Recent controversies over rules enforcement have some crying Foul!
Serena Williams, almost certainly the best woman tennis player of all time, had another meltdown yesterday. It may have cost her a record-setting 24th Grand Slam title.
ESPN News Services describes it this way:
Serena Williams was penalized a game for calling the chair umpire a thief during an extended argument as the US Open women’s final descended into chaos, with fans booing and play delayed before Naomi Osaka wrapped up a 6-2,6-4 victory for her first Grand Slam title.
The biggest issue for Williams on the scoreboard Saturday was that she was outplayed by a younger version of herself in Osaka, a 20-year-old who is the first player from Japan to win a major singles tennis title and idolizes the 36-year-old American.
During the trophy ceremony in Arthur Ashe Stadium, thousands of fans jeered repeatedly, and both Osaka, the champion, and Williams, the runner-up in her bid for a record-tying 24th Grand Slam trophy, cried.
Williams put an arm around Osaka’s shoulder and told the crowd: “I know you guys were here rooting, and I was rooting, too, but let’s make this the best moment we can.… We’re going to get through this, and let’s be positive. So congratulations, Naomi. No more booing.”
[…]
This was Williams’ third high-profile conflict with an official at Flushing Meadows, following her tirade after a foot fault in the 2009 semifinals against Kim Clijsters and a dispute over a hindrance call in the 2011 final against Sam Stosur.
What the 2018 final will forever be remembered for is the way Williams clashed with chair umpire Carlos Ramos, demanding an apology after he initially issued a warning in the second set’s second game for a code violation for receiving coaching, which is not allowed during Grand Slam matches.
The WTA released a statement after the match, urging celebration of both players while saying, “There are matters that need to be looked into.”
The US Open later issued a statement saying that Ramos’ decision was “final and not reviewable by the Tournament Referee or the Grand Slam Supervisor who were called to the court at that time.”
Williams objected right away, saying she would “rather lose” than cheat. After the match, in an interview with ESPN, Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, acknowledged that he had tried to signal Williams but said he didn’t think she had seen him. He added that he thinks every player gets coaching during matches.
“Well, I mean, I’m honest, I was coaching. I mean, I don’t think she looked at me, so that’s why she didn’t even think I was. I was like 100 percent of the coaches on 100 percent of the matches, so we have to stop this hypocrite thing,” Mouratoglou said. “Sascha [Bajin, Osaka’s coach,] was coaching every point, too. This chair umpire was the chair umpire of most of the finals of Rafa [Nadal], and Toni’s coaching every single point, and they never gave a warning. I don’t really get it. It’s strange.”
Mouratoglou added that he had never been called for a coaching violation: “Not once in my life, and you can check the records, you’ll see.”
Briefly, Williams appeared to be working her way back into the match, breaking Osaka for the only time to go up 3-1 in the second set. But Williams played a poor game right after that to get broken immediately, and she smashed her racket on the court, destroying it. That drew a second code violation, automatically costing Williams a point. When she realized that the next game had started with Osaka ahead 15-love, Williams told Ramos he should have retracted the initial warning for coaching.
“I have never cheated in my life!” Williams said. “You owe me an apology.”She resumed arguing with Ramos later, saying, “You stole a point from me. You’re a thief, too.”
He responded by issuing a third code violation, which results in a lost game. That made it 5-3 for Osaka.
Ramos called both players over to explain his ruling, and Williams began laughing, saying: “Are you kidding me?” She asked to speak to tournament referee Brian Earley, who walked onto the court along with a Grand Slam supervisor. Williams told them the whole episode “is not fair” and said, “This has happened to me too many times.”
“To lose a game for saying that is not fair,” Williams said. “There’s a lot of men out here that have said a lot of things, and because they are men, that doesn’t happen.”
Soon thereafter, the match was over.
On its face, there’s no problem here. Williams was receiving coaching, in violation of the rules, and was penalized the exact amount specified by the rules. Williams subsequently committed an equipment abuse, in violation of the rules, and was penalized the exact amount specified by the rules. Williams then immediately verbally abused the umpire, questioning his integrity, in violation of the rules, and was penalized the exact amount specified by the rules. She was frustrated that she was being outplayed by a younger, fitter opponent. She was frustrated by the call. She, not by any means for the first time, lost control of her emotions in a critical match. And it cost her.
