I can remember being home from school during the summer and waking up in the morning, always thankful to see that morning soap operas on NBC were replaced by tennis. It’s not that I was really much of a tennis fan, but I hated soap operas. But, by just having tennis on in the background while I was doing other stuff made me understand the game a bit. But more importantly, to me, it made me a fan of certain players. And they were always the women players. I found men’s tennis actually kind of boring. It took longer for matches to be resolved and it was mostly all about power. Serve, volley, kill. Wash, rinse, repeat. But I noticed that the women’s game had a lot more rallying back and forth and the set ups of the shots were less predictable. And what male on earth wasn’t a fan of Chris Evert Lloyd? And then Jennifer Capriatti came along. And Monica Seles. I didn’t really care who won, as long as Martina Navratilova didn’t, which meant that for the most part, I was unhappy with who won. She was like the Darth Vader of women’s tennis. Expressionless (at least to me). Didn’t seem happy. Didn’t know that wearing glasses and a headband wasn’t attractive. But she annihilated people. Gladly, for me, her reign of terror was near the end when I started watching. But she was still the villain and a fantastic one at that.

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