A Look Back at Serena Williams’ Meltdown with Carlos Ramos

In September 2018, Serena Williams went on a long tirade against Chair Umpire Carlos Ramos for supposedly unfair implementation of the rules on her.

The Serena Williams’ tirade consisted of highlighting the fact that this happened because she was a woman and for no obvious fault of her own. Let’s do a brief walk-through of that fateful night.

Carlos Ramos (The Umpire) issued a code violation to Williams for on-court coaching in the second game of the second set. Williams says that, “He was just giving me a thumbs up, we don’t have any code”.

Williams broke Osaka’s serve for the first time to go 3–1 up and then immediately lost serve. She then smashed her racquet which led to Ramos issue an automatic second code violation for Racquet abuse. A second code violation means a point penalty.

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So, Williams loses whatever cool she had and asks the umpire why a point was docked. Ramos mouths something along the lines of “coaching” and was probably referring to the first code violation. Williams says she didn’t receive coaching and follows up with “I have a daughter and I stand for what’s right for her”.

Osaka holds serve and breaks the Williams’ serve again to go up 4–3 in the second set. At this point, Williams was fuming. Her tirade against the umpire continues with lines like, “You will never, ever be on another court of mine as long as you live. You’re the liar. You stole a point from me. You’re a thief too”. At this point, Ramos, probably in disbelief, gives a third code violation to Williams for verbal abuse which means a game penalty.

At this stage, Serena is furious and calls for the match referee. She keeps on complaining and says, “Do you know how many men do much worse than that? This is not fair, there are a lot of men out here who have said a lot of things but because they are men, it doesn’t happen to them. Because I’m a woman, because I’m a woman, you’re going to take this away from me? “.  So, let’s do a fact check on that claim by Williams. Do men really get away with tirades and worse stuff? Data says no in majors, specifically. This study was done over a twenty-year period from 1998 to 2018 and for all four Grand Slams.

If we break it down to the code violations that Williams received, (that is, coaching, racquet abuse and verbal abuse), we see that women have received more coaching violations than men but have received far less violations on racquet abuse and Verbal abuse. Of course, there’s the discrepancy that men have to play best of five sets tennis while women have to play best of three sets.

So, men spend more time on court than women do. But, even if we take that into account, men have a significantly higher proportion of code violations compared to women. Men have been fined 646 times for racquet abuse while women have been fined only 99 times. Men have been fined 62 times for verbal abuse while women have been fined only 16 times. However, women have been fined 152 times for coaching violations while men have been fined only 87 times.

The most controversial one of the code violations in Williams’ case was, the on-court coaching. It’s a slippery slope too. The WTA has legalized coaching in tournaments other than grand slams. That is probably the reason why women register such high numbers in code violations involving coaching. And on-court coaching is something that is very difficult to draw a line with, as an umpire, as to when is it that you penalize someone and when is it that you simply give them a warning (like most other chair umpires). The rule books don’t mention anything about warning, yes. But then, tennis players are used to chair umpires being a bit lenient on that side. However, in this case, Carlos Ramos was not lenient. He strictly followed the rule book. You can’t penalize an Umpire for enforcing the rules aka doing his job.

It’s understandable that Serena felt that she was being robbed. She had faced bizarre calls in a US Open match against Jennifer Capriati in 2004. Yet, the penalties she received in September’s final were partly or wholly her fault. She lost her cool, for, what she deemed to be, an error by the Umpire and proceeded to call him a liar and a thief. You expect a 23-time Major winner to be more focused than that. Supporters of Williams’ claim bring out the fact that former players like John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors would go on such tirades unpunished. However, two wrongs don’t make a right. That just brings out false equivalences from a very different era to defend someone’s arguably indefensible actions. But are tennis rules sexist? No, they aren’t. Are tennis umpires sexist? On a whole, they aren’t. Data says so. One isolated incident, in which the player was arguably at more of a fault than the umpire, shouldn’t bring up a discussion on changing rules or implementation of the rules when they don’t need to be changed.