Maria Sharapova won her second French Open title on Saturday, and of course her victory was accompanied by her trademarked incessant shrieking. Apparently started by Monica Seles, shrieking and grunting have been taken up by many other players, male and female. But I find Sharapova’s vocalizations particularly disturbing because they’re so loud. Here’s what it sounds like:
It’s annoying to non-shrieking opponents, it can throw them off, and it disturbs the crowds. And it’s not as if it’s necessary: even Sharapova herself has admitted that she doesn’t know why she does it, and doesn’t even know whether it helps her game. Apparently it’s just part of the “routine.” (See here starting at 2:25.)
Why do judges allow this? It’s as if a baseball batter, while waiting for a pitch, were to shriek at the pitcher. Anyone who did that would be thrown out of the game.
(Let me add out that there’s never been a controlled experiment showing the efficacy of shrieking, which would be hard to do anyway. And you can’t justify it like faitheists justify religion—because it makes the grunter feel good. Maybe it does, but it annoys the hell out of everyone else.)
The fact it is annoying to others particularly their opponents could be seen as an advantage.
I agree the judges should crack down on this screaming and grunting. I used to like to watch tennis matches, but can’t bear to watch anymore because of all the racket.
In the absence of a rule on the matter, the judges can’t and shouldn’t do anything.
A rule change is a perfectly fine thing to be in favor of and that’s what it will take to address this.
You can’t watch tennis because of the racket?
LOLOLOLOL!
Sorry Jerry, but I think you’re wrong on this one. For some players, such vocalizations are a natural result of making a great physical effort. You’ll hear grunting when athletes lift heavey weights or try to karate-chop boards in half too. If it was done to throw off the opponent, it would be done when the opponent was hitting the ball. Let the athlete do what they can to play their best. We tune in to see excellence, not to hear silence.
… and yet, no tennis players at all felt the need to do this before about 1990. Were Laver, Borg, Connor, and McEnroe just not “making a great physical effort”.
And suspiciously, all the players do feel the need to grunt have the same coach, who apparently teaches it as a way to get an edge over your opponent.
Actually, the Wikipedia article Jerry linked to mentions Connors as “one of the first grunters in male tennis”.
I suspect that many players of earlier eras simply didnt let themselves grunt. Keep in mind the sport’s history as a country-club type sport. Hard to imagine a woman grunting while playing in a long dress.
The statement that every grunting player has the same coach is laughable. The article Jerry linked to has a short list of “contemporary” grunters. They do not have the same coach.
However, I wouldnt be surprised if there are coaches who teach grunting, not as a mind game, but as a way of establishing the rhythm of the shot, insuring an exhale at the right time, etc.
I suspect that while grunting helps the grunter, it also helps the opponent. The grunt comes when the player is making his/her effort, and this may provide early information as to when the player will be hitting the ball, which might help the opponent know sooner whether the shot is going down the line or cross-court.
As one who sometimes grunts or makes other noises during intense effort, here’s my theory:
It is meant to distract the grunter his- or herself from the pain or other discomfort associated with the effort.
When I lift weights, I occasionally grunt as I force myself to do the last one or two reps of a heavy set. The noise seems to takes my attention away from the pain just long enough to finish the set.
Somewhat surprisingly, I sometimes do something similar when I’m performing music. I sometimes fairly audibly suck air through pursed lips or clenched teeth during difficult passages, particularly if I’m not 110% prepared. My guess is that it masks or helps me not to pay attention to small imperfections in my playing so that I can power through and not let the small imperfections completely destroy my confidence and totally derail the performance.
Seems to me it could be the same kind of deal with karate chops and tennis swings.
(I am working on not doing the second one.)
On musical performance, I tend to do this too. I try to suppress it. (I guess if one is a wind-player it’s not an issue! 🙂 )
I have heard it on many records too (Christopher Parkening in particular.)
So, like Lamaze breathing, then.
😀
I don’t agree. This is more performance art and strategy than effort. Screaming or loud grunting when a player hits the ball masks the sound of the ball hitting their rack, which can alert the other player that they have hit it flat, a slice, the frame…you get the idea. Completely unnecessary, especially in a non-contact, one on one sport. It is annoying and should stop.
“racket”…I’m going to take hell for that typo.
Agreed.
Read the linked article. Grunting masks the sound of the grunter’s racquet hitting the ball, depriving the opponent of important information about the impact and the ball’s subsequent trajectory.
