THE GRAND celebration of the comeback of an all-time champion prematurely presumed to be over the hill turned into a first-time triumph of a kid from down under a rock.
One day after a final match between two African-American sisters was hailed as an advance for black America and the human race, tennis lowers its head for shamefully failing to look at U.S. Open champion Lleyton Hewitt, really look at him, as the symbol of everything the game purports it no longer wants to be.
Hewitt, who charged a black linesman with cheating on behalf of African-American opponent James Blake during a second-round match, got off without even a fine, let alone the threat of suspension, for a repeat outburst of bigotry, never mind an instant, zero-tolerance disqualification. Instead, the investigating authorities anxiously seized a sliver of ambiguity in what almost anybody could recognize as a racial inference.
Even after polishing off Pete Sampras in straight sets yesterday, Hewitt continued to draw praise from enabling members of the media for the single-mindedness with which he blocked out the controversy.
The words, “Look at him, look at him, mate, look at him and you tell me what the similarity is,” stayed under the rug, to join poor old Pete, swept there bearing no similarity to the lion in winter who knocked off Patrick Rafter, Andre Agassi and Marat Safin in a week.
The only similarity we saw continued to be Hewitt, a 20-year-old only sorry he put himself in a bad position, not that he had offended anyone. “It wasn’t a good situation to put myself in during a Grand Slam tournament,” he said. “I copped a lot of flak for something I really didn’t mean at all.
“I was obviously disappointed because I knew I was really innocent. It’s one of the toughest things that I had to block out during a tennis event. You know, to be able to do that at 20 years of age, it really shows how mentally tough I’ve been over the last couple of days.”
Frankly, we don’t know what was so hard about blocking out one’s own misguided sense of righteous indignation. For Hewitt, who claimed that the “similarities” referred only to the same linesman calling two rare foot faults, to be distracted by the incident, wouldn’t he have to be aware he behaved poorly?
Not since Ray Lewis was not invited to Disney World, have we ever felt less reason to celebrate a champion for his inner resolve. Truth is, Sampras went down almost as easily as Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the worst semifinal loser of the Open era, did against Hewitt on Saturday. The Australian Agassi returned Sampras’s vaunted serve so well, he exhausted him as quickly as Sampras went into denial about how bad he was.
“I was fresh and ready to go, just ran into a hot player like [Marat Safin] last year,” said Sampras. “The reason I wasn’t sharp was because of the way he played. He is a great player. We will see him contending here for the next ten years.”
If, during that decade, Hewitt never has another incident and ever acknowledges how offensive he sounded, then a lesson has been learned and the cause of awareness strengthens itself over another hard hump. If Hewitt, seen as a snot by exemplary Australians on the tour, doesn’t care to understand, the quality of person and player will always be separated – the latter deserving begrudging praise, the former only scorn.
The heat of battle, always the excuse, occasionally is even a good one when someone has built up good will or spent years living down an ugly and intemperate slip. Even the most inadvertent ones, however, usually spring from long-existing mindsets. And allowing that people can sometimes say what they don’t truly mean, the proof that someone ultimately looks at a person of another color as different than himself usually comes in the follow-up defense.
Hewitt opted for the, “I come from a multi-cultural country, I’m not racial in any way at all.”
When they don’t understand how that sounds, generally they are exactly how they sound. Which is why we need some indication of penance before “Lleyton Hewitt, U.S. Open champion,” rolls off our tongues as easily as some truly reprehensible words rolled off his.
