Serena Williams' US Open outburst will not tarnish her legacy... the 24th Grand Slam is coming

Listen up: Williams lays into the umpire
USA TODAY Sports
Dan Jones10 September 2018

One day soon, when all the yelling has quietened and people have gone back to hitting a fluffy ball back and forth over a net first and grandstanding about gender politics second, Serena Williams will win her 24th Grand Slam title.

This will be a cause for celebration and a moment to remember that she is the ‘other’ greatest tennis player of all time — the acknowledged holder of this title being that smooth lad from Switzerland who ‘only’ has 20. Sporting greatness is overwhelmingly weighted towards the numbers. Twenty-four is a number only Margaret Court can argue with. It’ll be a long time, perhaps even a lifetime, before anyone else does what Serena has done with a racquet in her hand.

When and where she gets to 24, we cannot tell. But what we do know is that a chap called Carlos Ramos will apparently not be sitting in the high chair.

One of the weirdest things about Williams’ US Open final meltdown on Saturday was not that she called umpire Ramos a “liar” or a “thief” – although that was a little strong for any professional athlete and it is disingenuous to pretend that a man would not be punished, particularly by the irritatingly punctilious Ramos, for using those precise terms.

No, it was the assertion by Williams that he would “never ever” umpire another one of her matches.

Yes, Ramos is a nitpicky, sometimes uneven official who has wound up (and penalized) most of the biggest players in the game, many of them men.

All the same, he’s the guy in the chair. We have come to a strange pass when a player — whoever they are, whatever they have been through in life and however enraged they happen to be — feels they can threaten to have an official removed from his post. It is an even prettier pass when a sports organizing body — in this case the WTA — comes out and effectively backs their player to the hilt. One of the hoariest old truisms in sporting ethics is that “no player is bigger than the game”. Here we see a neat case study in the opposite.

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I rather admire Williams — the supreme athleticism, the spikiness, her press conferences in which she wavers between indifference and contempt, the monumental self-importance elided skilfully with her real commitment to gender equality moral crusade etc.

Others, I am sure, will feel that her screaming at Ramos, whether justified or not, is the sort of thing that will tarnish her legacy. Well, let her get to 24 or even 25 Slams, and then we’ll see about that.

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