Behind The Scenes of Women’s Tennis
Tennis is the most organised and most played women’s sport in the world, and the most highly paid. For a good thirty years it has brought joy to a handful of exceptional champions and, to a lesser extent, to about a hundred aspiring stars. That’s not many, in view of the thousands of girls who making significant sacrifices, regularly launch themselves into battle.
What’s hiding behind the glamorous image of businesswomen dressed like fashion icons? Alongside a few gilded lives, how many ruined hopes, martyred bodies, damaged personalities and broken families are there? How much unfair pressure, emotional blackmail and sexual abuse is there?
And the individual cases keep mounting up. At every level. Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Jennifer Capriati or Marie Pierce were great champions but all of them, without exception, stumbled and suffered. More recently Marion Bartoli and Aravane Rezaï’s relationships with their fathers came under scrutiny. Not to mention an array of court cases (Draguignan, the Camaret affair, Levallois), turning the spotlight onto abusive trainers. Struggling with religious faith, disappointments in love, parenting problems and legal proceedings, prominent tennis women are trying to rebuild their lives in a helpless quest for an often fragile balance.
Dominique Bonnot has already co-written many books with Yannick Noah, Henri Leconte, Christophe Dominici, etc. This more personal work represents a sort of return to her years of apprenticeship and her achievement at the end of a career mostly devoted to tennis.
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