Women’s Tennis: The Good, The Bad, and the Rained Out

Praise for Jabeur, and a litany of jokes about the odder and less successful tournaments. Plus Boris Johnson jokes and Donald Trump jokes.

Congrats to Ons Jabeur for winning Birmingham

Ons Jabeur is a wonderful player on the women’s tennis tour. She has many fans because of her fantastic shotmaking ability and kindly nature. She’s an underdog you always want to see succeed. Still, rooting for Ons has been a little like rooting for the old Mets when they were the losingest team in baseball. She’s always shown tremendous talent, but hasn’t won as many matches as her talent would suggest.

That all changed last Sunday, June 20th, when she won her first WTA title at Birmingham. She beat Daria Kasatkina in straight sets to become the first Arab woman, Tunisian, and North African to win a WTA title.

Ons Jabeur is all smiles after winning Birmingham.

Vincent Van Gogh, inexplicably present in the stands, proudly displays a Tunisian flag

At times, one might get the impression that the rank and file of women’s tennis is dominated by tall, skinny, blonde East Europeans. Each of them is an individual to be sure, and they’ve prospered due to talent and hard work. Still, it’s great to see a stereotype-buster like Ons Jabeur winning a tournament for a change. She’s more of a quirky, offbeat player — which is just what fans love about her. Her body type is similar to Spanish tennis champ Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario — a star in the 1990s.

Jabeur’s legendary drop shot is unreturnable when it’s working well; but on a bad day it becomes her go-to shot, and seeing too much of it her opponents may start teeing off on it. At Birmingham, she was especially match tough: A rainout last Friday meant that on Saturday she played both her quarterfinal and semifinal singles matches, plus a doubles semi to boot. Rather than being all whacked, she was in good form on Sunday. She needed to be to beat Daria Kasatkina, who’s also a fine player. Kasatkina showed great sportsmanship, bounding around the net to give Jabeur a big hug after match point.

Jabeur’s win at Birmingham is a shot in the arm for her career, and for fans who love her but were beginning to lose the faith. With Wimbledon just around the corner, we can only hope her magic carpet ride continues! (minus the tacks).

Lip contact

Jabeur doesn’t have much experience kissing the winner’s trophy (as all players are required to do under penalty of death). She looks like she’s kissing a halibut, trying to avoid actual lip contact.

She could learn a lot from Boris Johnson, who’ll passionately snog anything — animal, vegetable, or mineral:

Boris Johnson practices his snogging technique on an unsuspecting member of the ichthys species. The British Prime Minister later claimed mistletoe was present — but honestly, where’s the evidence?

Anyway, it didn’t hurt Jabeur that some of the big sluggers like Sabalenka and Azarenka were off competing in the You Bet Your Life tournament in Berlin…

Where tennis players are sent when they are bad

Speaking of German tennis tournaments (file this under “What were they thinking?”), you won’t believe me if I tell you there’a new one called the Bad Homburg Open, where the losers are forced to eat bugs, and the winners are awarded trophies in the shape of Adolph Hitler.

Having worked for a French company, I know people can have a good textbook understanding of English, but still be daunted by the idioms. (No Philippe, don’t tell Canadians to ‘Take off!’ in the latest sales brochure. It’s too easily interpreted as an insult, like Casse-toi!)

In American English, a Homburg is a hat, and a ‘bad Homburg’ would be an ill-fitting hat. So the Bad Homburg Open conjures up comic images of people competing to see who can wear the most ill-fitting hat — with the starry-eyed winner dreamily exclaiming: “Mine was the not-grandest of all!” I suppose a hat party is better than a necktie party. A man’s head must exceed his neck, or what’s an idiom for?

#1 tip for non-native speakers of English: If invited to a necktie party, politely decline.

Competition at the Bad Homburg Open is expected to be fierce among both seeded and unseeded players, thanks to the tremendous depth which has emerged in the field of ridiculous headgear. Though not competing in the Open’s maiden voyage, Boris Johnson is regarded as its patron saint, having personally lived by the maxim: “If the hat doesn’t fit, wear it!”

Boris Johnson: wearer of many hats, master of none

August von Mackensen, #1 seed at this year’s inaugural edition of the Bad Homburg Open. He is actually wearing a Totenkopf, which literally means ‘big-headed poncy German.’

