Targets at Wimbledon: Women Who Grunt
Months after a highly ranked tennis player was forbidden from playing in Dubai because she is an Israeli Jew, women’s tennis is back in the news. This time, the debate isn’t about nations, but instead, the noises women make on the court, and why they are irksome.
Michelle Larcher de Brito, 16. a fierce competitor from Portugal, has inadvertently become a target in this controversy because of the high-pitched screech she makes each time she volleys. Many women tennis greats from Monica Seles to Maria Sharapova have stamped their game by making sounds (confusingly dubbed “grunts” in tennis lingo) when they hit. The BBC breaks it into decibels.
Certainly, every sport has its noises. NPR’s Frank Deford parsed the sounds of sports recently, a task that elicited imitation grunts from Deford himself. He asks “What’s the matter with a spot of noise in tennis?” Exactly.
Many male and female tennis players grunt when they serve. Why is it only bothersome and receiving of media attention when women do it? Are they expected to kick-ass on the court in “ladylike” silence?
One hightly visible, non-grunting woman seems to be going after all women who grunt. Tennis great, Chris Everet, told ESPN: “It is distracting when you are hearing this and I think the grunts are getting louder and more shrill now with the current players.”
We’ll see who gets the last grunt at the Wimbledon finals this weekend.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
