New Screamers
Written by Tennis Pro, Monday January 31 2011
Screamers Again - Where's It All Going!
What’s the only difference between professional tennis and wrestling? There are no folding chairs around to throw at your opponent!
Or somewhat to that degree, it’s becoming a lot like a wrestling match with all the idiosyncrasies of the players and their strange habits. Players pushing back non-existent locks of hair over their ears, having two separate bottles of liquid to drink from at each end change, tossing the ball between their legs before serving, bouncing the ball 15 times before the serve. Yeah, whatever, but the thing that puts the “Strange meter” off the scale are the “Screamers”. I guess they must have taken a martial arts class beforehand, or watched too many Bruce Lee movies, because they are taking the grunt (which is an expulsion of air caused by an extreme muscular contraction) to a ridiculous audio level.
The newest competitor for the screamer top spot has become Francesca Schiavone, in the Australian Open. She has developed the “Shout”, (it’s not even a scream) that’s got to be totally distracting to any opponent. It sounds like two separate words with a pause in the middle, and resembles the sound phonetically like…”Ahhhh…Heeeee”. Now what’s with that? I can understand the “Ahhhhh” as a by product of air out of the lungs, but he “Heeeeeee” part a second later, P U U L L E A S E! If I were playing a Screamer, I’d invent a scream just a distracting, and change it every hit, see how they’d like it.
In a previous article I’ve talked about this, but Franny obviously never read it. Imagine what it would sound like if you had Francesca Schiavone and Serena Williams together on the same court, it would sound like 2 cats being tourted in a 14th century castle dungeon.
If you approach it from an entirely sterile, outsider’s view point, for instance, if a historian / statistician could look at the sport since it’s conception and give their overall opinion it might read like this.
First origin of the sport came from the wealthy and the aristocracy and was played by people with a high level of sportsmanship, and integrity within their own society. Then as the sport grew and the “Commoners” were allowed to play, it changed to become more “Troglodidian” (Troglodites:Group of cave people who hadn’t discovered fire yet) in nature, with people shouting and trying to give support to their favorite, and hinder their non-favorite competitor. Then as then as the media (TV & Internet) picked up the sport, more credence was given to the shouting and screaming, and “Un-gentlemanly” type behavior, because this is what the now “Lower common denominator” type of viewer wanted to see. TV producers are only motivated by what sells advertising. They somehow persuaded the regulatory agencies of the game to permit tyrates of bad behavior from the competitors as well as the fans. This was because it brought in even more viewers, many of them the more Troglodite types. The ones who were too inept to learn the game (because of their small brains, and short attention span) but they just like watching players explode with bad behavior on the tennis court. This, of course, gave the same producers the idea for the Jerry Springer show.
You can think what you want, even in all amusement, but all boils down to the eventual level of the people watching the event.
SPORTING EVENT AXIOM: The event over a long period of time, will eventually take on the traits and intellectual level of the AVERAGE viewer, not the other way around.
One positive piece of data is that 88% of all tennis players learned the game while going to COLLEGE, or got to go to college on a scholarship, BECAUSE of learning the game from their parents who WENT to college. This academic background suggests a level of intelligence and sophistication, which has kept the game, and sportsmanship (up to now) at a higher level.
Another truth about tennis is, that it’s a very difficult sport to learn and the Troglodidian mentality can’t handle the complexities, and gives up before very long, usually when trying to learn how to keep score. Hopefully we can rule them out at the live matches because they can’t afford the tickets.
Bottom line: When you’re at a live match, point out the screamer in the crowd to the officials so he/she can be removed, and show your approval by applause only. The players have all the distractions they can handle with the motorized Paparazzi’s cameras, the moving cams on the wires all around them, flash photography from a $4 throw-away camera, and wild screaming fans. You show who you are, but what you do, and how you act! Don’t make me come down there!
Roger The Tennis Pro
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