Five instances when racism marred the game of tennis
3) Tsonga and Monfils
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a French player who has played in an Australian Open final, once told me he occasionally receives racist letters in the post. “I get some letters from a lot of people. Sometimes it’s nice, with letters from kids or from parents of kids who want to be tennis players, but I also get racist letters. It’s really painful to receive something like that because you’re not ready for that. You think to yourself, ‘That’s really bad’. But I realise that there are people like that.” But as Tsonga said of racists: “Stupidity cannot be controlled, only contained.”
Not restricted to Tsonga, his fellow Frenchman Gael Monfils has also been chided with comments. These top 20 players have their playing styles been called ‘wild’, ‘unpredictable’ and ‘athletic’, words that are right up there in the pantheon of reductive race based language. The aberration appears when in this crazy world the same quality among white players like Federer are credited as ‘spontaneous’ and ‘genius’.
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