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Photo by Darron Cummings/AP
Last night, good spirits were returned to the air with Kim Clijsters (and her adorable pointing baby in tow) netting a triumphant win to earn her second Open Title. Clijsters became the first wildcard entry to win the tournament and the first mother to take a major since 1980. But after the match, announcer Mary Carillo was back on Serena, saying, "I think she should be suspended. I can't believe they are letting her play the doubles after that. What does it say about our sport if all you do is hand out a fine?...What more tape is there to see? We've all seen the clip 4,000 times."
After Saturday night's post-match press conference from Williams that left many scoffing at her unapologetic flippancy, yesterday Williams was only seen at the MTV VMAs, where she joked again about the "unfair" call. Though he rarely shies away from stirring up the media, her father Richard Williams told reporters he had nothing to say to them yesterday. Serena did issue a statement about the incidents saying, “Last night, everyone could truly see the passion I have for my job. Now that I have had time to gain my composure, I can see that while I don’t agree with the unfair line call, in the heat of battle I let my passion and emotion get the better of me, and as a result handled the situation poorly."
As for the line judge who made the controversial call and is now famous for her scamper away from a threatening Williams over to the umpire's chair, her identity remains a mystery. (USTA protocol states that names of judges not be given out.) A source who was with the line judge after the match told the News, "The poor woman was so upset that she looked like she was going to faint."
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Did Kim Clijsters have a baby? I think I heard something about Kim Clijsters having a baby? Really? She had a baby? Tell me again: did Kim Clijsters have a baby?
Does Kim Clijsters have a clijtoris?
When John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors used to flip out, people laughed. When a black girl does it, everyone gets upset. Justsayin...
I think Connors and Mac injected more humor, and less physcial threats laced with obscenities, into their tirades.
I wonder if Serena would have said the same thing to a male line judge.
Sorry, dropping F-Bombs are culturally (or racially) conditioned values.
Sure, it'd be a juicy race-baiting story, wouldn't it, had the lines-woman been white.
Nope, 'twas Asian-Sino. So -- want to open that can of worms?
Or maybe watch Long Duc's long lost sister - Serena.
This has nothing to do with race.
I'm sorry but they showed a lot of McEnroe and Connors yesterday and their outbursts and I remember watching them growing up and they NEVER threatened a line judge like that. Insults are one thing but threatening to shove a ball down somebody's throat while waving a racket at them is a whole different thing. It does not matter what color the person is, the physical threat is there and she should be suspended from the rest of the open and a much larger fine should be given out. The fact that her excuse was "her passion for the game" makes it even worse.
A lot of people love Serena and tennis has evolved to a better place because of her and Venus. I know many of her supporters that are sickened by her behavior. She needs to realize how unacceptable her behavior was.
if(when) a little girl waves a yard stick at a teacher and yells that she will shove that fucking apple down her throat, then we've got a real role model.
Welcome to the world of ethno-apologists where everything is relative when/if a black person is involved. So McEnroe had tantrums and Connors acted like a punk. A few shout-filled shitfits = threatening to shove a ball down a line judge's throat and kill her while shaking your racket in her face from less than six feet away. Yep, TOTALLY the same. TOTALLY the same thing.
She didn't drive drunk and kill someone. She wasn't involved in a dog fighting ring. She didn't shoot anyone at a nightclub. She yelled at someone over a close call. Tennis is such a fucking bore...
Yeah, I agree.
And look, she lost the US Open Semi-Finals partly because of this. I think she's been punished enough.
She was going to lose anyway. She was down 15-30 prior to the foot fault--on her way to being broken--but Serena could've won that game and she still was going to lose as long as Clijsters held serve.
And the logic that the OC uses is asinine.
so officially speaking, did some juicy balls get shoved down anyone's throat? that is the real story here.
She was halfway through "shoving those balls" when her serve got broken.
What is it with tennis? The only other sport where you'll routinely see remotely similar behavior is in baseball, and the arguments with umpires are more the upholding of an honorable tradition than real displays of anger.
