[女娃] [剪報] Sold on Sharapova
from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2641-1659627,00.html
June 20, 2005
Sold on Sharapova
By Rick Broadbent
Are riches compensation for a lost youth?
IN LITTLE BRITAIN, THE television show, Vicky Pollard is a fat, foul-mouthed
gurner with a packet of fags and a Westlife CD, for which she swapped her
baby. In Little Russia, the reality programme, Maria Sharapova is a lithe,
leggy millionairess with a collection of TAGs and a Wimbledon crown on her
CV, for which she exchanged her childhood. It is debatable which is the worst
example of wasted youth. If sport can sometimes be reduced to the level of
men against boys, women’s tennis has become teens against toddlers. The bar
has been lowered to such a level that the only requirements for full prodigy
status are having a Barbie and a faintly sociopathic parent.
Genuine tennis fans will tell you Sharapova is nothing like Anna Kournikova
and is a good role model because she has toiled tirelessly and overcome
immense hardships to land her Motorola sponsorship deal. Sadly, she is
exactly like Kournikova, apart from having a better double-handed backhand.
Like the legendary Russian coquette, Sharapova has used her looks to plunder
a raft of endorsements worth an estimated $15 million (￡8.25 million) a
year. Kournikova did this by saying things like: “My breasts are really
good because they don’t sag.”
Sharapova has done this by winning tournaments and, unwittingly, fuelling
schoolboy fantasies. You can argue which is the more important criterion
for the ad men, but should remember that Colgate-Palmolive were not beating
a path to Conchita Martinez’s door in 1994. This is the sadness of women's
tennis. There is something inherently pervy about the Wimbledon crowds that
gather for matches involving a Sharapova, a Hantuchova or a Dokic. Are those
leery men in the front row hoping for a lustrous display of tennis aesthetics
or a timely gust of wind? You half-expect to see Stan Collymore pitch up
with his camcorder.
But more worrying than the way barely formed teens use their nascent sex
appeal to flog stuff, is the way women’s tennis chews up young girls and
spits them out. People say Sharapova is different to Kournikova because she
loves tennis. It is what she lives for. But why then does she say she wants
to quit at 25? Why, too, does Venus Williams show far more enthusiasm for
fashion designing or acting or Artexing the outside toilet than she does
for tennis?
It could be because they have been forced onto a tour that has the
flexibility of a night shift down a Siberian salt mine. The pressures
are high, the matches relentless, the joy undetectable. When Damir Dokic
was ejected from the US Open, he reduced his daughter, Jelena, to tears.
Mirjana Lucic, a Croatian player, spent her 16th birthday locked in her
room by her father because she had lost a match. It has been alleged
that Jim Pierce physically abused his daughter, Mary, when she was a
teenager, while Sonya Jeyaseelan, a Canadian, said her father hid her
dolls so she would focus on tennis. Bad parenting evidently leads to
Vicky Pollard smoking in the swimming pool or the main draw for the
women’s singles.
Sharapova’s story was trotted out as a contrasting romance after her
triumph last year. We heard how her parents had moved to the Black Sea
to escape the aftermath of Chernobyl and how Yuri took Maria to Nick
Bollettieri’s academy in Florida at the age of 7. There followed a
two-year separation from her mother and bullying in the dorm. Now she
is a star, has no time for boyfriends and studies via an internet course.
“A great tennis career is something most 15-year-old girls don’t have,”
she once said. That is true, but boyfriends and schoolfriends are.
Sometimes, normality is good, especially in a sport that seems to be
a Nike-based Stepford Wives for kids.
You wonder whether Sharapova will suffer a Jennifer Capriati moment on
the way to the Damascus Open and think: “Cor blimey, three Wimbledon
titles maybe, but I’ve never swigged half a litre of flat Strongbow
behind the back of the bike sheds.”
Refreshingly, Sharapova says she still likes to read Pippi Longstocking
books. Having sidestepped her youth, she is still enamoured by the tales
of a 9-year-old who lives on her own with a horse and a monkey. However,
there are positive signs that Sharapova will muddle through. She says
she does not want to be a tennis babe, albeit the absence of a face that
looks like a dug-up road mitigates against such ambition, and says her
bodyguards made her feel like a prima donna. That awareness is encouraging,
given that Kournikova always seemed pricklier than Elena Dementieva’s
cactus collection; indeed, her entire career might have been termed a
storm in a D-Cup.
In tennis terms, Sharapova has already achieved much and might prove an
antidote to the carve-up that the women’s game had become under the
Williams sisters. She also heads a Russian revolution, with five players
in the top ten and eight in the top 15. Her background has unquestionably
toughened her up and she has injected a dose of novelty and glamour into
the game. She is a good bet for Wimbledon. And who knows, if she can
avoid the loopy adults, the adolescent tantrums and the Pollard-esque
no-but-yeah-but intellect of many of her peers, she may be able to retire
at 25 with her sanity intact. Either way, at least she will have a nice
watch and a decent mobile.
這篇報導以批判角度,
雖然某些部份的確過於物化了點,
但從環境層面來說,
也是點到了一些不得不,或其來有自的先天與後天的種種環境與心態...。
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◆ From: 203.203.34.44
※ 編輯: ouch 來自: 203.203.34.44 (07/03 11:03)
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