Tennis Needed a Boycott

Tennis Tournament Bars Israeli Player – No Fair Play in Sight
Roddick Walks Saying Politics and Sports Don’t Mix
By Terrance Gavan
As reported on the wire and throughout the world press last week, religion, unbridled jingoism and shortsighted neo-fascist national policies are running rampant on the battlefield of sports.
Last week, Israel’s leading female tennis player, Shahar Peer, was refused a visa for entry into the United Arab Emirates, and politics threatened the future of one of the world's richest tennis tournaments.
The UAE does not have diplomatic relations with Israel and tournament organizers believe the decision to refuse entry to Peer was a reaction to the recent conflict in Gaza.
This is wrong. Unacceptable.
Sports, that humble but often illuminating backdrop, has performed admirably as effervescent and consuming catalyst against ethnocentric intolerance, racism, balkanism and fanaticism.
The world held South Africa and apartheid accountable through a boycott on trade and sports. The pressure, the embargo and the shame staunched a tide of jackboot colonialism that imprisoned Nelson Mandela for most of his adult life, and many aver that apartheid fell as a direct result of that worldwide pressure. Sports played its solid, bubbling, and textured role in the stemming of apartheid.
Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson danced a dilly of a duet in 1947 and down went the color barrier in major league baseball. Robinson, the catalyst, and Rickey, the mentor, eschewed together the petty thoughts and dalliances of an entrenched hierarchy, preferring to ignore the spills, the jeers, the death threats, the taunts and the epithets. Forging an alliance for the greater good. Clearing the path.
Sports is like that. It moves vaguely in the shadows, blunting the sharp sword of intemperance, applying comradeship judiciously and placing a modicum of sense midst the madness.
Big Bear Don Haskins sounded a death knell for a Jim Crow platform of all-white college basketball when he started five black players for Texas Western College against an all-white University of Kentucky team, winning the 1966 national NCAA championship.
He beat court legend and Jim Crow practitioner Adolph Rupp, a coaching guru. Kentucky, despite being beaten in that game, spent another decade bucking the trend, eschewing the recruitment of black players and appeasing their big-buck-wielding and not vaguely racist southern alumni by continuing to boycott black players.
Too late. Haskins and his freewheeling five proved the point. Basketball conformed and the Big Bear’s dance down Glory Road sparked the turn.
In sports a great leveler. A thin edge of a wedge. A foot in the door. A jackhammer at the gates, dispensing with niceties of the norm, and refusing to commit to the status quo.
Because sports is just that. The bulwark against the norm.
World conflicts are borne from fear. Fear of religion, of humble practice, of the color of skin; fear of difference. Fear promulgated by the hierarchy of intemperate souls who rule blithe in haughty impertinence.
On the platform, on the dais, on the rink, the field, and the pitch and in the raw heat of competition there is fear, but seldom does that fear translate to hatred.
Players know that sports remains as the great leveler.
Players play and they play by the set of rules they are given. They play peer to peer.
Players seldom ask another player what god they worship. They care not about the color of another player’s skin.
They simplify the equation. Can I win?
Is he faster? Are we better? Does she rise higher than I?
And so tennis was presented with a problem. The UAE tournament in Dubai banned Shahar Peer. We remain stunned by the lack of player action.
Every player should have walked.
Every woman player on that circuit should have told Dubai and their 10-star hotel accommodation and their multi-zillion dollar purse to stick their tourney where the sun never shines.
They should have stood solidly in support of Peer. That’s, after all, what peers do.
It’s what Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Don Haskins, and a legion of other committed athletes have done.
Instead women’s tennis did nothing.
Even the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena agreed to uphold their contracts to play the tournament in Dubai.
Shame. Two players who should know better. Two players who should have learned from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, American players who worked very hard to pave the way for black players on courts everywhere.
Venus and Serena should have stepped to the plate.
Their countryman Andy Roddick did.
He withdrew from the men’s side of the Dubai tournament.
Roddick is the defending champ and he said that he was pulling out because of his concerns over the treatment of Sharar Peer and her denial of a spot in the draw. “I don’t know if it’s the best thing to mix politics and sports,” said Roddick.
And then he packed up his rackets and went home.
Good on you mate.
We need the voices in the wilderness.
To keep the wolves from the door.