Women’s tennis was a different, hornier game in the 90s and early aughts. An era of unswerving titillation, it brimmed with upskirt photo opps and casual sexism. Any guttural grunting produced by a woman was ripe for coital parallels today’s media would never touch. The sheen of SEX lured an otherwise ambivalent audience. Anna Kournikova was the posterwoman for this heyday—tennis hasn’t contributed more to manhood’s shared spank bank since her, nor did it before her.
These titillations do not concern me, but still, I choose to insert myself. Two primary goals of mine in 1999 were being good at tennis (I was fine) and being hot (12 year-olds—contrary to the lewd teachings of Vladimir Nabokov—are categorically unable to be hot). Vlad’s fellow Russian, Kournikova, was both of these things, and therefore an aspirational figure. She was also blonde and white with an aristocratic ski-slope nose, exemplar traits for me, a half-Asian teen with internalized racism living in Australia. (It is also crucial to note here that a variation of a White Russian cocktail made with skim milk is known as an Anna Kournikova or a Skinny White Russian.)
Kournikova was known for hitting flat groundstrokes with minimal topspin, though she wasn’t a garden variety baseline rallier like many of her peers. She had a sound all-court game—a deft mover, a sharp volleyer, a tactical slicer—but contrarians will say Anna Kournikova wasn’t that good at tennis because she never won a WTA or Grand Slam title. About that! Kournikova reached a world #8 singles ranking in 2000, and with her partner, Martina Hingis, dipped in and out of a world #1 doubles ranking for several years. And so we together concur: Anna Kournikova was very good at tennis. Evidence exists! Watch her here, here, here and here competing with tenacity and finesse.
Back to the reporting. During those years, tennis coverage was bold and provocative. Kournikova supplied ceaseless scintillating fodder for a media industry that would know not of canceling for some twenty years. The adjective ‘problematic’ did not bob in the air like a reputation-threatening mistletoe. #MetToo and its ideologies were not a distant fantasy, but an anarchist impossibility. Zoomers would’ve turned in their cots.
But by virtue of the presiding media milieu and her own genetic enterprising—the metaphoric chicken-or-egg dilemma works here—Kournikova was a veritable *sex symbol*. In the year 2002, she was the second most-Googled athlete (edged out by Daddy Beckham) and the fifth most searched of women at large. She reportedly earned less than $4 million in career prize money, but made tens of millions from endorsements. To recall her name is to conjure an average tennis ability (again, world #8) secondary to her hot, sizzling and sexy appearance, and use the latter as reason to surmise the former.
So fetishized online was Kournikova that she aroused an eponymous computer virus in 2001 that infected clunky intergalactic IBMs worldwide. The virus was contained in an email with the subject line "Here you have, ;0)" with an attached file named AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs
. Expectant recipients—gagging at the thought of our leggy temptress—opened the attachment in Microsoft Outlook, only to discover not an image of Kournikova, but that a viral program had launched, forwarding itself to all contacts in the victim's address book. If you don’t consider this iconic I’m not sure what to tell you.
The commercial consensus was that Anna was too good-looking to be a true force on court, and that her off-court pursuits belied her talent.
This particularly cunty article written in 2000 is titled ‘Nymphet at the Net’, lol. Its author was not the long-dead and aforementioned Nabokov who coined the pedophilic term “nymphet” to describe a sexually precocious girl-minor, but curmudgeonly New York Times Op-Ed columnist, Maureen Dowd who therein, spouts scorn for Kournikova—perfectly in step with a zeitgeist in which women were not beholden to the virtues of *lifting each other up*. Cool story: She once won a Pulitzer not for respectable reasons, but for her commentary on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, cheaply painting then-22 Lewinsky as a dumb, fat whore. I barely hyperbolize—see for yourself! (Dowd—one ‘y’ shy from an adjective that would make me ageist—also made the curious decision to praise the Me Too *movement* recently, to which the internet replied, “Big mistake; huge!” before duly dunking on her.)
“Eroticism trumps athleticism,” Dowd declares. “She got gams, not game,” she feebly quips. “Kournikova flopped at the [2000] French Open in a cascade of unforced errors and double-faults,” she recounts, without color or context or nuance. The back and spinal injuries that punctuated Kournikova’s career forced our “bombshell” to retire from tennis in 2003, aged 22.
It’s also worth thinking about Kournikova’s condemnations of unreached potential through a classical tennis lens. Tennis has an elitist constitution. Its scoring lexicon is cryptic, with many hypotheses but untraceable origins. 15, 30, 40. Why are 15 points awarded for each of your first two successful rallies, but only 10 for your third? Why is 40 points apiece called deuce? What is love? (Baby don’t hurt me.) Discipline is preserved through virtuous white attire. Umpires deliver the scoreline with lite pomposity and intonation found nowhere else. Tennis is a distinctly reverent sport—to participate at a professional level without uttermost devotion is to disrespect the game.
Nick Kyrgios is another (male; contemporary) player who gets heat for unrealized potential. Scrutinized for cocky outbursts that are out of step with his few significant career victories, he and Kournikova are united in their *lacking commitment*. We enjoy his thespian bratiness, we enjoyed her outsized attractiveness. But these accoutrements have no place in a sport so sanctimonious.
Two critical questions at this juncture are:
1. What about the others who fell short?
Other women in tennis orbited a top 5 ranking and also failed to secure a singles grand slam title, though they of course weren’t regularly vilified because they had plainer looks. But had these players also been made in God’s hot, sizzling and absolutely unprogressive but sexy image? Well, there’d be many more naysayers, perched heaven-high on their thrones of moral arbitration, all campaigning for;
NO handsomely paying extracurriculars and NO meddling in modeling.
Taxing the beautiful, not just the rich. (Tax them more if they are both.)
The genesis of yet another direct-to-consumer company peddling bruised-but-edible fruits—a silly little corporate metaphor intended to SHOW US ALL not to waste potential, and it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
Commonplace jealousy and bitterness.
2. Who cares?
How good do you have to be to be remembered as ‘good’? Perhaps potential unmet is not not winning a singles title, but instead, denial of Miss Kournikova’s right to wheel and deal at her leisure: to shoot FHM covers that practically denounce tennis; or a Berlei bra campaign with the admonition ‘Only the ball should bounce’; or star in the disturbingly CGI-adjacent music video for ‘Escape’ by Enrique Iglesias, who would later become the father of her children.
Must we separate church from state; professional tennis from aesthetic fortune (and the opportunism it stirs)? Would everything be different if she had just won one time?