A different (and somewhat stupid) look at women versus men in an athletic field.
Article reprinted in its (mercifully brief) entirety because it's behind Times Select.
The libbers for lob equality once risked their wood Wilsons so prize purses for women would mean more than a nice clutch bag, so gender equity would include the right to a shared pot. Amid the estrogen revolution, the women’s Tour evolved ahead of society as Billie Jean King made feminism cool, as Martina Navratilova made muscle acceptable, as Chris Evert made an empire out of a playing career. They were Oprah before Oprah. They were tennis stars who, in their own ways, nurtured the Tour so well, with such a progressive spirit, it is the only women’s league where the money measures up to the fellas. But what happens to the Tour when financial freedom opens an escape hatch?
At age 23, Kim Clijsters doesn’t need tennis anymore. She doesn’t need waking up with an aching body after another night spent away from her fiancé, in a hotel room that looks exactly like the last. Ranked No. 5 on the WTA Tour, with $14.7 million in career earnings, plus millions more in endorsements, Clijsters chose to retire on Sunday, with an explanation straight off the menu of the “Happy Days” diner. "Right now, it is time for a new life," Clijsters wrote on her Web site. "Time for marrying. Children? Time for cooking and playing with the dogs." She would be a lousy bra burner.
But Clijsters’s decision to opt out of the playing tedium is not an aberration these days; it is a Tour trend. Some high-ranked players have retired — like Clijsters and Lindsay Davenport — while stars from Justine Henin to Amélie Mauresmo, from Martina Hingis to Venus Williams, have alternately disappeared during their careers in a game of "Where’s Waldo?" Injuries, players claim. Lame excuses, the suspicious say. But what women’s tennis may reveal is the same socially sanctioned element that ribbons through every Starbucks, where mommies with M.B.A.’s prefer to run play dates instead of boardroom meetings. In this circle, it’s O.K. to jump off the fast track for the mommy track or laugh track. Whatever makes a woman of means happy.
Money hasn’t fueled the competition in women’s tennis. It has served as a disincentive to play when the ladies reach a point where they have earned enough to buy contentment. "Money is important, but not the most important in my life," Clijsters wrote in her online diary. "Health and happiness are so much more key to life."
This is the right philosophy, isn’t it? And yet, one woman’s Zen is another loss for the Tour. Tournaments and majors played without longtime rivals or a consistency of stardom or familiar faces puts women’s tennis at risk of vanishing through irrelevance. Top players on Tour can afford to be ladies of leisure as they parachute in and out of the schedule to indulge in their cultural gender differences with male athletes.
Salary figures and contract numbers define many male pros. To them, wealth is a measure of their self-worth. This is why Roger Clemens needed to be the most ridiculously paid player in the game upon his ego-gratifying return. This is why LeBron James writes down "becoming a billionaire" on his career to-do list, why draft picks hold out, why free agents leave teams, why Tiger Woods has the same goal as James. Money as a reflection of manhood is not a hard and fast rule. There are exceptions. Bjorn Borg retired early after growing weary of the Tour grind and privacy intrusions. But disillusionment on the women’s Tour is a flu bug passing from one star to the next.
In tennis, 23 is the new 40. It’s midlife crisis time when players start to ponder the loneliness of the Tour, develop outside interests and realize they have been at the game since age 10, maybe 6. The guys start the game later and enter the scene with less attention. The women experience their first pimple, first love and first breakup, all before the public. The scrutiny is endless: Is Serena Williams’s caboose on the loose? Was Jennifer Capriati’s mood too dark? Did Hingis break Sergio García’s heart? Just what did the effervescent Clijsters once see in the boorish Lleyton Hewitt? The constant prying is enough to make a gal run for the exit.
"No more gossip or lies in the newspapers," Clijsters explained.
Mental burnout is nothing new to tennis (as in Andrea Jaeger at age 19) and careers have been cut short by injury before (as in Tracy Austin at 20). Clijsters cited herself as a victim of both. She longed for more time to plan her July wedding to Brian Lynch, an American-born basketball player in Europe. She pined for the days when she could slide on the court into a full split — a trademark of her Silly Putty elasticity — without her back locking up.
Tennis has a history of devouring its youth. But never have so many stars seemed so eager to fade out, whether into retirement or an extended leave. There is no glass ceiling on the women’s Tour — the revolutionists in pleated skirts made sure of it — but there is an open window. Who knew liberation could one day threaten the Tour?
It's kind of alarmingly facile, and almost (but not quite) entirely ignores some of the physical and social differences between men and women. Women mature earlier, so they can go on the pro tour and succeed at an earlier age; this also tends to make them have a lot more severe injuries a lot earlier than the men do. And men have always defined themselves in terms of their work; this is nothing new. It also means that a lot of professional male athletes hang on to their careers a lot longer than sanity and competitiveness say that they should -- hello, Jimmy Connors! And the plain fact is, if a woman wants to have children, it's easier at younger ages -- not every female athlete wants to do like Chris Evert did and wait until she's in her late 30s to start a family. And I suspect that these days, it would be much more difficult to do what Yvonne Goolagong did, and go away for a few years, have children, come back and win Wimbledon; it's a very different competitive landscape now than it was then. And there are very few people like Martina Navratilova, who managed to be competitive at some level in the Grand Slams -- whether singles or doubles -- until she was freakin' 50 years old, for heaven's sake! (And even so, she started when there were simply fewer tournaments around. She didn't punish her body in competition as badly as people who followed her have done in part because there were simply fewer opportunities to do so.)
A related issue is that many women's sports devour their youth. Women's gymnastics and women's figure skating are notoriously hostile to an adult woman's body; it's simply far easier to do the big tricks required before breasts and hips change the balance of the body, and that level of hard exercise retards physical development. It's also noteworthy that gymnasts and figure skaters tend to injure themselves very badly, very early. It's also notable that, if an injury is severe enough to force an athlete to take significant time off, you tend to get abrupt physical development that throws off their ability to perform at that level. (See also: Oksana Baiul, Sarah Hughes; both had major growth and development spurts after injuries, and neither were able to quite recapture their former skill.)
Seriously, how suspicious do you have to be to believe that people are lying about injuries that sometimes cost them a year and more of their competitive prime? To be sure, the cost to the ranking of being injured is somewhat less than it would be if you simply said, "Bored now. Taking a year off. See you later!" (Although I point out that if that option was viewed as really available, and widely used, it's likely that professionals of all stripes might hang around longer, because they could take the time to both really recover from those small nagging injuries, and because they could simply take the time to enjoy life for a while.)
The plain fact is, Bjorn Borg (later legal issues aside) and Pete Sampras look like they were relatively sane. They retired before they completely collapsed competitively, and while most everything on their bodies worked the way it was supposed to. Martina Navratilova looks ... kind of unbelievably lucky, frankly. She got to go out on her own terms (twice) before she was completely uncompetitive, and yet managed to have a shockingly long career. Jim Courier and Michael Chang hit the long slow slide at a surprisingly young age, thanks to injuries. And Tracy Austin, Andrea Jaeger, Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, and Kim Clijsters seem ...kind of pretty typical for people who started very young, worked very hard until their bodies started to have major problems, and then had to quit, at least for a while.
Posted by iain at May 10, 2007 12:17 PM