Suppose a player were to trick out their racquet with a strobe light that gave off a bright flash every time they hit the ball. Would that be OK? Loud grunting is the sonic equivalent of that.
I have seen her in a practice session and she does not do it then so your argument flies out the window. It is deliberate gamesmanship and it puts me off women’s tennis entirely.
No, it just means she’s not practicing with the same intensity as she plays with when there’s money and championships on the line.
I’ve also seen Maria and several other yellers and squealers in practice sessions at the US Open and none of them make the noises they do in games. I can’t guess whether it’s a deliberate attempt to interrupt the opponent’s concentration, but it is mildly annoying to many people watching matches.
Let me assure you that it is not… as a former college tennis player (I played on a team that won an NCAA championship), grunting is a common part of the game that no one really thinks about. It may be annoying to the fan, but that is a whole different issue… I find it very hard to believe that there is any gamesmanship going on. These players are putting literally all of their effort into every shot, the men and women for the most part grunt the same amount, it’s just that due to anatomical differences the women’s grunt is higher pitched and more jarring.
I think that’s right, Jeff. In fact, some “gamesmanship,” if there is any, may come from the opponents of grunters/screamers, who, before a match, try to prevail upon umpires to get into their opponents’ heads about it. All the same, prominent figures in the sport, like Navratilova, insist that the loudest, at least, are cheating in effect, by masked the sound of the ball on the strings–and they have a point.
Even if its an attempt at gamesmanship, I can’t imagine its all that effective. While we may watch these top players play 10-20 times per year, they play each other in matches probably more like hundreds of times per year. So the ‘annoyance’ and ‘masking the shot sound’ factor might work on the audience, but its going to have a much smaller – I’d say probably negligible – effect on the opponent.
Its kind of like being a lefty. It gives you an edge against novice players or players who rarely play lefties, because its unusual. However, all of the people in the top 100 can be counted on to have played so many lefties (and so many grunters) that any edge you may have had is essentially gone.
I’m going to come down in favor of letting them do it, mostly because I really dislike TV time outs and other rules manipulations that are put in place solely to make a sport more spectator-friendly.
This is a rude comment and you could have made your point without attacking another reader. Apologize for saying “sums you up totally” or you’re banned.
Well, at least from my own experience, I’ve found myself emitting the odd grunt and yelp whilst going for things in sport. I don’t know why I do it either (though it’s not on a par with Sharapova). No one’s ever complained to me about my vocalisations though (and it’s not been at tennis but many other sports eg squash, volleyball, football etc)
What would be interesting to see is if the volume and frequency have increased over time, or if they’ve stayed the same. If they’ve increased, perhaps it’s become habitual?
The occasional involuntary grunt is not a problem. Deliberate grunting on every damn shot (except for drops) is something that has been introduced to tennis, as far as I can see, purely to counter the same from the opponent – in terms of its potential to break concentration. If your opponent does it, you have to do it back. It’s stupid and ruins the game. Squash players exert every bit as much effort as tennis players and do not grunt on every shot. The same is true in cricket/baseball.
What Kevin says.
Plus, of course, sports-persons are notoriously prone to superstitions and reinforcing random behavioural patterns to the point of OCD. Skinner’s rats (or was it pigeons?) repeatedly fixing on a circumstantial pattern of behaviour in order to elicit grain/ cocaine/ water/ reward from a dispenser driven by a random noise generator. Tennis players shriek, golfers wear the red jersey, and soccer superstars get drunk and roofie a random fan.
There is at least one study suggesting that it is an advantage:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013148
Not if it’s banned.
I had a friend who was a recording tech for the CBC when they were recording Glenn Gould playing Bach.
He was not able to refrain from humming along as he played. They tried everything including putting a box on his head to try to prevent the humming from showing up on the final recording. Didn’t always work, you can still hear it on some recordings.
And now, more than thirty years later, that humming is a treasured connection to a great artist and much-missed human being. The recordings live on, and every so often, just for a moment, the man does too.
Oscar Peterson also hummed as he played. I have a CD of him live at the Bluenote in NYC. It is low but very noticeable.
I was thinking of Gould and other “hummers” when I wrote my response to wildhog up thread a bit. I think it stems from insecurity, however slight or subconscious it may be.
Yes, I had forgotten about Gould. I think this was charming in him.
