Pitch Bitch

Pitch Bitch

While it’s hard to justify giving even more column centimetres to the great fuckwits of the world, it’s even harder to let recent events in women’s tennis go by without a few words.

It’s clear great sporting father Damir Dokic should not be given a voice in any media, for all of our sakes. But his antics always sells papers, and newspaper sellers are always happy to have him ranting about the size of his fish or moving his family back to the Balkans.

In December Damir brought his own brand of bullshit into the debate on lesbians in elite sport, allegedly offering to top himself if Jelena turned out to be gay. Half of the other top tennis players were lezzos, he told a Serbian paper, and he couldn’t bear it if Jelena was too. And instead of the usual scoffs accompanying his rants, people started saying well, he’s got a point.

People like former tennis great Margaret Court, who added her two cents from her Western Australian ministry. Court said that she understood Damir’s concerns, but well, perhaps suicide was going a bit far. Yes, Margaret seemed to have looked at her slide rule of sins and worked out committing suicide was worse then going to bed with a same-sex tennis rival. She agreed with Damir’s assessment -“ no doubt made by extensive research into the non-match-time lives of all of the professional tennis players in the world -“ that there was a lot of dykes playing the sport. In fact, Court told a Perth radio station that when she was on the circuit there was a fair bit of it around even in her day.

In fact, The Australian reported, by the end of Court’s tour there was a whole lot of it going around -“ apparently some of the straight ones were lured down the lesbian path by some older players.

Anyway, the Damir Dokic suicide bid ended up another example of how a gay sport story could really bring out some shitty reporting. Just as it did when Alison Annan came out and moved to the Netherlands and when Martina Hingis smiled and said Amelie Mauresmo beat her because her lesbianism made her half a man, Dokic’s words have fuelled a whole new flurry of homophobia and half-arsed theories.

Like the lesbian mafia on the pro-golf tour who apparently pressured straight women to become gay, as Daily Telegraph reporter Paul Kent suggested in his mid-December He’s not so mad article. Parents were afraid that such a mafia might get into tennis, Kent wrote.

Like all good scandals, the latest Dokic family drama died out in the end. The final word was had by true tennis great Martina Navratilova, who told Australian reporters it was a good thing she wasn’t a part of the Dokic family. She then added, as an afterthought: Maybe it’s too bad I’m not.

 

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