John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors never raised their racquet and threatened a ref or a line judge. Get your facts straight. Also since when do 2 wrongs make a right?
Sorry, she threatened a judge - its in the rule book - throw her ass out - she is an national embarrassment. no wonder everyone else in the world think we're a-holes. i mean "passion for my job?" please.... we all have passion, if we did that in our every day work, we'd be fired and so should she. She is a champion for crying out loud... this is okay for a champion to act? i dont think so. idiot.
Way to race bait without following the sport! Connors famous '91 US Open rant didn't include any physical threats. He bloviated about the guy being a bad chair ump and called his out call on an overhand smash...wait for it: Bullcrap.
Whereas Serena had no filter and was much more vulgar and threatening.
In baseball you call an ump's call garbage, you probably don't get thrown out unless it continues. Also in baseball, you call an ump's call garbage and threaten to shove the baseball down his throat, you're getting thrown out. In football, you whine about a missed PI call and nothing happens. In football, you say you're going to shove the football up the ref's ass, you're getting a game misconduct.
Face it, she crossed the line when she threatened her physically.
Again, way to race bait!
Directed toward longacre.
I'm not saying she shouldn't have been penalized in the match and fined. But people saying she should be suspended are just over the top.
It was a pretty egregious instance of unsportsmanlike conduct, and she was punished accordingly. It's fair.
we know what the tennis purists say about this,
any comment from McEnroe? he made a living off those tantrums, it should be his trademark. (enough to get the tantrums into commercials)
McEnroe was the color commentator. His excuse for Serena was that the foot fault should never have been called regardless of if there was a fault or not. His opinion was that at that stage in the match, you simply don't call foot faults (ridiculous, imo).
They didn't have much to say about the verbal abuse. They had no way of excusing/defending it, and it was pretty obvious, imo, that they did not want to speak badly about one of the stars of the sport.
I've done my share of referee abuse, and there's a line. You can call the ref blind, an idiot, a jerk, a drunken jackass born from an incestuous evening between a shaved monkey and the goddess of stupid...whatever. Those will get you thrown out, but they're acceptable "passion."
But you never make a physical threat.
Sports are just sports -- we may become passionate about them, but at the end of the day we shake hands and go home to our families. We don't try to harm someone, and we don't threaten to do so. When you cross that line of threatening someone's real life because of something you didn't like on the field...that's just unacceptable.
Besides, what can the line umpire possibly do after that? Is she intimidated into not making a call? Or does she make a call she wouldn't otherwise have made, so as to show that she's not intimidated? A threat damages the integrity of the game in a way that even questioning the referee's parentage does not. It's not acceptable "passion."
I thought the same way. You watch McEnroe go ballistic and it's along the lines of, "What are you, blind??? A goddamn three-year old could do the job better than you! I was nowhere near the line!" Making it personal between player and ref is definitely different from disputing the call. And I notice Serena still refuses to apologize to the referee. To everybody else, including her fans, but not the ref.
Mary Carillo is 100% correct. Why is she still playing?
And again, people are misunderstanding the penalty. She was not disqualified or ejected from the match. She was only docked ONE POINT for her SECOND offense (she broke a racket earlier in the match) and unluckily for her, it was match point.
She was going to lose that match either way, she just figured out the least classy way to go about it.
So every time this beastly woman is down a few points she's going to threaten someone's life?
Yes, lets keep her playing, logically that's the responsible way!
"Clijsters netting a triumphant win"
Is there any other kind?
Ha. Go Colonel Jessup!
"The poor woman was so upset that she looked like she was going to faint."
Again, I feel really bad for this lady. And let's not forget the tournament president - what's his name, the tall dude who came out and made the umpire's call official. When Mary Jo Fernandez was interviewing him immediately after, the guy looked like he was about to cry. A grown man, shaken to the core by this insane situation. That she doesn't get suspended, like any other pro athlete who engages in this kind of behavior, is kind of ludicrous. A $10,000 fine means nothing to a bazillionaire.
Tomorrow, I'm gonna go out to work, and my passion for the MTA will lead me to smack a couple of passengers for violating my personal space, I hope people will understand.