I understand it’s been banned in the junior levels with the intention that it will eventually filter up to the adults when the current crop retires.
Not everywhere. But, yes, that’s the way to handle it. It’s an issue, and the sport is trying to address it.
In tennis, there should be no restrictions on laryngeal muscles. Period. It may be annoying to some spectators, but so what? Ley them deal with it as they will.
If football stadiums were quiet places, how would it sound to hear the players playing? It would sound a bit like the soundtrack to a gay pornographic film. If football fans decided to be totally silent during games, would the NFL have to assert regulations on players’ use of laryngeal muscles? How absurd would that be?
If the SF Giants pitcher Tim Hudson started emitting a sharp growl with each fastball, what could MLB do about it? Should they do anything? I don’t think so.
I remember a clip of Nolan Ryan grunting when he cut loose a hundred mph-er, but he was mic’d up for video purposes. I’m not sure the hitter and ump could hear him, and it wasn’t a noise that could be construed as intentionally distracting. Hudson could maybe get away with one grunt Sharapova-style, but if he kept it up and it pissed off his opponents, he’d get plunked first pitch on his next at-bat.
Given that NFL football is a violent contact sport, grunting, etc. is to be expected. Comparing it to tennis, a sport in which the audience is quiet, there is no physical contact, and the physical strain cannot possibly be as intense as 300 lb. guys going up against other 300 lb. guys (for just one example).
That’s kind of a silly example.. is a 300lb guy going against a 300lb guy the same as 2 100lb guys going against each other? There is serious physical effort going into every single shot these people hit, its only natural that some exertion noise gets let out
When it reaches the point where it’s deliberately done to distract or deceive the opponent, it should be stopped.
Tennis is performed in quiet. Generally, the players (or umpires) wait until the crowd is quiet before proceeding. The fact that they don’t do it while practicing and the fact it was very uncommon until recently pretty much show that it is done intentionally and for a purpose: Trying to gain an advantage over the opponent, outside the actual game: hitting the ball well.
How loud and outrageous would they need to get before you’d stop it? A continuous shouting or shrieking? Intermittent yelling at odd moments? What if they yell profanities or personal insults at the opponent? The strobe light analogy, in the comments above, is a good one too.
They do it on their stroke because it has evolved that they can get away with it.
Would you object to them shouting when the other player tosses for their serve? Why? (“I was working really hard to move to anticipate the serve position, no harm no foul, right?”) How does that not apply when they are returning? (Or maybe it’s N/A for you if you don’t care if they shout at the toss.)
About a hundred years ago when I was a shot putter in high school, my coach told me I was too quiet and need to grunt more when I threw. Oh, BTW, I am female.
Wow, Jerry, I can’t believe you posted this! I’ve been saying the same thing for YEARS now.
I’ll bet if we looked at some tennis matches from decades ago you’d hear little to no grunting. Archival tennis footage will probably prove me right. But this modern grunting is a meme of some kind that took traction I don’t know when. It’s an affectation. It’s “acting” of a kind, to let spectators know how hard they’re playing. (I just looked again at some of the comments above and I see that Jonathan Dore said the same thing: pre-1990 tennis players were relatively silent. Now they grunt EVERY time they hit the damn ball! I can’t stand it.)
I can’t stand it either. I don’t watch women’s tennis anymore because of it.
A friend just wrote me with his interesting take on it:
—
I’ve heard that the grunting is not for spectators or attention about how hard I’m playing. It’s purely about messing with the player across the net. If you grunt simultaneously to hitting the ball, the opponent loses a tiny bit of info he could use as to the sound of the ball being struck. The grunting screws that up. What it is at the end of the day is officially sanctioned poor sportsmanship. But yeah, it’s horrible to bear as spectators.
AGREE 100%! It’s B.S. that should have been stopped years ago.
Another thing that should be stopped is spitting during NFL, MLB. NHL. etc. games.
Absolutely. But the spitting is much worse, because it’s deliberate, unnecessary, and entirely divorced from at athlete’s preparation or performance.
I could not watch much of the finals of both the men and women. I can’t stand the noise, as has been addressed, but also the OCD routines of some players grate on me. Rafa has a long ritual that includes pulling his shorts out of his butt and putting his hair behind his ears every single time. The other guy needed to bounce the ball 10 or more times before he could serve and if distracted he would begin the ritual all over again. It makes for a long, annoying and disgusting match.