But Williams thinks something else is going on. That she’s being held to different standards than male players of her stature. And she may be right.
Veteran sportswriter Sally Jenkins thinks so:
Chair umpire Carlos Ramos managed to rob not one but two players in the women’s U. S. Open final. Nobody has ever seen anything like it: An umpire so wrecked a big occasion that both players, Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams alike, wound up distraught with tears streaming down their faces during the trophy presentation and an incensed crowd screamed boos at the court. Ramos took what began as a minor infraction and turned it into one of the nastiest and most emotional controversies in the history of tennis, all because he couldn’t take a woman speaking sharply to him.
Williams abused her racket, but Ramos did something far uglier: He abused his authority. Champions get heated — it’s their nature to burn. All good umpires in every sport understand that the heart of their job is to help temper the moment, to turn the dial down, not up, and to be quiet stewards of the event rather than to let their own temper play a role in determining the outcome. Instead, Ramos made himself the chief player in the women’s final. He marred Osaka’s first Grand Slam title and one of Williams’s last bids for all-time greatness. Over what? A tone of voice. Male players have sworn and cursed at the top of their lungs, hurled and blasted their equipment into shards, and never been penalized as Williams was in the second set of the U. S. Open final.
The role of officials varies from sport to sport. There’s arguably none where they play a bigger role than in tennis, where they rule on every single point.
In football and basketball, the two sports to which I pay by far the most attention, there is a tradition of “swallowing the whistle” in key moments, especially in the most meaningful games. But that tradition is only sporadically adhered to and there are plenty of instances fans can point to where bad calls by officials decided playoff games, even championship games.
In baseball, home plate umpires notoriously toss not only players but managers who dare question their authority. The tradition of de-escalation that Jenkins refers to simply doesn’t exist in America’s erstwhile pastime.
I haven’t been an avid tennis fan in a long time, so have caught only bits and pieces of games and a lot of highlights from the last two decades or so of the game. One can’t imagine a Roger Federer acting the way Williams does all too often. But there have been top male players, including John McEnroe, the favorite of my youth, who routinely berated officials when frustrated. And I don’t recall their being penalized in a similar fashion. (McEnroe was repeatedly fined and got to the point where he risked being disinvited from future Wimbledon tournaments. But I don’t recall his ever being penalized a game.)
“I just feel like the fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions and that want to express themselves and wants to be a strong woman,” she said afterward.
I’m not sympathetic to that argument. Williams is strong in pretty much every sense of the word. But it’s not “strong” to melt down in stressful situations.
It was pure pettiness from Ramos that started the ugly cascade in the first place, when he issued a warning over “coaching,” as if a signal from Patrick Mouratoglou in the grandstand has ever been the difference in a Serena Williams match. It was a technicality that could be called on any player in any match on any occasion and ludicrous in view of the power-on-power match that was taking place on the court between Williams and the 20-year-old Osaka. It was one more added stressor for Williams, still trying to come back from her maternity leave and fighting to regain her fitness and resume her pursuit of Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slam singles titles. “I don’t cheat,” she told Ramos hotly.
While I’m not particularly sympathetic to “everyone breaks the rule” argument, the implicit corollary—that the rule is only enforced against women, against Williams in particular, or out of vindictiveness is a legitimate complaint. That strikes me as an empirical question subject to falsification. Given that he was in the chair for the finals of a Grand Slam, though, one presumes Ramos is a highly-respected umpire. Indeed, as the previously-cited ESPN News story reports, “Ramos chaired the women’s singles finals at the French Open in 2005 and at Wimbledon in 2018. He has chaired seven men’s singles finals across all four Grand Slams and the men’s singles final at the 2012 London Olympics.” That’s a remarkable resume. He deserves to have the presumption of integrity absent demonstration otherwise.
When Williams, still seething, busted her racket over losing a crucial game, Ramos docked her a point. Breaking equipment is a violation, and because Ramos already had hit her with the coaching violation, it was a second offense and so ratcheted up the penalty.
Correct. Again, I mostly blame Williams. I don’t see how Ramos turns a blind eye to something that egregious happening in front of him.
The controversy should have ended there. At that moment, it was up to Ramos to de-escalate the situation, to stop inserting himself into the match and to let things play out on the court.
