Lost in the World Cup was the news that Anna Kournikova might be back. When last we saw the Russian bombshell, she was 22 and a constant sufferer of back pain, which forced her to walk away from professional tennis in 2003.
Apparently, though, the pain is not as bad as it was and it also seems Kournikova is intrigued by the successful comeback mounted by Martina Hingis, her one-time doubles partner on the tour.
It definitely sparked my curiosity, Kournikova said of Hingis return.
Reduced fame probably got to Kournikova as well. The face that launched thousands of Web sites, Kournikova was the first tennis pin-up girl of the Internet age. Exceptionally photo and telegenic, she was the most photographed woman in tennis and one of the most recognizable athletes in the world. When she played at Wimbledon, she would be plastered on 1,500 billboards, 25 feet high, all around London.
She probably also misses all that money. Conservative estimates put Kournikova’s earnings at more than $10 million annually, and that was off the court. She made more money in a weekend hit-and-giggle exhibition than most of her colleagues garnered from playing a year’s worth of tournaments.
We’re not sure how much she missed her tennis; probably not too much because there was not much of it in the first place. In nine years of playing, Kournikova never won a singles title. In 1997 she reached the Wimbledon semi-final but that was all she would write. There would be a few doubles wins and a few finals but never an outright final win, and not one Grand Slam.Amazingly, it didn’t matter. Her looks eclipsed her tennis and that seemed fine by most people. She was fool’s gold.
But her wealth and popularity represented a disquieting trend. Aesthetics and charisma were winning out over sporting performances. This might be doing wonders for women’s tennis, cementing its status as the world’s most popular and financially successful women’s sport. But there must be something wrong when a player who never won a tournament was promoted more heavily than players who had. Selling sports based on glamour alters the very reason we watch sports: to see who will win or lose, not who loses but wins all the same.
Miss Good Looking should be where she belongs: on the catwalk, in “The Bold and The Beautiful and in our dreams. And in sports, too, just as long as marketability does not count for more than match results.
Looks are a prerequisite for many film roles but should be incidental to success in sport. Yet the tour wasn’t shy about giving Kournikova and other pretty faces attention disproportionate to their results on court.
As L. Jon Wertheim writes in Venus Envy: A Sensational Season inside the Women’s Tennis Tour, “We reward sizzle over steak . This not only runs counter to a meritocracy. It unfairly punishes older, less attractive players.
The tour need not apologize for having attractive players any more than Hollywood studios should apologize for having Nicole Kidman. But when its most visible player could not win a tournament, it could not but threaten the integrity of the product.
Many attractive women have played professional tennis. Gabriella Sabatini, Chris Evert, Carling Bassett, Gussie Moran and her lace kickers, and before her Suzanne Lenglen and her gossamer dress, the tennis poster girl of the roaring 20s. But they were also good, many times brilliant at what they did for a living. They combined looks and Grand Slam-winning talent. There was style, but there was substance as well.
Kournikova was always poetry in motion but nothing ever rhymed. Worse, it never made a difference.