That is why they have a time limit on the server. If you find them annoying, try watching Ivan Lendl back in the day.
Ritualistic behavior in sports is fascinating to me. It is very common in sports. Especially MLB.
It’s common in golf too. I was watching Ben Crane, a local golfer, this weekend win the tournament. He had a ritual that took a great deal of time and he too had to start the routine fresh every time something bothered him. I soon cared little whether he won or lost. Afterward he thanked god for the win. Maybe god could help him realize a quicker pre-shot routine. I don’t think it glorifies god if every shot is a grind. You’d think with god on your side you could just step up and hit the damn thing.
Ya, and get off my lawn, too.
Amazing how many pro golfers are deeply religious and no doubt that applies to other sports too. My guess is that their minds are so attuned to their sport that they don’t have much inclination to critically evaluate other aspects of the world they live in. And perhaps religion is a short cut to the emotional security needed to be able to perform at the highest level without choking.
“Why do judges allow this? ”
Turn the volume down on your TV!
I, for one, am amused by the grunts. But, frankly, I notice them more when women do them because of the contrast of expectations – feminine, but fit, women, and loud athletic grunts. Yet there is no reason why women shouldn’t be as free to grunt as they please just as the men do. It’s tennis, not a library.
Couldnt agree more. There’s a mute button on every remote control. Maybe they should put a tennis ball on it to help give people the idea.
But suppose we actually want to hear the commentators? What do we do then? What if we want to hear the ball hitting the racket? There are a multitude of reasons why we might not want to watch a tennis match on a muted television, and we shouldn’t have to. If a significant proportion of fans don’t like something about the game, then it needs be changed. It’s completely unnecessary. Get it out of the game. Simple.
“If a significant proportion of fans don’t like something about the game, then it needs be changed.”
I disagree. If a significant proportion of *players* don’t like something it should be changed. If fans don’t like it, they can watch something else. If fans would really prefer to watch a Silent Tennis tournament, one would expect a budding entrepreneur to start up a Silent Tennis tournament.
My guess:
Quick, forceful exhalation goes along with use of trunk muscles (as anyone who has played a brass instrument knows — I have played French horn).
Tennis serves use the trunk muscles and the leg muscles, so the exhalation needs to be forceful so that good oxygenated air can get into the lung in the next breath.
A little info on serves found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3445225/
A ballet performance is every bit as demanding as a tennis match, and yet the dancers manage to do it without grunting or shrieking. So I’m just not buying the idea that this is an unavoidable side effect of physical exertion.
And yet tennis is a competitive sport, not an artistic performance under the direction, and conditions, of a creative director.
It is possible to keep quiet even while being tortured. Signs in Pol Pot’s torture chambers warned victims not to scream while being electrocuted. Just because it is *possible* to be quiet under demanding circumstances doesn’t mean we should demand it to be so.
But if the claim is that they can’t control it, that claim is shown to be false. They can control it (or can be trained to control it), but they choose not to.
Should they be required to control it? My take on that is that if grunting confers an advantage that non-grunters don’t have, then a level playing field requires that either everybody grunts or nobody grunts. I vote for nobody.
My take on it is that all of these players grew up training and playing tennis 10-20 years ago when no one cared at all about grunting… in that time period tennis became a much more physical sport and much more baseline oriented as opposed to finesse play at the net. Believe me, trying to return a 100mph ball with topspin and hit it back even harder requires some effort, the grunting is a natural side effect, I don’t think you can find any competitive tennis players that consider it a real competitive advantage or that the “grunters” (who are amongst the best in the world at what they do and may have better perspective than internet commentators) are only doing it to distract their opponent.
Sorry, but this is crap. I played tennis and squash and always played to hit to the max on 98% of shots. Occasionally noise would involuntarily escape me under exceptional duress. There is absolutely no need to deliberately grunt or scream. Tennis should take action to rid the game of it.
Perhaps the max of the pros (who are the best in the world at what they do) requires slightly more effort than what you exert…
No, that does not compute at all. In my experience less skilled players exert the same or more physical effort. Much of which is wasted due to lack of skill.
No, that’s BS. You didn’t watch tennis 30 or 40 years ago if you think they weren’t giving maximum physical effort (and not shouting).
It’s an extra-legal ploy to discomfort and deceive their opponents, full stop.
