Subscribe to Print Edition | Sun., November 08, 2009 Cheshvan 21, 5770 | | Israel Time: 01:14 (EST+7)
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On the Couch / Fit to call on our affection
By Jerrold Kessel

When you want to speak about women and be politically correct, I'm told you don't say "they nag," but that "they've become verbally repetitive."

There's nothing politically correct about the fact that in tennis women have done so well that they fully deserve to have finally secured equal prize money with the men. More power to their rackets! The WTA tour has even powered its way into Qatar, their end-of-year tournament climbing aboard the ambitious Gulf state's search for global status as a world sporting center. With the men for once out of the limelight, the top women were in a position to demonstrate just why it's so worth watching their game.
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How let down we were.

Many male fans of the women's game used to enthuse that what attracted them was the fact that, in comparison to the top men who seemed to be playing a game from another planet, women's tennis seemed much more human; even a moderate club strength player fancied he could give a girl in the top 100 a reasonable run - and everyone could identify with how they played much more than with the otherworldly brilliance of the top guys.

No longer. One of the revelations of watching contemporary women's tennis up close is to recognize just how hard they strike the ball - even a top 30 or 50 player like Shahar or the slender Daniella Hantchukova. So even if they still don't deign to play five best-of-five in Grand Slam events and in the Fed Cup, the women's game has come on really powerfully. Which is precisely why their championship week was such a letdown.

They turned on its head the joke about the little boy who, during a violent thunderstorm, asks his mother as she tucks him up, "Mommy, will you sleep in my room tonight?" "I can't dear, I have to sleep in daddy's room." A long silence is broken by the shaky little voice, "the big sissy!"

Real wimps was how they came across in this week of walking wounded, match after match ending prematurely because another of the players had cried off injured. We ought to be gallant, I suppose, and salute upcoming superstar, 19-year-old Caroline Wozniacki, for gamely trying to carry on through a string of injuries, though she too eventually had to withdraw from her limpid semifinal against Serena Williams.

Battle of the fittest

Sure players got injured, but there's more than a sneaking feeling that many of the women are just not fit enough - certainly not fit enough for several hard games on the trot or for five sets. Surely also, there's an argument to be made for the fact that the tour is too arduous, too long. But if it's the money they're after, they ought to spend more toughening themselves up in the gym and pounding the tarmac. Or, they can do what the great W sisters do and compete sparingly, an approach that irritates the tour organizers and many of their sister competitors.

With all the less-fit rest falling by the wayside, at least it left us with another enticing all-Williams final, though that too was rather less than pretty, what with Venus' left knee heavily strapped and Serena's left thigh even more heavily bandaged. EuroSport's Simon Reed and Jo Durie were more interested in measuring "the pain thresholds" than in backhands down the line, and in "depleted physical resources" and the "monumental effort needed just to survive" than whether it was advisable to come to the net more.

But as the sisters always do on an occasion, Venus gave her all. It was nowhere nearly enough against younger sis in formidable serving form, a master class really: Serena dropped but five points behind her serve in the first 6-2 set, and just three in the second, including the tie-break. "I'm glad it ended in two, I'm not sure I could have gone all the way," she admitted with a wry smile.

Anyway, Serena rightfully ends the year as World No. 1, putting a lid on the sordid running argument whether Dinara Safina (who pulled out herself almost before a ball had been struck) was justified in being top-ranked for much of the season, though she's still to capture her first big title.

One wonders whether any of them will be fit for the Australian Open now 10 weeks away, or whether the field has been cleared for the comeback Belgian duo, Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters, to romp away with all the glory. There's the rub - early retirement.

Play for love

Not that the major disappointment of the week, perhaps of the year, wasn't generated by a player who we were delighted to see prolonging his presence in the game well beyond traditional retirement age.

I'm told that when you want to speak about men and be politically correct you don't say "he acts like a total ass," but that he's developed "a case of rectal-cranial inversion." Unwelcome to our sporting week, Andre!

Throughout his career Andre Agassi exemplified the nursery rhyme about the little girl who, "when she was good, was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid." Early on it tended to be the latter, but later Andre became an ever-more captivating on-court spectacle, and ever more decent a fellow off it.

So it seemed.

It's not that we're blown away in dismay by the revelation in his forthcoming autobiography that he'd taken drugs, and what's more pulled a fast one over the lax tennis authorities who seemed only too willing to be hoodwinked. That too. But what's shocked us to the marrow was the sinister disclaimer that he never loved tennis - actually, that he's always hated the game.

"Agassi's coming out as a tennis-hater casts a retrospective pall," writes Guardian columnist Barney Ronay. "In real life it's no secret that everybody hates their job. Still, a top-class sportsman hating his job seems strangely jarring, particularly when it's Agassi, a blow struck for pure talent, a shambling, pigeon-toed riposte to the two-meter tennis ogre with his marmalising right arm. Those rifled returns. The breathtaking angles. Where does he get off, you feel, hating tennis - when his tennis looks like that?

Dudi Sela is also skating on thin ice, testing our emotions to the hilt by proclaiming he's fallen out of love with the game. It can happen - pull out by all means, but just don't let us in on your big secret, so that we go on rooting for you with all our hearts when you don't even want to be out there playing for us.

Play for sex

In terms of commitment, both Andre and Dudi and the injured lasses could learn a thing or two from a Philadelphia Phillies fan, one Susan Finkelstein. She risked being charged with offering sex in return for World Series tickets.

Finkelstein, 43, denies she did anything wrong: "I'm not embarrassed about my actions. I'm embarrassed about how I was arrested," (in a bar after meeting an undercover policeman responding to her online ad: "I'm the creative type! Maybe we can help each other!" She also described herself as a "gorgeous, tall, buxom blonde diehard Phillies fan."

All she had wanted was to get tickets to take her husband to the opening game of baseball's centerpiece, says Mrs. Finkelstein. Her lawyer says she never explicitly offered sex, adding "she's merely a nice lady overcome with Phillies fever."

She faces a hearing on December 3, when she hopes the misdemeanor charge of soliciting prostitution will be dismissed. It wasn't divulged whether Mrs. Finkelstein discussed her ticket tactics with her husband. At least a radio station saw merit in her commitment by arranging two tickets for a later game in the series.

Not that it, in the end, helped the Phillies much. In the early hours of yesterday they were denied their second straight triumph when the New York Yankees beat them in the sixth game to win 4-2 and claim a remarkable 27th World Series.
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