![]() ![]() And so, breathless with rage, she said, “I don’t cheat to win I’d rather lose.” Over and over, she repeated, sometimes pointing her finger at him, “You owe me an apology. Of course she was mad! She was enraged by being called a cheater, furious at the suggestion that her stature, in this sport that has made her feel so unwelcome even as she has dominated and redefined it, has in any way been anything other than earned. And one thing black women are never allowed to be without consequence is livid. ![]() Because in making the coaching call, in the midst of a match she was playing against a newcomer who looked likely to beat her fair and square, the umpire insinuated that Serena was herself not playing fair and square. Ramos’s censure of Williams on Saturday night cannot be disentangled from her gender and race any more than the other recent obstacles she’s faced, from the physical toll of pregnancy, to her profession’s status-tax on it, to her higher risk of maternal mortality and postpartum complication. 1 seed as a result of her absence from the game. It was a call that felt designed to provoke and diminish perhaps the greatest tennis player of all time, during a year in which she has made a return to the sport after having had a baby, come close to dying after a postpartum hematoma, and lost her No. ![]() This was a mystifying call, so common are coaches’ hand gestures to their players, so unlikely was it that Williams had seen the gesture from across the court, or that it would have had any impact on her game. They are rules written for a sport that, until Williams and her sister came along, was dominated by white players, a sport in which white men have violated those rules in frequently spectacular fashion and rarely faced the kind of repercussions that Williams - and Osaka - did on Saturday night.Ĭhair umpire Carlos Ramos first issued Williams a warning for purportedly having gotten “coaching,” via a hand signal from her coach Patrick Mouratoglou in the stands. Those rules were written for a game and for players who were not supposed to look or express themselves or play the game as beautifully and passionately as either Serena Williams or the young woman who eventually beat her, 20-year-old Naomi Osaka, do. I don’t care much about the rules of tennis that Serena Williams was accused of violating at Saturday night’s U.S. ![]()
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