To grunt or not to grunt...
Kate Enock
Posted on: 24 June 2009 - 17:11
Tennis
Alan Mills, the referee in charge of this years Wimbledon Championships, has said that players who grunt do it deliberately to win matches, and that players such as Maria Sharapova (the first who naturally comes to mind when discussing this topic) have been coached to shriek as a way of putting off their opponents. He wants some rules to be put into place to stop this “noise pollution.”
Screeching in tennis, mainly in the woman’s game, has become almost as part of the Wimbledon fabric as strawberries and pimm’s. Watching the Williams sisters battle it out in the final last year, the crowds were greeted to varying degrees of noise, tone and intensity from the two ladies on either side of the net. Was it enjoyable? The tennis was, but the noises definitely were not.
There are lots of different explanations as to why players grunt; to distract their opponents, conceal the spin on the ball and to improve timing and rhythm. But one thing is sure, it is getting worse. The latest player to cause a storm was the seventeen year old Michelle Larcher De Brito, when her grunting in the French Open was measured at a reported 109 decibels, just 11 decibels short of the noise a plane makes when taking off!!!!
Although making noises when hitting the ball is not a new phenomenon (Monica Seles was the first real “grunter” in tennis,) since Henin retired virtually every woman on the tour now shrieks to certain a certain degree at some point during a match. There is grunting in the men’s game, but what makes it more bearable is that firstly, not all of the men do it (take Federer for example!) and secondly, it does not have quite the high-pitched shriek that makes the grunts of the woman so intolerable.
Martina Navratilova, a champion of the women’s game, says it is “cheating and it has to stop.” She also said that, “it doesn’t make anyone a better player and it could be counterproductive because making that kind of noise maybe a thousand times in a match requires a lot of energy.”
Navratilova believes that the only way to prevent the grunting from getting worse is to ensure that it is stopped at junior levels, and when children learn to play tennis they learn without grunting. Yet for young children whose tennis idols are the William’s sisters, Sharapova, Safina etc.it seems that eradicating grunting is going to be incredibly difficult.
Another proposal would be for match referees or the LTA to introduce rules that would penalise those players whose levels of grunting were judged to be too much. For after all, it is not as if these professional sportswomen would fall over and fail to make contact with the ball if they didn’t screech! And there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the more noise you make the better tennis player you are.
So, to grunt or not to grunt, that is the question…..