Game, set and match to ideology

“Time to accept Wimbledon’s women’s matches are superior to the men’s,” writes Alyson Rudd.

At first, that made me wonder if she had ever picked up a tennis racquet in her life. But then I realised it didn’t matter one way or the other. Her statement had nothing to do with tennis and everything to do with ideology.

The ideology says that anything men can do women can do better, or at least as well. That’s why they should be paid at least as much. And if the evidence before your eyes contradicts the ideology, then so much the worse for the evidence.

The evidence before the eyes of any player (and most tennis fans have struck a ball or two) says in no uncertain terms that professional men’s tennis is the acme of athletic attainment, whereas the women’s equivalent is – not to cut too fine a point – rubbish.

Not as far as Miss Rudd is concerned. “It does not matter that the women play the best of three sets and yet earn the same amount of prize money,” she writes.

Of course, it doesn’t, dear. Nothing does, when ideology speaks. However, before people untainted by ideological afflatus pass a view on any subject, they look at the facts.

Let’s say they believe as firmly as I do in the principle of equal pay for equal work. Then they notice that women tend to be paid somewhat less than men in the same positions. Is that unjust?

No, says Thomas Sowell. That great American economist and sociologist asked himself that question back in the 70s and then proceeded to analyse piles of relevant data. He came to the conclusion that even then, in the early stages of feminist hysteria, all other things being equal, women, if anything, got paid slightly more for the same jobs.

Yet, because of that italicised phrase, they ended up getting paid slightly less. Things that weren’t equal included years of uninterrupted experience, readiness to work long hours and on weekends, time taken off to look after children and so on.

Sowell proved, figures in hand, that feminists’ claims of discrimination were false and based on an ideology, not facts. Such findings have earned Prof. Sowell the soubriquet of ‘controversial’ and, if he were still active today, would get him ostracised, cancelled and possibly prosecuted.

His opponents tried to argue, wrongly, that a woman having the same job title as a man must always be presumed to be doing equal work. But the campaign for women’s equal prize money at tennis tournaments eschewed even such arguments.

Its champions, such as Miss Rudd, happily admit that what they want isn’t equal pay for equal work, but equal pay, full stop. “It doesn’t matter” that women spend half the time on court during their matches. Hence it doesn’t matter that their hourly pay is twice as high. The only thing that matters is the shrill ideology.

However, I wouldn’t quibble about that iniquity if the entertainment level of women’s tennis were indeed as high as Miss Rudd claims. But anyone who has ever swung a racquet knows it isn’t. In fact, comparatively speaking, women’s tennis is pathetic.

The only difference Miss Rudd acknowledges but says “it doesn’t matter” is that women’s “serves are not usually as fast”. That’s not the point.

Since physiological differences between men and women haven’t yet been declared null and void, we assume that men are, on average, bigger, stronger and speedier. Thus they hit the ball harder and get to it faster than women do.

Yet, by itself, this takes nothing away from the attractiveness of the women’s game. It’s even possible to suggest that slower serves can lead to longer and more entertaining rallies. But they don’t, not by the long chalk of the Centre Court’s lines.

“One reason the women have been superior this year is that the upsets have not been about players off form but about players reaching exceptionally high levels,” writes Miss Rudd.

That’s arrant nonsense. Most points in the women’s game end on stupid unforced errors, with the ladies unable to keep the ball in play with any consistency. If Miss Rudd enjoys watching players dump routine shots into the bottom of the net or ten feet out, that makes one of us.

I am writing a few hours before the men’s final, but the day after the women’s. So I’ve compared the stats from one of the men’s semis with those of the women’s final.

Carlos Alcaraz beat Daniil Medvedev in three sets. The two players had 36 unforced errors between them, 19 of them committed by the loser. In yesterday’s women’s final, the loser, Ons Jabeur, managed 50 (fifty!) in just two sets all by herself.

That’s two-and-a-half sets’ worth of unforced errors alone – from a top-ten player seeded sixth. And the nature of her unforced errors was different from Medvedev’s. He’d usually miss a shot trying to hit a hard shot close to the lines. By contrast, Jabeur simply couldn’t hit two basic rallying shots in a row.

Even more knowledgeable people than Miss Rudd ascribed that abject performance to nerves. If the implication is that women are more susceptible to that problem than men are, then let me look up the number of the Equalities Commission. As a concerned citizen, I must report those misogynists.

Yes, nerves were a part of it. But the much greater part was Miss Jabeur’s poor technique. Here I have to wax technical, and those who have no interest in tennis should skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Like the men, most of the women can hit hard and they can hit with topspin. But, like me and other club hacks, they can’t hit hard with topspin. Topspin’s trajectory lets the ball clear the net at a height of three or four feet (sometimes even higher), then dive into the court like a kingfisher going after its prey.

That gives the player a higher margin for error than a flat shot would – one such clearing the net at the same height would hit the back fence, not the baseline. Interestingly, the harder a topspin shot, the more spin it puts on the ball, and the more reliable it is.

Since most women pros hit the ball much flatter than the men, they commit many more unforced errors. That makes most of their matches dull to watch, if obviously not for Miss Rudd, who must draw extra inspiration from her ideological commitment.

However, there is no physiological reason for women to be unable to hit the ball with the same technique as the men, if with slightly less power. A professional player has his basic strokes so grooved that he can repeat them time and time again under any amount of pressure.

If women can’t do that, this means their strokes aren’t as grooved (nor as varied, by the way). That in turn means they don’t spend as much time on the practice courts, honing their craft. Add to this the three-set format of their matches, and you’ll see that, while the pay is equal, the work isn’t.

And that’s not all. Not a single player in the men’s draw looks grossly unfit. But many women do, although Jelena Ostapenko, whose photo I chose, is an extreme case. Again, making allowances for the physiologically higher fat content in a woman’s body, it’s still clear that many ladies shirk work not only on the practice courts but also in the gym.

Hence their getting equal prize money is a case of glaring injustice – and a triumph of ideology over facts. Miss Rudd’s ignorant comments fall into the same category.