Tennis, the True Violent Sport?
Growing up, my local newspaper (the Dayton Daily News) barely acknowledged the existence of soccer. It seemed the only thing that could get the sport into the newspaper was a riot in a foreign country, preferably involving deaths. I know that the Dayton Daily News is not the only paper to take such an approach to soccer coverage. With this emphasis on a few negative incidents, it is perhaps little surprise that many non-soccer fans in the US come to see the sport as “violent.”
This impression stands in marked contrast to the incredible number of soccer games which go off each day without violence. Given the number of games played on any given day and the relative number of violent incidents, I suspect that soccer may be, statistically speaking, one of the least violent sports in the world.
OK, maybe tennis has soccer beat.
Or so I thought until news came from the just completed Australian Open of violence between ethnic Serbian and Croatian fans there. A small number of fans from these two communities who clashed during the 1990s in the Balkans recently rekindled their fight in Melbourne.
Reading the reports of violence surrounding the Australian Open, I caught myself wondering, “What’s the matter with those tennis fans?” But I quickly realized that I had fallen into the same trap set by the Dayton Daily News for its readers. Just as the Dayton Daily News only covered soccer when there were riots surrounding games, leading its readers to assume that soccer was a violent game, so too can such reports from the Australian Open lead readers, like me, to jump to conclusions about the nature of tennis.
The real issue that lead to this recent violence is, of course, anything but tennis. Rackets and fuzzy green balls were only peripheral to the events that led up to the violence. Anyone with even a minimal knowledge of recent history knows the degree of animosity that the 1990s Balkan wars created in people on all sides of the conflict. The fighting at the Australian Open occurred as a result of the unresolved anger that came from the war that led to Croatia’s ultimate independence from then-Yugoslavia (later to become Serbia). It may have occurred at a tennis match, but the fighting was not about tennis; it was about a history of hatred between two ethnic groups that flared up years after and thousands of miles from its genesis.
Soccer was, sadly, sucked into the “tennis riots” as well. Reports indicate that the rioters were wearing soccer jerseys. And the reports also say that riots between ethnic Serbs and Croats in Australia have occurred in the past at soccer matches.
It is sad when violence becomes intertwined with sports. But given the popularity of sports, it is perhaps not surprising that violence often finds a way to rear its ugly face near games. However, jumping to the conclusion (as I did) that tennis, that most patrician of sports, is inherently violent shows just how silly a similar characterization of soccer would be. Yet coverage of violence that surrounds sports often ignores this larger context.
Violence occurs far too often around sports and it deserves to be condemned. However, it behooves us all to remember that sports are not the reason for the violence, but instead merely the innocent bystander who happens to be close by when violence occurs.
