Naomi Broady’s win at Wimbledon on Monday caused quite a sensation. Not just because she was a British woman progressing to the second round, but because she was a very particular woman – the so-called “bad girl” of British tennis – who had been stripped of her Lawn Tennis Association funding seven years ago.
Her heinous crime? Posting a picture of herself on the Bebo website showing her posing, in a rather skimpy dress, in the loos during a girls’ night out. The LTA suspended her, accusing her of unprofessional behaviour.
Broady said this week that she struggled to see why the incident became such a “big deal” – and to be fair, looking at some of her fellow players who put the wild in wild card, one is inclined to agree.
For while the image of the women’s game may be of sets in the sunshine, fuelled by nothing stronger than lime juice and barley water, in reality the circuit has been dogged by sex scandals, tax evasion and tantrums.
The traditional way to get a name as a bad girl in tennis is by what you wear – or, rather, what you don’t. “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran caused outrage in 1949 and 1950 with her ruffled lace-trimmed knickers, leading the All England Club to accuse her of bringing “vulgarity and sin into tennis”. Yet her transgression was pretty mild compared with Anne White’s skintight bodysuit in 1985; or the exploits of Natasha Zverera, who shocked the Australian Open crowd in 1995 by flashing her bra to celebrate a win.
Suzanne Lenglen, who played at Wimbledon in 1920, used to sip cognac between points. She at least confined herself to a quick drink; her tennis descendants have been caught out using harder substances. While Mary Pierce transformed her game via the perfectly legal supplement creatine, others turned to illegal drugs. The teenage prodigy Jennifer Capriati was charged with possession of marijuana, while former world number one Martina Hingis quit tennis in 2007 after testing positive for cocaine – though she insisted she had never taken drugs.
And then there’s sex. For every Steffi Graf and André Agassi, who’ve been together for more than a decade, there’s a Chris Evert or Jimmy Connors whose tempestuous engagement has been called off. Martina Navratilova made the news when she had to pay out $3 million to her former girlfriend, Toni Layton; while Anna Kournikova’s relationship with pop star Enrique Iglesias made as many headlines as her game.
read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/tennis/wimbledon/10923004/Wimbledon-2014-The-tennis-girls-whove-got-balls.html
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