Tennis
Wimbledon TWAGs – tennis wives and girlfriends serving self-promotion
You could barely believe your eyes. There she was, 26-year-old Paige Lorenze, climbing uninvited on to the court at the Queen’s Club Championships to pose for pictures with her boyfriend Tommy Paul, for all the world as though she, not him, had actually won last week’s tournament.
It was an effortless and totally inappropriate upstaging. As she clasped one handle of the trophy, she was even wearing a teeny tiny dress that looked just like tennis whites!
Placing red talons around his neck, she dragged his head down to her level for a photo, which swiftly went viral.
American Tommy looked miserable, a man who’s perfected the art of swinging a racquet outmanoeuvred by a woman whose only talent appears to be to swing her hair.
I used to watch Wimbledon and when the camera landed momentarily on Roger Federer’s wife Mirka, for example, or Kim Sears (wife of Andy Murray), or Jelena Djokovic, as they sat cool and calm behind giant sunnies, I would marvel at their supportive stoicism.
They were there to soothe and to console. Only at the most tense and critical of moments did they allow themselves a tiny whoop, the flicker of an air punch.
You could tell, when Murray looked up at the stands for reassurance, his loins were immediately girded.
This year, however, there is a new gaggle of groupies who really do believe they are the stars of the show, given they — vicariously, undeservedly — have millions of brain-dead online followers too stupid to grasp what ‘Let’, ‘First Service’ or even ‘Out!’ means.
Yes, building a personal brand as an ‘influencer’ on the back of a romantic relationship with a male tennis player is now a valid career, it seems, a symptom of the exploitation of what was once a dignified sport.
Indeed, the Tennis Wives and Girlfriends — TWAGs, as they are known, though personally I favour the collective Tennis Wives And Trophies — have no need of a bored BBC cameraman focusing in on their faces, since they are posting endless images of themselves on social media anyway.
Here is Costeen Hatzi, the ‘content creator’ and squeeze of Nick Kyrgios; Hannah Dal Sasso, model girlfriend of Australian player Thanasi Kokkinakis; and Maria Gonzalez Gimenez, the 24-year-old arm candy of last year’s Wimbledon champ Carlos Alcaraz, who often poses with a surfboard (and who would know the difference, frankly?)
The queen of them all — the most famous woman in men’s tennis — is Morgan Riddle. But the only riddle I can think of is why on earth world number 13 Taylor Fritz puts up with her.
She posts videos of herself getting ready to ‘look at tennis’ on Wimbledon’s very own lifestyle channel, Threads (did you know it had one? Me neither).
Riddle is ‘thinking of transitioning to Formula 1’, apparently. Yes, the puzzle is why she hasn’t done so sooner, given that men’s boiler suits and flameproof underwear are so much sexier and edgier than a T-shirt and plimsolls.
Pushy Paige, who has a tally of famous ex-boyfriends — ‘New balls, please!’ — to rival the number of trophies on the Federers’ mantelpiece, even posted photos of her feet astride The Queen’s Club trophy last week.
It’s not yours, Paige! Did you endlessly hit a ball from the age of three or four, never have a life, a day off, any other interests at all? No!
How humourless, frozen in aspic, these women seem. Endlessly worried about angles, making a fish face for the selfies backstage or in a Vuitton-strewn hotel suite.
They all look so similar, too, cut from the same bland cloth, raised on the same prescriptive YouTube make-up tutorials.
We might roll our eyes at these women, assume they are as harmless as a chair, but these so-called influencers and fashion ‘designers’ (Paige has her own clothing brand with a strawberry theme for Wimbledon week, of course, while Costeen has launched a luxury clothing rental business) are demeaning to all womankind.
I feel sorry for the men, too, saddled with these preening princesses who probably scream ‘don’t smudge me!’ should they hove in for a kiss.
I imagine the fear of failure, pulling a hamstring, is even worse when your girlfriend is relying on you to provide fodder for her daily posts.
When Kyrgios pulled out of Wimbledon last year, Costeen posted ‘heartbroken’ with a sad face and broken heart emoji on Instagram. He’s not playing again this year, but thankfully he is commentating.
These young male stars are simple souls, which means they doubtless have no idea they are being played.
Oh, and breaking news. Tommy Paul will not be playing at Wimbledon this week due to a neck injury.
Only joking, but I think Paige just aged ten years…
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