Serena’s Latest Judgement Day: Thoughts From A Tennis Mom

Still nursing a hangover from Serena’s big upset, my family decided to try and shake it off with a friendly doubles match. As my husband, myself, and our two daughters approached the courts we were stopped in our tracks by a loud, hissing voice:

“Pick another role model, girls! Pick ANYONE but Serena Williams!”

The words were spat at my eleven and fourteen year old daughters with such contempt that I was taken aback. It took every ounce of control I could muster to remain unphased in my reply to the angry white lady: “I couldn’t disagree with you more.”

We headed to our court where I fumed for at least an hour.

I’m rarely on the court actually, only playing the game every now and then to show interest in my 11 year old’s dream of someday becoming a world famous tennis player. But I’ve spent countless hours watching lessons, shuttling her to tournaments across the state and the country, and sitting in front of televised matches while she schools me on the finer points of executing a swinging volley or an inside out backhand. She is obsessed, I am intoxicated by her passion, and so I am something I never imagined I would be: a Tennis Mom.

My husband and I have agreed that we will support her dreams, no matter how big. But as the years go by we’ve had to come to terms with obstacles we didn’t fully anticipate. Given the plethora of other female tennis players of color our daughter can choose to idolize, surely her race wouldn’t be a barrier to success in this sport, right? Wrong. The tennis world is simply a microcosm of the real world, a place where no one is immune to race-based biases and no person of color is free from their impact. For us to expect otherwise was foolish.

It would be unfair to assume that the average person knows the ins and outs of the tennis world the same way my family does, so I’m hoping tennis novices will bear with me while the following facts are established:

1. A tennis umpire’s job is not the same as a football or basketball referee. As stated by legend Billie Jean King in her recent Washington Post article, a tennis umpire’s job is to keep control of the match, at their own discretion — a discretion which they exercise with great latitude on a regular basis. For umpire Carlos Ramos to interfere in the finals match of the U.S. Open by choosing to interrupt the game and penalize a player for the quietly undisruptive behavior of her coach, far away in the stands, was to unnecessarily influence the match and to overstep the duties of an umpire.
2. Every coach of every professional tennis player gestures from the stands, and this fact is common knowledge amongst players and fans. Commentators after the match said so, and were clearly baffled by the fact that this particular incident was called out by the umpire.
3. According to the rules, three warnings cause a player to lose a game, which is what happened to Serena. Yet no one, including the commentators, could recall a time when this rule had been invoked, let alone during a match of this importance.

In light of these facts, perhaps amateur tennis fans can see with greater clarity why Serena was beyond pissed. Anyone watching the match who knows a lick about the sport was pissed, too.

Some of you can relate to this rage more than others. The podcast Therapy for Black Girls immediately posted an episode called, “What Was Your U.S. Open Moment?” to speak to black women across the nation nodding their heads and sharing stories of when they were unfairly targeted and then punished for reacting angrily to the offense.

My own rage at the injustice committed against Serena by umpire Carlos Ramos comes from a private place— a place buried deep inside of me where I store all of the rage I experience when either one of my daughters suffers from what critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw calls the double bind; that is, the uniquely oppressive combination of both racism and sexism.

You see, my tennis girl is a grunter. She likes to rip the ball at a pace that is often unreturnable even by an adult male player, and when she does, she grunts good and hard. It’s the sound of intensity, passion, and determination, and I find it to be the most beautiful sound on the planet. But alas, the umpires of her local and national matches rarely share my opinion. My husband and I cannot count the number of times a line judge has asked her to “take it down a notch” or “control herself” while the boys playing next to her slam down their rackets, scream at their opponents, and throw a distracting tantrum after every missed point. The double standard is sexist, to be sure, and most folks commenting on Serena’s match have already noted it. But there’s a particular brand of punishment for being an unapologetically vocal woman of color. If you are female, black, and dare to be loud, you can rest assured you’ll be penalized.

I could spend all day sharing examples and I could never prove that any of the incidents are race-based, but when both players are foot faulting like crazy, why is our daughter the only one getting the warning? On one particular occasion it was the second game of the first set, and her serve. In the first game, instead of penalizing the other player for her constant foot faulting, the line judge chose to wait until it was our daughter’s turn to serve, pulling her aside to have a talk with her about what the other player was doing, wagging her finger and warning our child in advance not to do that. After a nearly three minute lecture interrupting her serve, she was allowed to continue playing, stunned and deflated.

Again, I can’t prove these behaviors are race-based, but the trend is too frequent to be coincidental and my suspicion is supported by the constant background noise of overt racism in our culture. If you need concrete evidence, look no further than the spectators. For those who haven’t seen what folks say online about Serena, don’t bother. Just know that it echoes what I hear, first hand, from real parents, while watching my daughter’s matches. Because I am white and my daughter is black, folks don’t realize we go together. Commentary about my daughter from spectators who don’t know I’m her mom provide enough evidence that overt racism is alive and well in this sport, let alone implicit biases.

In yet another situation, our daughter took the allowed time out to use the bathroom, which happened to be located a quarter mile away. As she came sprinting back, just seconds over the allotted bathroom break time, the line judge chose not to give her a penalty, but instead to berate her at length in front of her opponent. By the time they were allowed to finally continue the game, she was holding back tears.

The tendency for line judges to disproportionately berate my daughter leads me to the primary issue non-tennis people may not fully understand about the sport, which may affect their judgements about the intentions of Serena’s umpire: Tennis is a head game. When laypeople watch players play and champions win, they chalk way too much up to skill without fully understanding the mental piece. Players understand this, coaches understand this, and umpires especially understand this. Knowing this, those of us who are intimately familiar with the game are certain Carols Ramos was way out of line and Serena’s reaction to his bullying was justified. Whether his biases are implicit or overt, I cannot say. But after choosing to penalize her for a signal from her coach she didn’t even see… while the other player’s coach was doing the exact same thing… in the finals of the U.S. Open… a match on which her life’s goal depends… there was no other direction it could go and he knew it. She was on fire, and a burning house doesn’t stop burning until it’s burned to the ground.

I heard a radio story about the incident yesterday, which featured a montage of callers expressing their opinions about Serena’s reaction. In many of the voices I heard the same bitter venom that spewed from the mouth of the white woman who tried to tell my girls they shouldn’t look up to Serena Williams. There was something strangely personal about it, and it made my skin crawl to be reminded, yet again, about the forces against which my daughters will have to resist as they grow up. These women will be their bosses, their co-workers, their graduate school advisors, their loan officers, and more.

Perhaps the tide is turning, but not fast enough. It’s not lost on me that Serena’s latest judgement day came on the heels of the new campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick as the face of Nike. One print ad quotes Kaepernick as saying, “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” My family had been discussing the ad campaign in the days leading up to the U.S. Open, having no idea just how relevant those words would be.

At the moment she chose to stand up for herself and call out injustice, Serena sacrificed winning the U.S. Open and getting one step closer to her life’s goal of having the most major titles of any player in history. She sacrificed it all for something she believed in: standing up for herself in the face of dominance, bullying, bias, and injustice.

That’s exactly the kind of role model I want for my daughters.