Sports – well, professional sports – is the last remaining meritocracy. Even science is under siege by social authoritarians who want to hijack the field by forcing science through a prism of social justice issues, racial quotas and the framing of political beliefs such as the ‘biologization of politics’.
Luckily, we still have athletics. Few people care about the racial makeup of sports – yes, we have some who complain that baseball is only 15% black but those same people do not complain that the NBA is only 30% white. There are a whole lot of Hispanics in baseball so it isn’t like there are fewer minorities, but the NBA pays better than baseball. Kudos to black kids for figuring that out.
Still, it would be a worthwhile experiment to try and examine what would happen if the same subset of the political fringe that seeks to ban goldfish, cigarettes, Happy Meals, golf – you name it, they want to ban everything, except gay marriage and marijuana – made their way into sports. If only we had a sport no one watches anyway to use as a test case.
It seems we do. Womens’ tennis. Hey, I like womens’ tennis, saying no one watches them is not a knock. What liberal American man does not want to watch Elena Dementieva smite her foes on clay?
But the Womens Tennis Association apparently does not like womens’ tennis. The same mentality that has sought to repress individuality in womens’ chess is now going after women in tennis.
It seems the WTA wants to tackle “excessive grunting” among women. I guess it is not very ladylike for women to grunt when they are being the best in the world at something athletic. Maybe they should always have to smell pretty too. Progressives have basically become Victorian school marms about how ‘their’ ladies should act in public.
Their plan is right in line with what kooky progressives always want to do; penalize and mitigate to control behavior they happen not to like personally. “If junior players start getting docked points for excessive grunting, they won’t care what their role models do,” WTA tour spokesman Andrew Walker told Ken Belson of the New York Times.
That’s certainly true. Progressives always extol how raising taxes and outlawing behavior leads to fewer behaviors they happen not to like. But fans who care about their sports should resist it. Liberals should resist it. Conservatives likely would resist it, unless someone tells them gay people play tennis.
There is no benefit at all to anyone grunting loudly in tennis, unless you believe some ancient Chinese mumbo-jumbo about the Ch’i (we do it in TaeKwon Do too, it is bogus then as well), it is gamesmanship more than science. But if the WTA are claiming psychology has nothing to do with sports, they know as little about that as they do about athletes.