Tennis as a model of life

You may wonder what tennis has to do with life, specifically yours. After all, chances are you neither play the game nor watch it, not regularly at any rate.

So why should you waste your time reading about youngsters chasing fuzzy yellow balls around a patch of Wimbledon grass? Simple. Think of it as another exhibit in the indictment of modernity.

The charge is total – and totalitarian – primacy of ideology over everything else. One of the pieces of corroborative evidence is enforcement of equality where no parity exists.

Men, women, others are all supposed to be proportionately represented and equally paid – regardless of achievement, industry or competence. Justice, morality, even commercial common sense need not apply, and there I was, thinking modernity is obsessed about money. So it is, but not when it clashes with ideology.

Thus men and women are paid exactly the same prize money at the four Grand Slam events, of which Wimbledon takes pride of place. This year’s winners got just over £2 million each; the runners-up half that.

A labourer worthy of his hire and all that – justice, modern style, was done. However, comparing the two finals, men’s and women’s, even a casual watcher would have known that in this case, as in so many others, modern justice actually means injustice.

It even has nothing to do with the supposedly relevant principle of equal pay for equal work. For the work put in by the men and the women was as equal as chicken salad and chicken manure.

The most obvious thing first: the men’s final took four sets played over 3 hours 1 minute. Had it gone to five sets, it would probably have lasted more than four hours. The women’s final was a three-setter lasting 1 hour 47 minutes, which was about as long as it could have gone (women don’t play five-setters). Hence Novak Djokovic’s hourly wage was much lower than that of Yelena Rybakina, the women’s champion.

And if you compare the total time on court over the whole tournament, poor Novak got paid less than half of Rybakina’s pro rata earnings. Let’s hear it for gender equality.

Yet it’s not just about quantity but also quality. For the Djokovic-Kyrgios final was tennis at its most brilliant, with most points won by a cluster of good shots, not lost by silly errors. Facing one of the biggest hitters on the men’s tour, Djokovic committed only 17 unforced errors in four hard-fought sets.

By contrast, the Rybakina-Jabeur final was greatly inferior even to some club matches I’ve seen. And in terms of net play it was inferior to some club matches I’ve played.

The girls couldn’t hit two shots in a row, even when they weren’t going for winners. In earning her £2 million, Rybakina committed 33 unforced errors – that’s a set and a half just thrown away. Those few shots she did manage to get over the net and between the white lines carried more weight than Jabeur’s cream puffs, which is why she won. Watching that kind of tennis was painful.

Her opponent noticed that Rybakina’s mobility wasn’t that of a professional athlete. Hence Jabeur tried to hit one drop shot after another, but she wasn’t good at it. Any male player would have changed his strategy, but Jabeur – world number two! – had only one string to her bow, if that.

When she did push Rybakina into a corner, the latter was patently unable to retrieve her central position after hitting the ball. So she kept whacking Hail Mary shots, hit or miss, mostly miss.

All this shows that the women haven’t spent enough time either on the practice court or on the running track. They haven’t mastered the professional technique of hitting the ball with consistent power and placement, and neither are they physically up to scratch.

Someone like Djokovic demonstrably has put in the required time, which cuts his pro rata wage even more compared to Rybakina’s. Equality reigns supreme.

Some of the commentators were professional players who know infinitely more about the game than I do. They could compare Djokovic and Rybakina, or men’s and women’s tennis in general, stroke for stroke – and offer their instructive conclusions chapter and verse.

So did they? Of course not. The totalitarian ideology won’t let them. They were equally effusive about both finals, which was tantamount to cheating the audience of expert opinion. Yet the subject of prize money did come up, regularly.

However, not one commentator pointed out the glaring injustice of equal prize funds. Instead – are you ready for this? – they kept lamenting that, yes, the Grand Slam events do strike a blow for gender equality. But if you look at other tournaments, you’ll see that women’s prizes are merely 85 per cent of the men’s. Clearly, there’s some work to be done yet.

The work I’d like to see done is cutting women’s prize funds to no more than half of the men’s, or a third, if justice is really to be served. Be that as it may, tennis tournaments are organised by independent organisations under the aegis of the ATP or the WTA, which don’t answer to any governments either.

So how does the woke brigade of tennis propose to force those tournaments to increase women’s prize funds? The same way they pushed through gender equality at the Grand Slams: through rabid propaganda and unrestrained political pressure. It worked once, it’ll work again.

Speaking of Rybakina, she was only allowed to compete at Wimbledon because she is listed as a Kazakh, not Russian. Russian players were banned from this year’s Wimbledon because the organisers didn’t want to give Putin a chance to gloat should one of them win.

Now, Rybakina is a Russian girl, born and bred in Moscow where she has lived all her life, and where she is still living. I’m not even sure she has ever visited Kazakhstan. However, in the past 10 years that country’s government has started buying Russian athletes wholesale to boost its own international prestige.

No residence requirements exist. A Russian athlete can simply agree to represent Kazakhstan in return for generous financial support, which is what Rybakina did some six years ago.

I watched her match in France, and the commentators kept saying that she didn’t just represent Kazakhstan, but was d’origine Kazakh. Clearly, they had never seen any persons of Kazakh origin, who tend to be less blonde than Rybakina and somewhat shorter than her six feet.

One such person, the president of the Kazakhstan Tennis Association, was in attendance, and he celebrated Rybakina’s triumph like a winner of a prole TV game show. He wasn’t the only one.

The Russians celebrated even more wildly. Shamil Tarpishchev, Putin’s tennis coach, who happens to be under personal international sanctions for links with organised crime, bleated that “Yelena is ours.”

So she is, and the triumphant articles in the Russian press somehow omitted her links with Kazakhstan. Thus Wimbledon’s ploy didn’t work, but at least the intention was laudable.

I wonder how much of her £2 million Yelena will have to kick back to Tarpishchev and his jolly friends. Quite a lot, would be my guess, but I’m sure she’ll have enough left not to sweat on the practice court, learning how to hit the ball in consistently. Add to this her forthcoming modelling contracts, and Djokovich will seem like a pauper.