If you listen to enough of the television commentary by John McEnroe and Jimmy Arias, you quickly realize that their shticks are different shades of the same broadcast persona. McEnroe being the irritable former champion who still wants to challenge the establishment and question every little detail of the game. In the case of Arias, he’s the former top five player who has a bit of a chip on his shoulder that he didn’t live up to his potential – something he makes clear in his bitter and sometimes flippant commentary.
Still, you might be willing to trudge through a match with them because you’re waiting for that one nugget that nobody else can deliver. They can do that because they’ve been there, right at the top of the sport. They’ve been around the best. They’ve beaten the best. They’ve been coached by the best. And that’s why they can offer that one revelation that moves us one step closer to understanding our perplexing tennis universe.
This comment isn’t one of them: “From my standpoint, I don’t think she’s been great for women’s tennis because she wears her hat so low that you can’t even see her face or her eyes during a match, and so you don’t get a connection as much as you could.” That was Jimmy Arias commenting on Iga Swiatek on the Tennis Channel’s “Inside-In” podcast last week. After going back and listening to the entire episode, this quote making the rounds isn’t out of context. It’s exactly as awful as it sounds.
If Arias had bothered to do his homework on Swiatek, he may have read the essay she wrote earlier this year for The Players’ Tribune (literally titled “The Story of a Polish Introvert”) in which she talks about how she’s worked to overcome social awkwardness. “There was a time in my life when I was so introverted that speaking to people was a real challenge. Until I was 17 or 18, it was hard sometimes to look people in the eyes. I hated how hard it was for me,” Swiatek wrote. “It felt really bad not being able to make connections.”
Arias would hardly be the first person to say they have a hard time connecting to Swiatek. Every tennis fan has their own quality they look for in a player, and no player is universally loved. But maybe he could be a little more kind with his comments toward a young woman who is, in fact, loved by many — and who has confessed she’s had a hard time connecting, too.
These days, in addition to his commentary gigs, Jimmy Arias is the director of player development at IMG — the very place he started his march toward pro tennis as a teenager, back when it was the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. Presumably, he sets the tone for how scores of young players train at IMG. Let’s hope he doesn’t evaluate them — especially the young women and girls — the same way he did Swiatek, because some of us see Iga’s eyes just fine.
