Older sister Venus won her fourth Wimbledon title on Saturday, easily defeating [Insert random European name here]. I am always partial to athletes who challenge the establishment and take alternative paths to greatness. I don't know anything about women's tennis, but I have heard that players fizz out a young age, so we need to be cherish every glorious moment my older sisters have over the coming years, for you never know when childbirth may strike.
People are constantly labeling Venus and Serena as drama queens, which they probably are. However, if they really were the prima donnas that everyone says they are, don't you think there would occasionally be family conflict which the media would turn into the Shaq/Kobe, TO/McNabb circus? I do not believe I have ever heard of any dispute between the two. Credit has to go to Venus. She is the older sister, and entered the mainstream sports world with considerable hype in the in late 1990's. But when her younger sister dominated the sport at the start of the decade, not once was their any hint of jeolousy or resentment from Venus. She could have easily become the Billy Ripken to Serena's Cal. She didnt. In all honesty, Venus and Serena seem to be less dramatic than most women I have met. So maybe its not that they are drama queens, but rather, that the other women on the tennis tour are actually men. GO VENUS!
This is an op-ed in the London Times written by the Champion herself. She demonstrates how equal pay can be achieved without the involvement of government. Although this is an unusual case, I truly believe that eventually all discrimination in pay will be resolved in a similar fashion. Instead of having the government come in and mandate it (which creates resentment, backlash and unintended consequences that ultimately hurt the benefiting party), discrepencies in pay will be resolved simply by the MAN handing out the paycheck realizing that it is in HIS best interest to reward his employees equally.
Here is also an interesting article written by Jemele Hill. It is about Althea Gibson, the first black woman to win Wimbledon. Hill has been on the ESPN Page 2 staff for about six months now. I have probably read half of her columns. She is not bad. I find her a lot more interesting than Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post (who in addition to being ridiculously boring is insanely stupid). It seems as though Hill and LZ Granderson have morphed into a better version of Jason Whitlock, in order to balance the crazy rhetoric of the god-awful Scoop Jackson.
