Serena Williams, 36, world-famous women’s tennis player and advocate for human rights organizations, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, has recently come under fire due to a controversy with an official at a match against Naomi Osaka at the 2018 US Open in New York.
Williams, while playing her final match at the US Open, got into an argument with umpire Carlos Ramos towards the end of the match. Ramos, the chair umpire, called a warning when Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, was reportedly giving Williams coaching from the stands. After Osaka was awarded a point, Williams threw and broke her racket causing Williams to receive a point penalty. Williams also got a game penalty for verbal abuse after calling the umpire a “thief” for sanctioning her with the loss of a point.
“I feel like people didn’t really take into account that she just came out of a pregnancy,” senior Jules Hubbard said. “I feel like a lot of the media blew it out of proportion.”
Although Williams’ actions caused many mixed responses, what added to the controversy was an Australian cartoon of Williams and Osaka published after the match. Williams is depicted in the cartoon as having a temper tantrum on the court, with the artist using a stereotypical and exaggerated depiction of Williams, a black woman. In the background, Osaka, a mixed Haitian-Japanese woman, is depicted as a small, calm, blonde, white woman. Both Williams’ and Osaka’s representations in the cartoon angered many fans and the general public alike.
“I feel like [Williams] was portrayed unfairly as…this sort of like big, huge, black monster,” Hubbard says. “Really she’s just a person who got into the game.”
In the beginning of Sept. 2017,Williams welcomed her first child. According to CNN, Williams wore a special catsuit during her matches that prevents blood clots that arise from pregnancy complications, and earlier this year, the French Open banned her outfit for not fitting the new dress code.
“It will no longer be accepted,” French Tennis Federation president Bernard Giudicelli said.
“One must respect the game and the place.”
However, some people don’t agree with the French Open’s decision on banning her catsuit, including Williams herself.
“I feel like a warrior in it, a warrior princess… from Wakanda, maybe,” Williams told NPR. “I’ve always wanted to be a superhero, and it’s kind of my way of being a superhero.”
Junior Mackenzie Holland feels that Williams should have been allowed to wear her chosen athletic attire, “especially because it was for a medical reason.”
“If she just had a baby and she’s trying to go out there and win these championships and win these matches, [being] without it it would give her a disadvantage,” Holland said. “You kind of don’t want her to die.”
The controversy surrounding the banning of Williams’ catsuit in August 2018 also opened up discussion of women’s roles in sports and the underlying sexism involved in their participation.
“It has a bunch of factors that go into it,” junior Hallie Arnott says. “Discrimination [against women] can be one, but it’s also the fact that people just assume so much of [women] and so much [less] of men that women are not treated the same way.”
In fact, many of the rules of tennis that are still enforced today are due to misogynistic reasons, such as tennis whites, which, according to Harper’s Bazaar, were “instituted because of a horror of seeing women sweat.”
“I think that Serena Williams should be allowed to wear anything she wants,” senior Cera Powell says. “In tennis, I guess it’s one of the sports that gives more freedom to wear what you want, versus other sports, where you have a set uniform with a jersey or a number.”
With the rules of tennis making it more difficult for women to succeed, Holland believes that the portrayal of women like Williams is often unfair.
“[When women are] doing something that they believe is right, they speak their mind,” Holland says. “And when they do, they’re [labeled as] ‘crazy’.”
Whether or not Williams faced discrimination in the episode with Ramos, Holland believes the entire issue was “blown out of proportion, especially for someone who just had a baby,” and some felt that Osaka didn’t receive the attention and praise she deserved for her win as a result.
“Naomi Osaka really deserved the respect because she won, and I feel like all of the attention was sort of focused on Serena and how she did wrong, but it wasn’t really focused on how well Osaka played against her idol,” Arnott says. “It kind of blew up too much and I think Serena made mistakes, but her intention was not to make this huge deal about it.”
-Alyssa Detzi and Emma Pollard
