Columnist Dean Juipe: Verbal jousts nothing new in pro tennis

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2001 | 10:02 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

The tennis brats are at it again. It's hot and humid in New York City and the cute and rich debutantes who comprise the women's side of the U.S. Open are getting a little snippy.

It's comical, of course, to see the petty jealousies rise to the surface.

But there they are, detailed in this week's Time magazine and examined and re-examined in virtually every story that emerges from the press room of Arthur Ashe Stadium.

It's hard to take it too seriously, yet the ladies have brought this unnecessary attention to themselves by their failure to see their rivals as equals or competitors instead of ironclad adversaries.

The unwitting focal points of the skirmish are sisters Venus and Serena Williams, whose greatest burden is the baggage their intermittently overbearing father presents. The fact that the sisters have enviable endorsement deals also rubs a few of their underexposed colleagues the wrong way, the inference being that the Willliamses have capitalized on their African-American heritage to a greater extent than their tennis records.

Similarly, beauty queen Anna Kournikova has her detractors for no other reason than the endorsements that have come her way for looking great even in the face of repetitive defeats.

The temptation on this end is to question the motives of the accusers and ask them to cease and desist.

Yet at least two prominent women's players, Martina Hingis and Lindsay Davenport, have had a bone to pick with the privileged trio, although Hingis' remarks -- which pertain to the Williams family and were pivotal to the Time story -- were made months ago and she has since attempted to defuse her role in the still-brewing controversy.

Davenport, too, has tried to soften her stance in recent days, albeit after the damage was done.

If contemptuous behavior wasn't something of an offbeat tennis tradition, fans would take offense at this latest installment of reprehensible remarks by the sport's leading lights. But, the fact is, bad manners and tennis have had a long and not-so-subtle association.

In times past, however, the kings of confrontation were all on the men's side and, from a historical perspective, the undisputed champions of tumult remain John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. McEnroe -- dubbed "Superbrat" and "Mac the Strife" and "the Incredible Sulk" -- was a Stanford-bred iconoclast whose many transgressions include skipping the Wimbledon winner's banquet in 1981 even though he won the sacred event. Likewise, the UCLA-schooled Connors regularly thumbed his nose at tradition and diplomacy, declining, for instance, the winner's commemorative medal at Wimbledon after winning in '82.

Both routinely abused fellow players and officials as if it were their duty. If nothing else, they kept an otherwise cavalier tour from being too stodgy.

But having the ladies quarreling as they have been of late seems a bit unnecessary, even if the verbal cat fight comes across as amusing to the rest of us. Martina's mad at Venus? Lindsay's peeved with Anna? No one likes old man Williams?

Oh well, tennis anyone?