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THE SCOOP: MONDAY, JUNE
25
Kournikova's BBC flap revisited
By
Matthew Cronin
tennisreporters.net
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Susan
Mullane
Camerawork USA, Inc.
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FROM WIMBLEDON – If you are
going to establish your reputation somewhere, it may as well be
Wimbledon, still the world's most talked about tournament, despite
the efforts by some to bury its grass surface deep under the Tower
of London.
Such is the case with 1997 semifinalist
Anna Kournikova, who was simply atrocious on the big points in her
loss to Tatiana Panova on Monday and then became involved in another
worldwide flap due to her on-air spat with a BBC reporter.
For Anna, Wimbledon is the locale where she first established herself
as a top-10 threat, because she is an excellent athlete and a brilliant
volleyer when she manages to hit a decent approach shot. Moreover,
due to her striking looks, she immediately became a pin-up girl
for London's many tabloids.
As of Tuesday, she made the British Bobbies Most Wanted List due
to her flap with the BBC, which became news because the BBC decided
to make it news.
Sources told tennisreporters.net that the BBC executives
debated for an hour and half as to whether to run the first part
of the interview or not – the portion where Anna gets off her
chair and walks off the set after getting into an argument with
the BBC's Garry Richardson over whether or not he had the right
to make a statement as to where her confidence is. He said it was
low and she wondered where he got the right to make the statement.
They BBC decided to run it, as well as the second take, where is
is pretty clear that Anna was peeved.
RERUN REVISITED
So for the past 24 hours, the BBC has run the tape again and again,
allowing its analysts as well as the rest of the civilized and uncivilized
world to take cracks at Kournikova for being difficult. But did
Anna have a right to upset and should the BBC have run the first
part of the tape, when it knew that Kournikova had requested that
the interview be done again, they concurred and also knew that she
assumed that it was the second part of the interview would air?
No, the BBC should have not have the first part of the tape if it
agreed to re-tape the interview. Journalistically, that is foul
play. If the BBC was satisfied with the first and more sensational
part of the interview, it should have told Kournikova that she could
leave. Instead, she sat back down and answered the questions, even
if she was classically petulant and uninformative.
Maybe the BBC's second interview wouldn't have made sense without
the first part and maybe the network was smart to broadcast both
parts of the interview if it was attempting to show Kournikova as
she really is at times – snide, aggressive and immature. But
Richardson did make a statement about her lack of confidence and
Kournikova is not the only player who gets irritated when a direct
statement is made about her state of mind. He could have rephrased
question, but chose instead to argue with her.
That does not excuse Kournikova from jumping on Richardson. She
could have very easily asked him to rephrase the question without
attacking his interview technique. But that was not, as the BBC's
Pam Shriver said, the real Anna Kournikova that most people see
behind the scenes. That's was a part of Kournikova's personality
that sometimes comes out behind the scenes AND in front of the media
and fans.
As my tr.net colleague Sandra Harwitt wrote yesterday for
FoxSports.com, the Russian superstar was very cooperative and forthcoming
in the press conference that preceded the BBC interview on Monday.
She can be pleasant in private and can also be rude. I can recall
an incident a few years ago when walking down a stairwell while
she was walking up and the minute she saw me, decided to stair at
the wall the whole way up the stairs rather than making eye contact.
I found that laughable as well as inconsiderate. I also remember
chatting with her privately in Palo Alto about one of her former
doubles partner antics and she was cooperative as well as forthcoming.
Anna is apparently furious about what happened with the BBC and
the massive critiques that have come her way as a result of the
broadcast. She told one official that she doesn't understand the
point of trying to be pleasant when she's going to be roasted anyway.
What Kournikova needs to understand is that she cannot unmake her
long history of being confrontational in just a year's time (my
gage of the amount of time that she has spent trying to more cooperative).
Certain people not only like to kick a golden girl/multimillionaire
while she is down, but have been waiting for a long time to get
back at her for a past brush off or rude remark. She has to want
to change and let her better side come out instead of being forced
into it. All the media training in the world that her agency, Octagon,
is putting her through won't make a difference in the long run if
she doesn't believe that her personality is flawed in some way.
HARDER
CRUST NEEDED
Kournikova needs to be more resilient, both on and off the court.
Questions and statements about a tennis player's confidence are
about as common as rain showers at the All-England Club. They are
no big deal.
But Anna's mental state is a big deal because right now, because
whether Kournikova can claw her way back to the top 10 is very much
in question. Her new coach, Harold Solomon says she's a work in
progress and not to look for results until the end of the summer,
but both he and Anna know that she needs a couple confidence-building
wins immediately so that she will fully buy into his program –
which is to almost restructure her game entirely.
Her forehand is frighteningly erratic,
at one moment a weapon and another albatross. She seems to have
lost her knowledge of when she should be coming to net and because
she often comes in behind mid-court approach shots, she is forced
to hit too many difficult volleys. Hence a loss of faith is her
most dependable shot. Her serve still needs work; she never seems
to know where her opponent is going to serve and plays much too
aggressively when her opponents are nervous. She literally handed
Tatiana Panova the match on Monday, a victory she badly needed.
If she was a confident player, she would have made any number or
returns of serves on key break points in the third set if her loss,
but she kept finding the net.
Life for Anna K. is not going to get easier on hard courts this
summer, because her serve will be more vulnerable and she will be
forced to hit more winners from the baseline. She needs to come
at least 10 times a set if she is ever going to challenge the likes
of the Williams sisters or any player of note. Can she regain her
confidence in the next few months and begin to show at least top-20
form again? Possibly, but it will take an unshakable commitment
from Anna and and from a man called Solomon, who may never have
been faced with a more complex and trying task, not even in Biblical
times.
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