Big-headed Donald Trump struggles to fit into one of his own absurd MAGA hats

Grand occasions like insurrections require grand choices in headgear. QAnon icon Jake Angeli (right) models the Davy Crockett I-just-killed-a-raccoon look — the final word in crappage chapeaux for those crashing the U.S. Capitol. “I am woman, hear me roar!”

Princessin Victoria Luise, #2 seed at this year’s Bad Homburg Open. Her qualifications include dance, intermediary stage fighting, and some tumbling. She may compete with or without boobingtons.

Welcome to the Hat Party! Official mascot Hazel beams with Teutonic cheer, or chemical equivalent. Those pupils are the size of robin’s eggs!

This is your brain on autocomplete

I’m ashamed to admit my brain works much the same as Google’s. So when I see the first seven letters BAD HOMB, I do just what Google does and form the phrase BAD HOMBRE, a term of derogation popularized in American fascism by the Trumpmeister himself. While a disaster as president, Trump remains the angry right’s #1 bad hombre, and reigning King of Cultural Insensitivity. Remarking on his use of the phrase in a 2016 debate with Hilary Clinton, Carolina Moreno wrote:

Politics aside, the language Trump uses is just as important as what he is, or rather isn’t, saying. Sure he’s repeatedly spoken about immigrants as if they were a biblical plague of sombrero-wearing, mustachioed criminals yelling “arriba! arriba!” as they run across the border with taco bowls filled with drugs. But on Wednesday night he turned to Spanish to make his point.

Amazingly, Trump still thinks he’s president, suggesting that this lower-than-the-lowest of rascals has problem-solving skills far inferior to a different rascal touted by the Beeb:

Trump! Admit you’re no longer president! Come on, rascal, you can do it! I’ll even reward you with a slab of broccoli shaped like Stormy Daniels.

At the real Bad Homburg Open (a WTA 250 event), local favourite Laura Siegemund, ranked #55 in the world, survived a scare from Riya Bhatia — a player from India ranked #362.

Indian tennis player Riya Bhatia, best known on the ITF circuit

Bhatia took the first set 6-2 and pushed Siegemund to a 2nd set tiebreak, but lost it. The 3rd set was all Siegemund, who denied Bhatiya her first win at the WTA level. (She’s won some ITF events.) Oddly, during the changeover between sets 1-2, event organizers played an extended dance remix of the 1981 Rick James song “Super Freak.” Forty years later, the song’s lyrics seem rather sexist, and out-of-whack with the image of women which the WTA (founded by Billie Jean King) has tried to promote. What can one say? Perhaps the Bad Homburg Trophy is “the kind you don’t bring home to mother.” Anyway, the weather gods retaliated the next day (Tuesday) with a torrential downpour, and again on Thursday.

Bad weather at the Bad Homburg Open

The Serbia Ladies Open

Another new tourney which didn’t quite make the intended ‘splash’ was the Serbia Ladies Open. It didn’t attract big name players, the stands were empty due to COVID-19, and the weather was atrocious. By week’s end, people were making jokes like:

Question: What’s the difference between the Serbia Ladies Open and the Titanic?

Answer: The Titanic had a band.

Still, those televising the event managed to put together an impromptu version of Rainout Theater — an old baseball tradition which entails showing reruns of F-Troop, The Odd Couple, or Hogan’s Heroes. Since Serbians were unlikely to be wowed by American sitcoms from the 60s and 70s, event organizers wisely took a different tack:

That’s all for now from the (hastily dug) trenches of women’s tennis! — except I did venture this logo redesign:

The Bad Hombre Open, a  tennis tournament sponsored by Donald Trump, presumably with other people’s money

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Sidebar: A Cure for Ostapenko?

Ostapenko is a leading cause of death in males aged 50 and older. The early signs are skin rash and irritability. In the later stages, ostapenko can lead to tightening of the vocal cords, so that those afflicted can only emit a hoarse, rasping cry like that of a crow.

Yet there is hope! A new salve promises relief for ostapenko sufferers, though not an outright cure. Utilizing a derivative made from the sinews of Latvian camels, this remarkable blue ointment may be rubbed into the afflicted area, and is said to alleviate much of the discomfort of living with ostapenko.

Scientists believe a cure is within reach in our lifetime. But much research is still needed. So won’t you please give generously to the Find-A-Cure-For-Ostapenko Foundation? Someone you know may be itching for a new lease on life.

Michael Howard

The views expressed are my own, and do not represent any other person or organization.

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