A case of pulling out the pin and getting out of here …

Okay, I’m coming out of the woods with my hands up. I’m male and my ‘topic de jour’ is the vexed one of women in sport.

Last night, by complete chance since my gaff had been invaded by an electrician who has taken the best of two months to repair the non-working lights system in my front room – a task he failed to complete after 45 minutes when he apologised but he had just ‘burnt out’ the new dimmer he had been installing and therefore would have to return another day – I turned to BBC1 on my television and joined the epic five-setter between Rafael Nadal and Gilles Muller of Luxembourg (I didn’t even know they played tennis) on Court One at Wimbledon at 8-8 in the final set.

In all, this titanic struggle lasted some four hours 48 minutes, including the 15-13 last set that alone took two and a quarter hours.

I then awoke this morning to discover that some of the world’s elite female players are attacking the Wimbledon authorities for their matches being afforded less prominence than that of their male counterparts:

See here for a link to a representative report by Luke Brown as appears today upon the website of – THE INDEPENDENT

You can pigeon-hole me in the category ‘misogynistic old gits’ if you wish but it won’t surprise Rust readers that I’m firmly on the side of the Wimbledon schedulers whose initial defence seems to be that no discrimination is intended but they are just working on the age-old principle of ‘giving the public what it wants’.

Well, I’m sure that this little spat is bound to run and run because the ‘right on’ PC-correct brigade won’t let it lie where it is at the moment.

However, as usual I’m getting not a little hacked off with the constant quest to get women’s sport regarded as ‘equal’ to that of men’s.

Just what exactly do these tennis women want?

They’ve already heavily over-achieved in my book because they get paid the same as the men for far less work (best of three sets, not five) and far less excellence. And let’s leave aside the fact that, a couple of years ago when the ‘equal pay for equal work’ argument briefly came to the media fore, even elite female players were openly admitting that only about 20% of them would be physically capable of playing a five set match if that were to become a requirement.

It’s a fact of life that on the women’s pro circuit even their Grand Slam tournaments don’t get down to seriously competitive tennis until the ‘last sixteen’ stage because there aren’t that many female players of good enough quality and fitness (not that anyone is allowed to say it) – yet despite that, there are hundreds of ladies making sufficient money thank you to construct a lucrative career out of it, largely because of the huge amounts of cash in the sport that somehow filters down that far.

It’s a bit like the Tiger Woods syndrome in pro golf – when he was at his zenith there were tens of golf pros around the world who never had a real chance of winning key tournaments, let alone Majors, but could still earn hundreds of thousands per annum simply because they were active in the same era as he was.

I’ve got just two comments to add to the debate:

Firstly, and there’s no way getting around this, the fact is that in women’s sport generally the way to increased excellence generally is by maximising what I’d describe as ‘male’ characteristics – i.e. being bigger, faster, fitter, stronger, more dynamic and more aggressive.

It’s an obvious point and yet – for the general and wider public, including those who are not major sports fans – the prospect of watching women become more and more like men is just not that enticing.

I don’t think I’m being entirely sexist (because many women I know agree with me) in saying it, but my enjoyment of women’s tennis was/is built around watching the likes of Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Maria Bueno and Gabriela Sabatini, who were comfortable in their femininity and played a quite different type of tennis to their male counterparts, rather than watching the modern female Godzillas who seem to dominate modern female tennis with their thumping serves and blockbuster groundstrokes.

This might be later used as a stick to beat me with, but I‘d even go so far as to suggest that in female tennis there should be two classes introduced – (1) for the female Godzillas; and (2) for the women who look and play like women used to in my youth.

And if such a system was introduced, you know what? I’d lay a penny to a pound that, in terms of spectator-attractiveness and global television audience ratings across both genders, the latter would be the more popular – and commercially successful) of the two.

Secondly, I’d just add that in this crazy modern world where women tennis players are screaming the odds about unfair treatment, and LBGT and gender-self-determination rights and all sorts of similar ‘minority’ issues are demanding the headlines, we need to get a proper sense of perspective about what is really important:

See here for a report upon the latest real problem confronting the human race – THE GUARDIAN