Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

SDB weighs in today on why Anna Kournikova is such a marketing hit, whereas a number of superior tennis players - - the Williams sisters, primarily - - are not. This is one of his best recent posts, and I think he's pretty much nailed it: In an era where sex appeal seems to be the driving force behind most successful advertising campaigns, it's simply to be expected that blond-hair-and-blue-eyes is valued above black-and-muscular-and-more-talented. It's a tad depressing, but there it is. (I also think there's something of the "Russian Princess" factor here that makes her a bit more exotic. If she was from Schenectady and her name was Jolene Johnson, to make up a middle-American name off the top of my head, I suspect she would have to really ratchet up the sex factor to achieve equal success.)

SDB also spends a bit of time discussing the physical attributes desirable in various sports, and I think he's pretty much got it on a lot of those, especially in his discussion of baseball not really favoring any particular physical advantage. Sure, we had Mark McGuire, who was powerfully muscled, but Barry Bonds - - while certainly very fit - - is not nearly as muscular, and yet he's the player of this generation, as well as probably one of the five best of all time, in my opinion. You have big, hulking players in baseball and you have little wiry guys in baseball. And with pitchers, there's an equal disparity: Randy Johnson is something like six-foot-six, and looks like he weighs all of 150 pounds. In fact, one of my favorite baseball moments ever came in an All-Star Game in either 1993 or 1994, when the tall-and-lanky Johnson pitched to the short-and-stocky John Kruk (who proceeded to purposely strike out, so terrified was he when Johnson uncorked a 98-mph fastball over his head).

I do take issue, a bit, with something SDB says at the very end: "I am rather using her as a symbol of what I see as a basic corruption in women's sports in general." I'm really not sure why what he has said here pertains only to women's sports, as opposed to sports in general. Sports marketing is all over the map, really. Definitely, in terms of women, it's the sex appeal that drives the marketing, but I'm not sure that reflects on the sports themselves.

I'm also not sure I agree that women's figure skaters really project an air of "virginity". The coin-of-the-realm there is more elegance, which isn't quite the same thing. As to when the last time a married woman won a major skating event, well - - skating has been trending toward younger competitors winning in most recent years, which is in turn something of a consequence of the increased focus on jumping in the sport. Most of the competitors who can turn in long program with six or seven triple jumps are teenagers, because all that jumping takes a toll (women's bodies aren't as well-suited to doing jump-centric skating as men's bodies are), thus forcing the women into the professional ranks sooner, where jumping isn't so important. (You won't see Kristi Yamaguchi, who won gold in the 1992 Olympics, doing a performance with a lot of triples these days.) And given that these skaters are so young, it's not really a surprise that they're unmarried.

If figure-skating suggests an air of chastity on the part of its female athletes, I think that's more a result of the sport becoming youth-skewed than an intended result of its own (and I'm far from convinced that there even is an air of chastity at all). And even then, it only really applies to the solo women skaters. In the pairs and dance competitions, you'll often find sex appeal all over the place. Torvil and Dean, for example, had so much sexual chemistry that people ever since have assumed they were married, but they weren't; and the Russian pairs often exude eroticism galore.

(And as far as tennis goes, I always thought Steffi Graf was gorgeous. But that's just me.)