We here at SportsFan
Magazine aren’t necessarily looking to make every female
professional athlete into a sex object. But it’s just that some choose
to pose nude in Australian art magazines (Lauren Jackson of the WNBA)
and participate in foxy boxing (Tonya Harding). And then there’s women’s
tennis, which for the last four or five years has basically been
"Serena, Venus, and Anna," despite the fact that one of the members of
that trio has won about as much as the Cubs have in the last century.
But here we are, watching Wimbledon, and this fetching
young Russian 17-year-old named Maria Sharapova beats Serena Williams,
6-1, 6-4, for the title. We want to see her as a bright young athlete,
as someone who can elevate the sport of tennis with her God-given
ability on the court.
And then we read things like this, from
Bruce Jenkins in the San Francisco Chronicle:
The fashion statements were bold, or something
like that. Already working with a seductively short dress,
Sharapova`s designer opened a long slit inside the hip, just to
tantalize those already obsessed with her looks. Serena, meanwhile,
has had better brainstorms. It appeared that a 5-year-old had gone
wild with a pair of scissors on the bottom of her dress, suggesting
tear-off phone numbers on a supermarket bulletin board.
And this, from the
Telegraph in the U.K.:
Sharapova was also attired for the disco floor in
a revealing halter neck which drew an appreciative wolf-whistle from
the packed crowd who even lined the roof of the broadcasting centre
to catch a glimpse of the Siberian Siren, whose distinctive grunt
once earned her an official reprimand at Edgbaston following a
complaint from a player on a distant court.
It’s unavoidable, this sex-and-sports thing with
women’s tennis. So we did what any responsible publication would do: We
put Maria to the test.
THE MARTANNA SCALE
On one end of the scale is Martina Navratilova, tennis
legend and…ahem...handsome woman. On the other end is Ms. Anna
Kournikova, a looker who has had more NHL All-Stars than Grand Slam
titles in her illustrious career. Think of the impact his young woman
has had on professional sports. Would there even be an ESPN Page 2
without her and Jenny Finch?
So, using the incredibly scientific and
awe-inspiringly accurate MARTANNA Scale, we find that
Maria Sharapova rates an…
8. She’s a
young, attractive Russian blonde. She doesn’t want to be seen as a
tennis babe, but she doesn’t exactly play in a prison jumpsuit, does
she? But, she’s also really talented, dropping her below Anna K.
because there’s nothing hotter than a model-cute, pathetically awful
and perilously incompetent performer; hence, the appeal of Hilary
Duff.
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