Posted by
Ed Lilly on Sunday, June 29, 2008 8:31:37 AM
Professional tennis has had a long, slow decline in popularity over the years, but a link caught my eye the other day in the tennis headlines. It said something about a U.S. tennis official calling women’s tennis players sexpots and bit¢hes. I didn’t save the link at the time, but I have found the story again, from the website This is London.
From the link, it appeared that perhaps a women’s tour official was caught making some really outrageous remarks. Turns out, it’s former men’s tour pro Justin Gimelstob, who is now an ATP (the men’s tour) director, who was shooting off his mouth.
The specifics of Gimelstob’s comments, made during a radio show interview in the U.S. before he departed to cover Wimbledon, are about what you might expect from a former professional athlete being outrageous in a radio interview when talking about female tennis players, and he has of course now apologized to pretty much all women past, present and future for his inartfully expressed comments. I even saw one link that mentioned Gimelstob apologized to Billie Jean King, which I guess somehow makes her the women’s tennis equivalent of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton as the go-to person for apologies when the relevant minority group is insulted.
But what I really found interesting out of this whole kerfuffle was that the Gimelstob story came out on This is London’s web site on Friday, June 27. As of this morning, June 29, even with the wave of stories about Gimelstob’s subsequent apologies (a search of Gimelstob and Kournikova, who was mentioned prominently in the article, gave me over 23,000 online hits, and it took me to about the 5th page of links to get back to the original story), the original story from This is London has ZERO comments on the web site.
How can this be? Granted tennis is not the most popular sport in the world, but the whole point of running this story was to shock and draw attention, right? So no comments at all in 2 days?! My guess is they got a lot of comments from men that they didn’t want posted, and they simply haven’t allowed any posts to go up.
UPDATE: I may have been incorrect in where I saw the original link/story. Further down the online search results, I found essentially the same piece via the Mail website, where there are now 34 comments. Most are taking Gimelstob to task, and a few are "supporting" him by saying he just spoke his mind and shouldn't cave into political correctness for exercising free speech. So perhaps the lack of comments at This is London is because they don't get much traffic? Don't know about that. I'm a bit surprised at only 34 comments at the Mail site.