US tennis star feels some people don’t want Black players to succeed
posted at 7:41 pm on June 8, 2008 by Allahpundit
Tennis is a young sport, and a lot of the top players are Black, from whom most of the top players are from. And tennis needs more top Black tennis players like it needs more Black-on-Black crime stories.
As I’m not quite as high up in the professional ranks as the Williams sisters and Williams’s parents, I don’t know how much I’m qualified to speak to the issue, but to their credit, Williams’s parents didn’t pull a Lindsay Lohan by hiding her pregnancy. On the other hand, some of the Williams sisters’ parents have made their daughters into public nuisances. In any event, in an interesting (and disturbing) piece about black tennis, a number of Black sports figures suggest that the best tennis player black can hope for is to be “found and married to a White female tennis player.” This is, needless to say, a gross generalization and a very dangerous one at that, but if you’re a black tennis player, you might as well face the possibility that you’ll never play tennis again. It’s not that impossible to imagine that an older White woman playing tennis might be a better match for you than you would be for her, but it’s unlikely, and while the world of tennis would like to keep you playing, it would only do that for you as long as you played with White women.
A great many of these “exceptions” to that rule are the Williams sisters. As a matter of fact, the very existence of the Williams sisters shows the limits of that rule. What if I’m not the good-looking one? What if I am? How are we supposed to know whether the right woman will want me to be her husband?
The Black athlete who is most likely to be accepted into the