There’s No Crying in Tennis – Wait Just Like in Golf, Maybe There is?!

At the Sony Ericsson Open in Key Biscayne, Florida, during the quarter-finals, Spanish tennis player David Ferrer was losing in his match to American Mardy Fish.  While the match was going on, a baby in the stands began to cry.  And cry.  After losing his serve, a frustrated Ferrer decided to slap a ball into the stands in the general direction of the baby and its father.  The ball didn’t hit the child and nothing really happened, other than people actually watched YouTube clips of a middling tennis player doing something stupid.

Now, should the parent have taken the crying child out of the stands? Sure.  We’ve all been at that wedding where the clueless parents let their child basically ruin the couple’s ceremony.  And, if someone in the stands had yelled at the baby’s father, I would have trouble finding fault.  However, there are two problems with the story in my estimation. First, is that if athletes don’t want anything being hurled at them from the stands, then they should avoid tossing their own projectiles into the stands.  Athletes are largely exposed as it is and giving a crowd of people an excuse to come after you is a bad idea across the board.

Tennis is a sport, after all, that has seen a female player (Monica Seles) stabbed on the court during a changeover.  Sure, she wasn’t harmed too badly – well, except for the psychological impact – but it certainly showed what can happen. Baseball and basketball players have tempted fate repeatedly, both by going into the stands during contests and by engaging the fans in heated exchanges.  Those have spilled into violence on more than one occasion and the fact that it hasn’t devolved into an occurrence of serious injury is only because most people are smart enough to stay out of it.  If this was Europe and a soccer player on an opposing team decided to go into the stands the way that NBA players Stephen Jackson and Ron Artest once famously did, they wouldn’t be coming back out in one piece. One time, an athlete is going to ignite the wrong powder keg of drunken idiots and we’ll all sit back and act SHOCKED at what happens.

The other issue has to do with the elitist world of sports like tennis and golf.  I don’t mind admitting that I’m a happy participant in both sports and I don’t have any problem hanging out at a country club.  But the exaggerated reactions of the participants in both sports to anything that can break their concentration borders on the ridiculous.  When I’m participating or watching either sport, I do abide by the etiquette that has grown with the sport.  However, I also recognize that there are a preponderance of dolts in the world today and I have no expectations that everyone is going to do the same.  If Augusta National wants to remove a patron for making noise, I have no problem with it.  But, if a player or a caddy decides to go off on someone for coughing during a backswing, that I have no patience for.  If you can’t overcome a little noise and keep concentration, then you’re not as good as you think.  I’ve played in ProAm’s with some players, and while I marvel at their skill and have found them to largely be gracious, I’ve also come across a group of players that are…well, babies.

I’ve spent less time with tennis players, but from a distance, they seem even more on edge about what spectators are doing.  Most elite tennis players are coddled from an early age and often are too far removed from what most of us would consider normal society.  Much like recent generations of basketball players, and to lesser degree athletes in every sport, they have had too many years of people telling them they’re great.  Anyone who interferes with their self-stylized greatness is a moron or a pest or both. Trying to get people in that position to recognize that they only way that they have the opportunity to enjoy privileges is solely because of consumer dollars, either in ticket sales or sponsorships, is like trying to explain the theory of relativity to an aardvark.

Unfortunately, the mindsets are so far ingrained that it’s next to impossible to change these High School behaviors that come with it.  Tennis players will still yell at fans to shut up and golfers will still admonish photographers for clicking a camera during their stroke.  It’s asinine, but that’s the world that they live in.  They should just avoid doing anything that would cause the masses of people around them to decide to reach in and pull them out of it.

Related posts:

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2. Grand Slam Tennis – Politics and Sports Don’t Mix
3. WTA Doha 2010 – Zvonareva vs Azarenka – 1st set – 3 Crying Babies
4. History Of Tennis, Rules Of Tennis
5. Open Tickets Put Enthusiasm On Rise In Tennis Court

Tags: Crying, Golf, Just, Like, Maybe, Tennis, There, There's, Wait