“This brand new trend of systematically taking your opponent in your arms once you have beaten him in order to look like a nice guy is very annoying to me,” wrote Serena Williams’s tennis coach on Twitter. #authenticity. #nomorefakeness. If you, too, find Patrick Mouratoglou’s verbose, foot-stampy turn of phrase obscurely endearing, you may be willing to indulge the idea that tennis players’ post-match displays of affection can also be adjudicated. By him.
Mouratoglou went on to clarify that he was not attacking anyone in particular. “Sometimes it makes sense to do it,” he said, referencing Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka, who, friends for many years, embraced fondly at the end of their quarter-final stand-off at the French Open on Tuesday, “but it starts to be systematic”.
Mouratoglou was making a generalised criticism of a sporting culture that has turned saccharine: over-rewarding love, over-criticising resentment. You can see why he might: Williams is policed very closely for her “mood”. I thought, at the start of her career in the 90s, people were projecting their feelings on to her, because otherwise there was so little to say: “She’s won. Oh look, she’s won again.” But in hindsight, and because it hasn’t got better over time, I realise that this is plain racism, every twitch of her eyebrow filtered through the prism of the “angry black woman” trope (is she predictably angry? Masking her anger? Too angry, or not angry enough?). People who may be using tennis and its on-court etiquette as a way to police women.
But setting aside the politics of passion, maybe it is time to bring a bit of John McEnroe’s authenticity back to the game. “I can’t advocate people not liking each other. But … I’d prefer it,” he said in 2015. “It was fun when guys were trash-talking each other and yelling at each other.”
Though McEnroe did often seem like a bit of a baby, there is value to showing the world your true face. It is genuinely moving to watch one person hug another when there is love to it, especially with and, even better, a backstory (witness the Champions’ League final). But a loveless hug that you suspect to be for brand-building purposes is horribly off-putting. Then you feel bad for thinking that – who are you to stand in the way of a new generation, who seem to be constantly burying each other in bear hugs, as if recently rescued from the ocean? – so you sourly give it the benefit of the doubt. I agree with Mouratoglou: we need to be much more exacting about this. Anyone who wants to hug has to provide photographic evidence of friendship. And not from Instagram.