It does not bother me. Strangely, the quietest smacking at a dinner table will drive me nuts.
Who gets smacked at your dinner table? Or are you talking about the smacking of lips?
I’m someone who gets annoyed by all kinds of noises (especially vacuum cleaners and chalk on blackboard, drills (especially dental!)), but grunting female tennis players don’t bother me at all. I wonder if the sort of annoyance that people feel at the grunting is anything like the annoyance I feel at the squeaky chalk etc? Those sounds are mentally painful to me; they make me wince and feel upset or startled.
Grunting in competitive tennis has a long history. Many of the early players, dating back to the 20s and 30s (especially the men) grunted now and then, but the first high-level player to grunt consistently, on every contact, was Victoria (Palmer) Heinicke, nicknamed “The Grunter,” who competed in the late 50s and early 60s.
Many players since then have grunted disconcertingly–Jimmy Connors, in particular, who was once asked at Wimbledon to “tone it down.” He refused, challenging the officials to default him. they didn’t. Players who grunt or scream claim there’s nothing they can do to change, and indeed Monica Seles had a very hard time trying to eliminate her scream on the court, finally giving up the effort.
It’s too late now to stop Sharapova, Azarenka, and many more ranking players who have learned to play with that habit, no matter whether other players are disturbed by it. The solution, if there is one, is to grandfather current tour players and to announce that “extreme” vocal expression will result in penalties, starting, say, in 2020, or whenever the grandfathered players retire. Tennis, of course, is, like bowling, sport played in silence, so the noises the players make are obvious. In other sports, such vocalizations are part of the atmosphere.
Saw Kathy Horvath play Carling Bassett in 1984 at a club on Sanibel Island. Horvath is a grunter.
I whisper to my buddy ‘I wonder what she sounds like in bed’.
‘She makes a racket’.
LOL
‘Quiet in the stands please’ from the ump
Weird then, weird now. I played a lot of raquet sports, only grunted in pain or laughed at my flukey shots. Never felt the need otherwise.
Swinging a raquet isn’t as physically exerting as lifting a multiple of your body weight.
i regret watching the video.
AFAIK, the grunters aren’t more successful. Any grunters in golf?
Seems like it’d be tough to develop objective criteria about which sounds are to be banned.
Maria Sharapova makes noises while playing? I have been watching her for years and haven’t noticed. I just watched the above clip 3X and didn’t notice anything unusual, but I’m willing to watch it again.
Seriously? Or is this sarcasm? Or did you watch the above video without any volume? 🙂
I might have been distracted.
In baseball, batters could do things to try to throw off pitchers, even without resorting to vocalizations. For example, they could stand half a step closer to the plate as the pitcher begins to wind up, then quickly take their “normal” position in time to take the pitch. Pitchers could do all kinds of nonsense during their windup to be be annoying and distracting as well. The reason they dont do that is that it is poor strategy. Players know they have to do whats best for their own performance in such critical moments, not worry about distracting their opponent.
And tennis players, if they wanted to distract/annoy their opponents, could find a multitude of other means besides grunting. If that was the case, soon the shoe companies would be making shoes made to squeak on tennis courts, for example.
I would love to see data comparing the opinions of professional tennis players, baseball players, and similar elite athletes to non-athletes, with regard to whether they think the tennis players are grunting for gamesmanship or for some other reason. I suspect the gamesmanship charge would be far more popular among non-athletes.
Yes, but you’d have to have the control set of data: How well would the grunters do if they weren’t allowed to grunt?
It’s on obvious ploy.
Thank you! My father would have disowned me if I had done that in a tournament. A little decorum please.
Decorum doesn’t win championships, skill does. Ms. Sharapova has won 4 Grand Slams and is currently ranked #5 among women tennis players. She seems to know what she’s doing.
Sharapove is among the most forceful and relentlessly aggressive women in the sport. Has the shriek she lets loose with every swing helped her? As an indelible aspect of her aggressive style, it seems it has. Has it helped her by subtly intimidating or distracting her opponents? Probably so. And that certainly seems unfair.
“It’s as if a baseball batter, while waiting for a pitch, were to shriek at the pitcher. Anyone who did that would be thrown out of the game.”
Its not the same thing at all. In fact Im sure if a tennis player, while waiting for a serve, were to shriek at their opponent, they would be warned or penalized by the umpire.
Yes, but why? And why NOT on their stroke? Tell me the real difference here. The only difference is that they have been allowed to get away with it.
