Rafael Román Martel

Serena Williams, upset to see that America’s long tennis tradition of horribly-mannered players on the court has mostly ended since John McEnroe has taken to joking around with Novak Djokovic, has stomped, snorted, and cursed all over the name of American tennis on her final point against the Belgian Kim Clijsters tonight. Clijsters, who had been responding to Williams’ notorious 110mph+ serves with all the answers and practically mopping the floor with the “defending champion”, was up match point at 6-4, 6-5 on Williams’ serve when the latter was called out on a foot fault, something that had become rather a staple of Serena’s game. Because Serena had already been warned for an “abuse of racquet” violation after losing the first set, the rules demand that she be fined a point. Since it was on match point, this sped up the already inevitable victory by Clijsters.

Serena, as good a sport as she’s always been, responded to this the only way she knew how- turning to the seated umpire, a small, helpless Asian woman, menacingly thrusting her racquet at her, and cursing her out. Although CBS refused to play the the footage of Serena’s outburst, our courtside correspondent has confirmed her words to the umpire to be something along the lines of “I’m going to shove this fucking ball up your fucking ass, you bitch!”, although CBS initially reported it as “I’m going to fucking kill you”. CBS censored at least four words from her dialogue with the arbiter. You can see an uncensored broadcast of the event via EuroSport here:

As for her self-professed role model, the elder McEnroe looked like he had just been told to spend the rest of the day wearing a dunce cap as Serena cited McEnroe in her post-match interview as her “inspiration”. “I feel like I’m in the hot seat now” and some mild trembling was his only response to the event. “She may have admired me, but for all the wrong reasons.”

Just when McEnroe, more of a crowd favorite than Serena herself, had finished rehabilitating the image he spent three decades destroying on the court with New York’s most hated male tennis player, Novak Djokovic. No, Djokovic didn’t tell anyone he was going to kill them. He didn’t say he would suffocate linesmen with tennis balls. He didn’t even raise his voice! The words that did the typically happy-go-lucky Serb in were, in fact, much more harsh than anything Serena could have ever come up with: “It is not nice to say that I am faking injuries.” Never will there be a more offensive sentence in the history of our beloved sport.

No one could ever accuse the New York crowd of bad judgment.

As for their beloved Serena, is as yet undetermined whether Serena will have to undergo steroid or testoterone level tests to determine whether she has committed any more ethical violations.