I hate it because it is slow, boring, full of unnecessary womanly weeping dramatics and hysterics, and riddled with deeply unfeminine women. As I have pointed out before, former Wimbledon champion and general all-around Dutch shitlord Richard Krajicek once (very uncharitably but mostly truthfully) said that 75% of the top 100 players in women’s tennis are “fat, lazy pigs”, and he was right about that.
But more than the lack of athleticism (for the most part – there are exceptions, like this chick), the lack of technical skill and virtuoso shot-making, and the extremely irritating prevalence of “Kournikova Syndrome” throughout the ranks of the women’s game, I really, truly, hate the grunting.
Here is a set of examples that demonstrate just how stupid the grunting nonsense is, especially in the women’s game:
The dictionary definition of “grunt“, as noted in the second video above, is indeed as follows:
To utter a deep guttural sound, as a hog does.
Now, that is all well and good, for the most part; wild hogs are quite fearsome creatures when cornered and their grunts are not to be mistaken for terms of endearment. If you have a grunting, pawing hog cornered, chances are pretty good that it is going to wheel around and charge you with its very sharp tusks, ready to take a few chunks out of you for good measure in the process.
Hunting and slaughtering wild hogs is good clean old-fashioned manly sport.
Listening to female tennis players grunt, though, is a lot like watching a particularly odd form of pR0n. And by far the worst offender of the female of the species has got to be Maria Shrieka Screecha Sharapova:
The thing is, there is actually a reason why tennis players grunt when striking the ball. It has to do with the fact that, as the body torques around its central axis to strike the ball and transfer energy into it, an explosive contraction of the diaphragm occurs to release air held in the lungs.
This process of breathing is highly useful and virtually every sport teaches some form of breathing control in order to ensure that the athlete is respirating in the right ways and at the right time. This applies just as strongly to MMA fighters as it does to tennis players – when a fighter throws a strike, he exhales, because generating that positive motion requires oxygen to allow the muscles and blood to move freely.
Of course, our friend Dom can explain this rather better than I can, with his notion that “Grunting = Force”, which evidently means that the louder one grunts, the harder one must be working:
The problem with this logic pops up the moment that one actually tries to watch a tennis match.
The loudest grunters generally are not the best players – with some exceptions, obviously.
On the women’s side, the game appears to be flooded with women who think that screeching every time they hit the ball is somehow a sign that they are moving better and hitting harder than they really are.
As far as I can tell, it is merely a way of intimidating their opponents and annoying their spectators. Those who watch tennis do so to be entertained, not to have their eardrums shattered by women who lack proper breathing control.
Indeed, if one has a sufficiently deviant mind, one might be tempted to wonder what such women would be like in the sack. Think about it – you wouldn’t exactly have to bring your A-game along to have a good time, as she’d have her legs up in the air screeching like a banshee within about 30 seconds.
Now, at this point, I do have to admit that this particularly irksome affliction is not confined merely to the women’s game. The men’s game suffers from its share of verbally diarrhoetic players too.
Again, it is no coincidence that the men who grunt the loudest, generally have the ugliest playing styles.
Rafael Nadal’s playing style is pure brute force and athleticism – he runs everything down and grunts and roars on his way to doing it.
Novak Djokovic is even worse in some ways – no one doubts his incredible athleticism, but does he have to make quite such a racket when doing it?
And don’t even get me started on Andy Murray, David Ferrer, and Nikolay Davydenko.
The exception to all of this is – of course – the almighty Roger Federer, who rarely grunts much during his groundstrokes and only really utters a sound when hitting a high-spin second serve. That silent grace and astonishing foot speed on court is what makes him such a joy to watch – he doesn’t make much of a fuss, he simply gets on with the business of ruthlessly disemboweling his opponents with beautiful, surgical precision.
It is true that male players generally make a more forceful, warlike sound when grunting, but honestly, I wish they’d just drop the silly practice altogether. Tennis would be so much more enjoyable if only we could concentrate on the shot-play instead of the sound effects.
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