Terence Blacker: But what about her second serve?
Tennis has been comprehensively hijacked by the marketing of sex
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Independent Minds
The tennis players getting pulses racing at Wimbledon
In the glory days of L!ve TV, the red top-inspired television channel, a show called Topless Darts attracted a certain amount of attention. Its concept, half-naked women paying darts, was based on the simple idea that a combination of sport and sexual titillation would be a ratings winner.
Topless Darts disappeared from the screens in 1999 but, 10 years on, there is a new and profitable version of the same basic formula. It is called the Wimbledon Tennis Championships.
No other sport, with the possible exception of beach volleyball, has been more comprehensively hijacked by the marketing of sex than professional tennis. The potential for exploitation has always been there. Back in the 1970s, the most popular Athena poster was of the famous bum-scratching, knickerless Tennis Girl. More recently, newspapers have loved to run candid on-court photographs of young, attractive female players as they stretch adorably – and revealingly – to make a shot.
Tennis underwear is a regular subject of debate, providing an excuse to feature the low-angle picture, technically known by paparazzi and pornographers as the "up-skirt". Now, the pretence that this wet-lipped boggling has anything to do with sport has been abandoned. The press list their Top 10 Wimbledon Babes and run headlines like "Volley of the Dolls" and "Babe, Set and Match!". The BBC is playing the same game, if the words of an unnamed spokesman are to be believed. "Our preference would always be a Brit or a babe as this always delivers high viewing figures," he told a Sunday newspaper.
There is nothing wrong with BBC programmes stimulating a dim throb of desire in their viewers – it is an important part of the corporation's mission to entertain – but perhaps we could all stop pretending that this kind of light voyeurism has anything to do with sport. Otherwise, if sporting broadcasters are really so anxious to bolster their ratings with the sexually frustrated, why not include peak-time teenage gymnastics in the schedule?
Wimbledon itself, so often praised as the home of old-fashioned lawn tennis, appears to be eager to accommodate this new kind of tennis fan. There is now a powerful bias in favour of young players who look good when it comes to the All-England Club's scheduling of matches. The latest pig-tailed cutie from Slovakia or Romania will appear on the Centre Court while a higher-ranked player, who happens to plainer or older, is banished to the outer courts. "Box-office appeal has to be taken into consideration," the club's Johnny Perkins has explained. "It is not a coincidence that those (on Centre Court) are attractive."
It is difficult to see how those in charge of a professional sport can expect it – or them – to be taken seriously when among the criteria for their match-planning decisions are the legs, breasts and general dimpled gorgeousness of the player in question.
There is something about Wimbledon which offers the British middle-class a holiday from being themselves. For these two weeks, respectable folk who would disapprove of anyone sitting slumped in front of a TV watching sport for hours throughout the day, do just that. They gaze mistily at the screen as a couple of babes grunt and gasp and tell themselves that their interest is entirely innocent. Self-delusion, after all, is one activity at which we British excel.
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Comments
Maybe get the Williams sisters dad as an advisor and get him to go and find 50 potential tennis champions, because he has produced more tennis champions in the last decade than the whole collective brain power of the All England Club in the last 73 years...
If TV companies know they are onto a winner and newspapers salivate on their readers behalf at the sight of tennis babes it sort of tells you where the problem lies. I feel sorry for the poor darlings. An entire section of society lost between primness and titillation. Tennis for the middle class is as John B so poetically wrote outdoor sex. They can lust after each other with purity, flirt with gamesmanship, think dirty while playing fair. Tennis allows them all those things they would otherwise have done in the vynil heat of a closed car in the woods.
As I said sex starved.
Or how about we realise that to qualify you need to excel at your sport and that these girls, pretty or not, are there on merit and not because of some clandestine beauty contest. The attire they wear is no more revealing than is worn about town by those in their age group and if some middle aged men like to watch them as much as they like the game - good luck to them. We are not under the control of the Taliban and still have enough personal freedom to make our own choice.
If you don't like the tennis, then don't watch it. This has to be the most glaring case of trying to create controversy where none exists. A shallow, sexist and pathetic article; can we go back to some journalism please.
Remember all the hooplah (ie free publicity) generated last year by Sharapova's outfit?
Personally, I watch the tennis for the tennis, and any bonus generated because one player's legs are better than another's to look at is icing on the cake. (and in this I'm referring to the men!)
It seems to be getting out of control and there is a link it would seem that as our society becomes more depraved so does the crime figures for sexual related crime goes up too.
What are the next generations going to grow up into? Are we going to fall down into the same abyss that the Romans fell into, where anything goes? Where children are fair game and worse.
Because every time we raise the ceiling on whats acceptable sexual wise, it then leds to complacency and then people get bored with the new high, seek to push the boundaries further and further.
I don't think we need to be a nation of prudes by any means but it is getting far far too much.
Compared to footie tennis is pure white and boooring. Where are the sex scandals in tennis, the romping in hotels, the playgirls and naturally the beefcake doing kiss and tell? Come on tennis stars Boris did try to get the ball rolling so to speak, but since his little broom cupboard incursion - zilch. Even our cricket boys managed to break a bed once, and generally cavort on tour. But tennis -- oh so dull.