I do not often comment about women’s tennis, mostly because I find virtually the entirety of the WTA to be utterly boring, bland, and unwatchable. (With perhaps one or two exceptions.) The women’s game is slow, weak, technically deficient, and – as 1996 shock Wimbledon champion Richard Krajicek once very uncharitably, if quite accurately, pointed out – full of fat girls.

Hey, it’s true.

And when it comes to Serena Williams, I rarely have a kind thing to say. Yes, she is a 23-time Grand Slam champion, but I have an intense dislike for her playing style, which basically amounts to hitting the ball as hard as a She-Hulk possibly can, and her attitude.

Nor is she particularly well informed or sensible when it comes to issues of remuneration. Ms. Williams has been something of a crusader for equal pay between men and women in tennis, but I find the very idea of equal pay between men and women in tennis to be ridiculous in the extreme – the facts and figures clearly show that, objectively speaking, men should be paid at least 11% more, on average, than women.

So it was with great pleasure that I woke up this morning to discover that Ms. Williams – or is that Mrs. Ohanian now, I can’t quite tell – had been comprehensively blown off the court by one Naomi Osaka.

Ms. Osaka’s victory was, as far as I can tell, well-fought and well-played. She did just about everything right to keep Ms. Williams off balance, uncomfortable, and out of sorts.

I have maintained for years that Serena Williams wins against the women not because she is exceptionally skilled, but because she is simply big and very strong (for a woman). She hits the ball damned hard (again, for a woman) and makes good high-percentage shots by hitting deep into the baseline.

The easiest way to lose against Serena Williams is to do what most of the female players do: hit short bouncing groundstroke returns that pop up off the service line and sit at about lower-chest height on her. She will simply crush the ball on the return.

However – she cannot run very well. She’s too big. Keep her on the back foot, push shots deep into the baseline on either wing – and especially her backhand – and she will simply become discombobulated. Push her forward to the net, make her run and chase down low short balls, and kick the second serve out wide to her backhand, and suddenly she has no idea how to play. And, best of all, if you move her backward a lot, she cannot respond effectively.

Beyond that, though – she doesn’t have much of a game. Compared to her relatively limited repertoire of shots, greats of the past, such as Margaret Court – the woman whose record 24 Grand Slam singles titles Ms. Williams seeks to topple – and Steffi Graf, are simply far superior and more well-rounded players.

The absolute worst thing about Serena’s game, though, really has nothing to do with her playing style, and much more to do with her personality.

Put simply – she has an ugly temper and makes no bones about insulting anyone that she feels is in her way.

Here is footage of her completely losing her shit at a line judge over a (likely valid) foot-fault call in the 2009 US Open Women’s Final against Kim Clijsters – one of the nicest and sweetest ladies ever to pick up a racquet and play on a tennis court:

The foot-fault call was valid because you can see that Ms. Williams’ left foot does move to touch the baseline on her second serve. That is a foot-fault.

And now, 9 years later, the exact same tournament umpire and handler were called onto court to deal with a temper tantrum by the exact same player:

Those two incidents, 9 years apart, tell you a lot about Ms. Williams’ character.

She does not play gracefully, she rarely wins gracefully, and she certainly does not lose gracefully. She is the epitome of a sore loser who uses brute force and physical intimidation against her opponents to gain a mental edge, and then breaks down in tears and plays almost every possible victim card in the book when she is caught out behaving badly.

The story of this particular episode of boorish behaviour, by a boorish woman, is pretty ugly, and really only reinforces people’s existing dim opinions about Ms. Williams.

It all started with a code violation for coaching from the stands.

The rule against coaching from the stands is a nebulous one. It is difficult for umpires to enforce it; if a player looks over at his box and pumps his fist in triumph at a particular winner, and his coach applauds him for doing a good job, can that really reasonably be considered “coaching”? Similarly, if a player glances over at his box, despondent when he misses a shot or is passed cleanly, and his coach motions to him to keep his head down and persevere, is that truly “coaching” at all, or merely good moral support?

Normally, when a coach is caught out giving advice to a player from the stands, that is a warning, not a code violation. The latter is a harsh and strict enforcement of a rather tricky rule, especially given that this was in the middle of an extremely high-stakes Grand Slam final, but the chair umpire had every right to do so. He especially had the right to do so given that Ms. Williams was only down 1-0 in the second set – this wasn’t a code violation issued just before match point, after all.

In this particular case with Ms. Williams, her coach Patrick Muratoglou literally admitted to ESPN after the match that he absolutely was coaching. So the umpire, Carlos Ramos – one of the most experienced and respected referees in the entire sport – handed down a code violation for the fact that Serena Williams’ coach gestured to her to come to the net more.

That is blatantly against the rules – though, again, it is very hard to enforce those rules, and one can argue with complete justification that a law is not a law if it is not enforced.

In this case, of course, it was enforced. And Serena Williams simply lost her shit a few games later when she smashed a racquet – and then picked up another code violation.

This one automatically docked her a point when she did it at 3-3 in the second set. Once she was broken and lost the game to go down 4-3, she launched into a furious rant at the chair umpire from her chair.

Carlos Ramos at that point simply decided that he had seen enough bad behaviour – and issued a third code violation. This one resulted in Ms. Williams getting docked an entire game.

That put her opponent up 5-3 and ready to serve out the match. And Serena Williams promptly melted down on court.

She sobbed and railed and played just about every victim card in the book – the “woman” card, the “sexism” card, the “bullying” card, the “equality” card, and even the “crying mother” card.

The only card she didn’t play – somewhat surprisingly – was the race card. Either she was too upset to think straight and therefore didn’t realise that she could have deployed that particular nuke, or she realised that Carlos Ramos is Portuguese, not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and therefore not a particularly good candidate for the R-bomb.

When she lost, she realised that she looked an utter prat and went into damage-control mode, asking the audience to stop booing and let Naomi Osaka – who played very well throughout the tournament, without question – have her moment. But at that point it was too little, too late.

Serena Williams still has 23 Grand Slam singles titles in spite of her loss – way, way more than any of her rivals. She will probably break Margaret Court’s all-time record and finish her career with 25, or more, titles. But she will certainly go down in history as one of the most graceless, boorish, unsporting, and downright unpleasant champions of a great sport.