day one.
Fast forward more than a century to Wimbledon 2015, and tennis’s foul-mouthed tradition is firmly entrenched, with code violations and fines meted out to the offenders like Serena Williams, who was penalised in her first-round victory, and like Heather Watson, the British player who was given a point penalty in her victory.
“I say things I shouldn’t say,” Watson said. “I apologise to anybody that’s offended. I need to control it, and I just can’t.”
Boris Becker, the three-time Wimbledon champion now coaching Novak Djokovic, recently claimed that on-court microphones have removed the spice from the rivalries in the game, forcing players to suppress their characters and muffle their frustrations for fear of penalties.
But even with Big Brother listening, it has been an audibly profane stretch in the professional game. Veteran stars like Williams and Andy Murray continue to let the bad words fly. Williams dropped a string of F-bombs in the French Open final she won in three sets against Lucie Safarova.
“I was just so angry at myself,” Williams explained.
But there is also a new group of impact men’s players emerging, best represented by Nick Kyrgios of Australia and his US friend Jack Sock, that possess an edge and vocabulary between the lines that could set a new tone after the more courtly era long ruled by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic.
Kyrgios, in particular, has a four-letter habit on the practice court as well as the match court, receiving four fines totaling $11,000 at the Australian Open in January. But he also has undeniable crowd appeal, an ability to make the difficult look easy as well as a showman’s urge to make the easy look difficult.
At a phase in Western culture when the Internet and cable television have brought profanity into the mainstream like perhaps never before, does cracking down on bad language in tennis matches really matter as much as it once did?
“Parents don’t want to turn on the TV and hear too much of that,” said Stefan Fransson, the French Open referee. “From our point of view, we want to keep it as clean as we can. Of course, there are some words that come through. But we are not saying to chair umpires that it’s OK to let it go. People don’t want to hear those words, and we believe it’s not right to let it happen.”
The challenge is that the fans on site and watching at home tend to hear a lot more audible obscenities than the chair umpires hear (or admit to hearing).
Consider Murray’s third-round match with Kyrgios at the French Open, a recipe for tennis profanity if ever there were one. They did not disappoint, as the television coverage made clear.
A British tennis coach, Chris Nelson, wrote on Twitter that he had had to turn off the television: “I wonder if @andymurray would like to apologise to my clubhouse full of young kids for his foul mouth.”
Murray did just that, responding “very sorry” on Twitter, adding: “I try 2 be a good role model but this is one of my many failings. I’m far from perfect but I do try hard to improve my behaviour.”
Kyrgios, just 20 and clearly just fine with challenging authority, seems less intent on self-improvement.
But the remarkable thing about that French Open match with Murray was that neither man was given a fine for an obscenity. The only fine for an audible obscenity handed out during the entire men’s French Open tournament came in qualifying, when Brydan Klein of Britain was hit with a $1,000 fine, which was later suspended after appeal.
But most of the swearing clearly goes unpunished. Players are adept at turning their backs and cursing under their breath or in a low voice in the corner farthest from the chair umpire. And even though linespersons are supposed to report any code violation they hear or observe to the chair umpire, it rarely happens. Players also have learned to wait for the crowd’s roar before cursing, so the obscenity won’t be audible.
“Unless we are doing something ridiculous, I think they are pretty lenient with us,” said Sam Groth, the big-serving Australian who muttered a few not-so-sweet nothings that went unpunished in his four-set, first-round upset of Sock.
As for Sock, he ended up with a $2,500 fine for unsportsmanlike conduct after smashing a ball in the direction of a small group of particularly vocal Australian supporters, part of the fan club called the Fanatics. He earned another fine by leaving the grounds without speaking to reporters.
Though Sock has sworn plenty on court of late, he was not penalised for any audible obscenities. “My sense is that, verbally, it’s worse today than before, but in terms of racquet abuse and all that, it was worse before,” said Bob Brett, who once coached serial racquet-smasher Goran Ivanisevic.
Wayne McEwen, a Grand Slam supervisor and Australian Open referee, sees another distinction.
“Before, there was probably more of it directed at people,” he said. “Whereas now it’s more frustration, letting it out at themselves, than anything else.”
Tennis perfection, after all, remains unattainable.