The difference is the intention.
You are assuming that they are not doing the stroke shout for effect. The data do not support this. See Comment 28 and the reply to Comment 28 (and history) (and many other comments.)
This was extremely rare up until 20 years ago.
This has only persisted because the umpires and the sport generally have allowed it to fester. It is intentional and its intent to to discomfort and deceive the opponent.
The early birds in this got free cover from the “I can’t help it” trope. This doesn’t fly anymore.
*discomfit
And the “I can’t help it” excuse does fly these days, because the vocal habit, begun in some players’ early teens, is unconscious and very hard to break. Monica Seles tried to stop and couldn’t. The solution is to nip it in the bud–in a player’s early development.
The object at that level is to win. If it’s not against the rules, then use it to your advantage. There was a player on Jeopardy recently who played an un-traditional game. He didn’t follow the usual pattern of picking the answers, which made many fans upset. He also held his clicker close to the microphone which threw his opponents off their game. He won. That’s the goal, winning. Arthur Chu is now ranked 4th all-time in non-tournament winnings. His opponents went home.
Winning is the player’s goal, but players aren’t the only stakeholders. Tournament organizers have a duty to maintain the integrity of the game and the perception of fair play so that audiences will want to watch it.
If players are exploiting loopholes in the rules to their own advantage but to the detriment of the game, rule-makers are under no obligation to continue letting them get away with it.
Then change the rules. But if you’re changing the rules to target one player’s dominance, that’s being a bit unfair also. Better to wait until Maria retires, then change the rule so it won’t happen again.
“Has it helped her by subtly intimidating or distracting her opponents? Probably so. And that certainly seems unfair.”
It would indeed be unfair if Sharapova was allowed to shriek and her opponent was not. Since that’s not the case, I can’t imagine what your definition of fairness must be.
Seems like maybe your point is: Win at any cost, regardless of the rules of decorum and accepted behavior — as long as you can get away with it.
Let’s see how that would work out if applied universally …
What’s unfair (if nonetheless permitted) is that Sharapova, benefiting from acquiescent guidance in her early training, should have acquired a habit that, in addition to her tennis skills, can confound some players by depriving them of noises and concentration in a way that few other opponents will manage to do. It’s not a matter of conscious intimidation, of course–and that’s why another player cannot simply say to herself, “Damn it, I’ll do that, too.”
Seems to be more about throwing the other player off as you say.
Actually, the best comparison would be between the baseball pitcher and the tennis server. The levels of exertion and the motions involved are quite comparable, but baseball pitchers don’t grunt or scream when delivering the ball. I believe it would be conceived as unsportsmanlike, even though, in contrast to tennis, there would be no issue of muffling the sound of how the ball has been struck.
Although it is definitely not as annoying as the Sharapova screaming or the Azarenka hooting, I find the grunting or groaring of David Ferrar unnecessary, even though I admire the fact that the fellow is consistent in giving a maximal effort. Perhaps he imagines the sound effects are needed to assure the spectator or the opponent that he is trying his best, but do people really doubt that Roger Federer or Leyton Hewitt are not consistently giving their best because they don’t make analogous noises? Of course not. The noises are unnecessary and unsportsmanlike, as the Danish player Caroline Wozniacki has argued. Martina Navaratilova continues to argue that grunting is cheating.
I’ve seen one pitcher scream delivering a pitch, but then his humerus had snapped.
It was cancer, iirc.
There was a match Sharapova played in England a couple of years ago where a woman got the giggles over the grunting. Sharapova didn’t grunt for the remainder of that match and it didn’t effect her play.
There’s another eastern European female player (who’s name currently escapes me) who used to grunt after she hit the ball, just before her opponent did. It was clear the grunt was just to put her opponent off.
I’m also annoyed by Serena Williams frequently needing to use the bathroom at a time that’s advantageous to her and to put her opponent off. At a tournament last year she demanded to go in the middle of a game and was naturally refused by the umpire. At the end of the game, she no longer needed to, and didn’t for the remaining 45 minutes of the match.
These are forms of cheating and annoy me intensely.
I’ve seen Serena lose a point for screaming *after* she hit a bad shot. The ump’s judgement was correct, that it possibly distracted her opponent and caused her to mess up her return shot.
