Serena Williams calls out alt-right d-bag Tennys Sandgren: people deserve an apology
January 25, 2018As we discussed yesterday, Tennys Sandgren is an Alt-Right douchebag. It feels good to say that outloud, because it feels like there are a lot of people making a concerted effort to normalize and excuse Sandgren’s sketchy words, beliefs, tweets, etc. There are even a lot of American players trying to defend him, although to be fair, I’m not sure many of them know the long, detailed history of Sandgren’s anti-gay, transphobic, racist, neo-Nazi sympathies.
Sandgren made it to the quarterfinals of the Australian Open before he lost in straight sets to the first Korean player to ever make it this far into a slam, Hyeon Chung (sidenote: I’m sort of in love with Chung and his game). Before that QF, Sandgren deleted nearly every tweet he ever sent or retweeted, because that’s how much he believes in what he’s saying, I guess. After he lost, he gave an eyerolly statement to the media which was basically a word salad of churchy dumbf–kery and Ayn Rand misquotes. As I said yesterday, Serena Williams burned Sandgren with a two-word tweet as his QF match got started. And this is is what she wrote hours after he lost:
I’ve been thinking a lot about Serena in her maternity-leave absence from the tour, as I think many other players have been thinking about her too. There are a lot of women on the WTA tour who miss her and understand what she means to the game, means to the tour, means to the entire sport, means to women athletes around the world, and what she means to women of color.
Do men understand what Serena means though? I think someone like Roger Federer understands what Serena means to the sport. Djokovic understands. Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka understand. All of the top guys know her and love her. But the American men… I’m not so sure. Her generation of American men included the likes of James Blake, Andy Roddick, the Bryan Brothers and Mardy Fish. Only the Bryan Bros are still on the tour now, the other dudes have retired (and they were all good friends with Serena too). The younger guys, the Tennys Sandgrens of the tour, do they “get” what a huge call-out this is? Serena is basically telling the tennis establishment that these shenanigans will not stand, that you cannot spend years as a homophobe, a racist, a bigot and a neo-Nazi and then just suddenly try to whitewash your image because you start to win. I f–king dare reporters to ask Sandgren about Serena’s callout at his next event. PLEASE DO THAT.
Also: Serena Williams will be back on the tour in about a month. She’s playing Fed Cup this year!
Photos courtesy of Getty.