The Hindu : Sport : Compelling radicals of tennis

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 30, 2006

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Sport

Compelling radicals of tennis

King is a hard act to follow. So is Agassi, writes Rohit Brijnath

In 1984, women runners sweated down the streets of Los Angeles, pounding out history with every stride. Eighty-eight years after the men first ran an Olympic marathon, women were finally allowed to run this distance.

Wisdom had dawned (presumably that women would not drop dead), but it had taken its own sweet time. Along the marathon course, women apparently wept in admiration. At home, maybe so did Billie Jean King.

All athletes battle, but women like King have a keener sense of struggle. Their skirmishes have not merely been over titles, but with men for legitimacy. Chauvinism has been an ugly and persistent opponent.

A lot to prove

King faced the mockery of male players in the 1970s when she asked for their support in the fight for better prize money. Get married, raise children, a male player responded. She fought Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, and you might say now what did beating a 55-year-old man prove? A lot. And think of the pressure she wore, for imagine if she lost?

So it was fine on Monday that a man named McEnroe described her as an inspiration and another called Connors insisted "it's my honour to have shared the same sport as you" as the U.S. Open complex was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.

No major stadium perhaps has been named after a woman. But the real honouring of King must come from her own kind. In women players remembering that if they get equal prize money at the U.S. Open (at the 1970 Australian Open, the women's singles champion got less than the men's doubles winners), if they get the respect they deserve on a tour of their own, then King is the reason.

Tribute to King

For female players, so cosseted these days, to not appreciate King is sad, to not continue her work is sinful. Like all sports, women's tennis must fight for dollars and respect. Not all athletes will be activists, but in just engaging with spectators, in shaking sponsors' hands, in hitting balls with kids occasionally, they pay tribute to King.

Wimbledon still doesn't pay equal prize money and King's work is not yet done. Neither apparently is Andre Agassi's. Here, too, like King stands a revolutionary, whose transformation of tennis has been less significant perhaps but compelling nonetheless.

Entertainment

Agassi helped convert tennis into entertainment, he could put on a show and he could play. On Monday he did a bit of both. Only he could start a match half in tears and his opponent in smiles. Andre Pavel was laughing, having figured out there was no way he could beat 23,001 Americans.

If King struck powerful blows for her sex, Agassi is still striking some of his own. For men in their mid-30s (for three-and-a-half hours how he ran), for tennis technicians (his backhand down the line has "Made by Rolls Royce" engraved on it), for professionalism (at one-set all, 0-4 down he could have quit and gone home to Steffi, but he doesn't know how).

Watching Agassi perform, even now, is an education. For most of the match he played like an engineer with a faulty slide rule, just that fraction inexact on his shots. Still he won. He played from two metres behind the baseline when usually he camps on it. Still, he won. He hit more slice backhands than he does in an entire tournament, confirming he doesn't get to some balls in time. Still, he won.

Why? Because he's won 223 Grand Slam matches (the second most ever), from every possible situation. Struggle, he knows, too. But once he was tuned, in the fourth set, he did what he does best: he hit cleanly, and rapidly, ensuring his opponent ran out of time to make the right response.

Agassi smells a big point and he grows six feet. He's down and he comes out swinging even harder as if swiping hesitancy off the court. In the crucial third-set tie-breaker, at set point, he plays his best return of the match, darting to his left on the ad court, turning his body, slamming an inside out cross-court forehand.

We have to believe athletes care and Agassi does. He said once, "Being on a tennis court was an opportunity to make a difference to someone's day". On Monday, he did. Again.

King is a hard act to follow. So is this fellow.

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