I found it odd that Nole hardly grunted during the recent men’s final against Rafa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv7VNNowa6g
Noisiest match ever, Sharapova vs Azarenka.
I generally watch them with the volume way down.
Ooops. Sorry about the embed, PCC.
The “effort” argument used to condone grunting is bogus to me for a few reasons. Number one, it seems to be much more common among female players than males. Are female players exerting more effort than male players??? I doubt that.
The second point is that this excessive grunting with effort seems rather unique to tennis. I’m a fan of Olympic weightlifting and have participated in a few contests myself. I have never felt the need to grunt in such a way during a lift. And if you watch world class lifters lifting 2-3 times their bodyweight overhead in very explosive movements, you rarely hear such audible grunts or screams, other than the occasional triumphant scream or two after a world record lift.
Thus, the explanation that it is mainly a form of strategy seems more likely to me.
Oh, the men grunt, too–but their ejaculations are more guttural and low-pitched, so not quite as noticeable or as distracting.
Listening to the posted vids, I’d say these women aren’t grunting–they’re shrieking or yodeling or something. Women grunt the same way men do, but it’s not considered very feminine, so you’re not hearing that.
I totally agree. Like incessant flopping and injury-faking in soccer, shrieking in women’s tennis takes a game that might otherwise be pleasing to watch and adds a serious element of annoyance.
Imagine a double with four shriekers! 😀
Okay, I will now give the definitive word on this issue.
Just Kidding!
But here’s my $0.02. I see lots of people arguing points as if they are opposed when it seems to me that both, or many actually, are correct at the same time. Such is life, it is messy.
Generally speaking, emitting some sort of abrupt vocalization at the moment of some sort of maximum explosive physical effort is very common and taught by experts / coaches / trainers of all kinds of sports. For whatever reasons there is an advantage. It may be mostly mental, it may be physical, but is almost certainly some of both.
Take weight lifting, perhaps the most obvious example and one I have experience with. I disagree with blitz442 above. I have seen a full range of noises from virtually silent to obnoxiously loud from a full range of lifters, ranging from not a clue novices attempting to show off to world class athletes. I myself am quite quiet. I am getting a little old for explosive maximum lifts anyway. But, that abrupt vocalization does help. In some cases you can’t really help it. Air needs to get out, abruptly. For example on a heavy squat, a heavy clean, a heavy leg press, you are seriously compressed at the bottom of the contraction and when you “explode” out of the hole you better exhale forcefully or you might have an embolism.
How loud the abrupt vocalization made is surely purposely exaggerated by many people in competitions for various reasons. To psych themselves up, to psych their opponents out, to distract. I have no doubt that many of these tennis players are purposely exaggerating their grunts/shrieks for reasons other than their physical performance. And I am just as sure than grunting / shrieking at some widely ranging magnitude can enhance their physical performance.
You said it better than I could. Surely all of us, at some point or other when lifting a heavy suitcase or any other heavy object, especially when placing them on a higher plane such as the back of a truck or onto a train, etc., produce a more or less loud grunt or other noise – it does help. Tennis players today hit faster and faster balls at greater and greater speeds, and the effort involved is greater and greater. I seem to remember Jimmy Connors grunting back in the eighties before Monica Seles began emitting grunts too.
I would imagine it’s akin to the kiai used in martial arts.
Now that you’ve mentioned it, I love this young karate master’s routine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65QCHZDXKmA
The kiai from such diminutive figure reminds me of the vociferous cry from a baby panda!
A few people have mentioned Connors. I watched one of his matches against McEnroe on youtube. He emits a mild gasp. Nothing forced and it sounds completely natural. The shrieking of some of the women is in a completely different category. I also watched women weightlifters at the 2012 olympics. Virtually silent.
You think that’s loud? You should hear her during sex!
More seriously, I have the urge to shout “No!” after many of my tennis swings. It seems completely natural to me at the time and takes a strong act of will power and concentration to stop myself (when I do).
I notice most basketball players scream loudly after a dunk or a block, and of course sports fans yell at the least excuse. I suspect this is part of our primate heritage.
Due to a serious lapse in judgement I allowed myself to be entered into an annual extended family ball golf tournament Memorial weekend for the first time since my last debacle almost twenty years ago. As always when I swing golf clubs, I experienced a primitive urge to yell “F^_k!” at the top of my lungs after almost every shot, but only did so (and only threw a club simultaneously) the one time on 18. Give me disc golf any day.