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Both the players in the 2012 Women’s final of the 2012 Australian Open, Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka, are screamers and grunters, when they strike the tennis ball.
Indeed Azarenka has added a shrieking/whistling add-on to her screaming that gives the obnoxious noise she makes the air-splitting quality (or lack of quality) of a jet taking off.
Let’s be blunt about this. The screaming and grunting of Azarenka and Sharapova (who are the worst offenders among the women’s players) gives a sort of porn movie sound-track to their antics on the tennis court.
This assault on the integrity and ethics of tennis, and the sheer awfulness of the noise the players make with every shot, is why I won’t be watching their final.
I switched on early in the tournament to watch both these players as they started their campaign. But within seconds, in both instances, I was forced to switch off.
Readers of The Roar will know that for the last few years I have written a column sometime during the Australian Open condemning the players who have grunted and screamed their way through their matches, and the supine officials (who seem totally unconcerned about the sensibilities of watching the game in comfort) who have refused to do anything to tone things down.
Last year’s rant was titled, somewhat presciently: ‘Please tell Sharapova to stop her damn screeching!’
The article quoted a journalist complaining that Sharapova was ‘wailing like a banshee virtually every point.’
Her opponent in the match under review was a Frenchwoman Virginie Razzagno who said, I thought rather generously: ‘It was difficult, but I got used to it.’
Razzagno might have got used to it. However, I wasn’t and still am not prepared to go through the agony of even trying to see how much of the screaming/grunting, wailing I could cope with, in time.
I suggested in the article that players should ask the umpire to stop the screaming. One reader (Darwin Stubbie, you know who you are) complained that ‘isn’t this just a rehash of a similar story last year?’
Of course it was. And this article is a rehash of last year’s article, without the old Peter Ustinov ‘wedding night’ joke which Richard Hinds quoted in an article written early in the tournament.
The point about re-hashing the standard Zavos rant about the screaming tennis players is that only by repeating the argument every tournament against this objectionable practice that the mainstream journalists might – finally – pick up on the matter.
And, thankfully, this has happened. Hinds’ article about the women’s final is titled: ‘Bring your earmuffs and let battle of the grunters begin.’
‘How excruciating does this slugfest threaten to be,’ he writes. ‘As a precaution, all leave has been cancelled at the nearby Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital where fans evacuated from the arena with bleeding airs are expected to turn the waiting room into a scene from M*A*S*H.’
Hinds points to the lamentable fact that the officials running the Women’s Tour have virtually refused to do anything about taking effective measures to muffle the worst offenders. They are, apparently, going to try and educate some of the younger players. But nothing has really been done to challenge the pampered starlets: ‘In tennis, the lunatics run the asylum. The result, tomorrow, will be bedlam.’
There is no hope of relief from the officials, or from the players like Sharapova and Azarenka. Some other form of pressure on the players and officials has to be created.
This reaction of the crowd during the Ararenka-Kim Clijsters semi-final is most promising. Some of the crowd began to make a whistling noise when Azarenka was serving and playing her shots. The chair umpire, rather amazingly given the noise the server makes when she plays her shots, called out to the crowd: ‘As a courtesy to the players, please keep the noise down during the play.’
This comment/warning must rank as one of the most bizarre ever made from the chair umpire. It was greet (according to Hinds) ‘with shreiks of laughter and just plain shrieks.’
We should demand that the spectators at the final to maintain their rage against the shrieking by imitating both players during their final. The players refuse to show any courtesy to their opponents, or to spectators as is evident from their continued assault on their ears. So why should the spectators show any courtesy to them?
The rest of us not at the Rod Laver Arena should just refuse to watch the match on television. If enough viewers do this, it will have an effect on the television ratings, which might just be the spur to get some action from officials.
As Anthony Albanese (in his plagiarism of great lines from the movies) might say: ‘We’re as mad as hell and we aren’t going to take it any more!’