If you want to see an example of unbelievably unprofessional behavior from a professional tennis player then look no further than the video above.
In the first set of Anabel Medina-Garrigues’ quarter-final match in Madrid against Serena Williams, Medina-Garrigues asks for the new balls at the change of ends. The parasol hiding her from the view of the umpire, she takes one ball and begins to rub it against her racket, fluffing it up. Yes, you read right. She rubs a ball from the just opened can, cans opened every seven games to let the game be played with bouncier balls that fly off the racket. Yes, those very balls that you hold up to your opponent before you serve to reassure them the game will be played in the best possible conditions. The ball-boy holding the parasol looks on at this untypical behavior, the fluffing up of said tennis balls. Medina-Garrigues throws the ball to the back of the court and sets to work on the next one. The tennistv camera is as transfixed by what she is doing as she is, moving in up close to show you what the umpire, the one person on the court who should be witnessing this, cannot, her view obscured by the parasol. Medina-Garrigues checks the back of the ball to see how fluffed up it is, fluffs a little harder and, when she is satisfied, gets rid of the ball before continuing in her quest to take away the advantage that the new harder balls would have had for her opponent and to make the balls how she would like them, nice and fluffy. Time running out, she rushes through the next few and then turns to see the camera on her. Her eyes narrow beneath her cap. She gets up, the parasol closes and Medina-Garrigues looks round again, perhaps to check she got away with it.
It would seem she had. The umpire had not noticed and neither had Serena (what a priceless reaction that would have been!) But as the match went on, the fluffing up did not prove to work out for her. Medina-Garrigues lost a tight first set. And though she won the second set to love, only Serena’s seventh love set lost in her career, and led by a break in the third, Medina-Garrigues fluffed up herself, dropping serve and losing the third set 7-5.
It was not only the match she lost either. As media interest grows in what she has done and debate mounts as to whether or not it was mere gamesmanship or out and out cheating, whatever reputation she has is nowhere to be found.
The case is still out for some on Medina-Garrigues actions but one thing is clear to The tennis review. That old line they tell you at school, the one about cheats never prospering, well that was never better illustrated than yesterday afternoon in Madrid as Medina-Garrigues went down in three to Serena Willians.
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