Why Are The French Freaking?

By Chris Oddo

Photo Credit: Julian Finney/ Getty

(June 28, 2012)—One, two, three… I can’t sleep. I am counting French freakouts as if they were sheep. I was inspired to do so because of yesterday’s headline-making quotes from Gilles Simon. Seems Gilles felt the need to stick his foot in his mouth the other day as a means of celebrating the fact he was named to the ATP’s player council recently.

If you haven’t heard about the comments that Simon made to French radio and L’equipe, I will get you caught up:

Simon made some incendiary remarks about the WTA, pursuing the argument that men deserve more money than women because they play best-of-five setters at the Grand Slams.

He also took a jab at the WTA, and poked fun at their inability to draw fans, basically saying that the men play better tennis, are a better draw, and therefore should be compensated for it.

Today, he tried to pull back, attempting to clarify his words, saying “Tomorrow if women's tennis is more interesting than men's tennis, if the price of the women's final is higher than the price of the men's final, they will deserve to win more money than us. That's just the way it works. [I] Just feel like it's fair. Just to say it has to be equal because there is a struggle in life in general, I'm not sure it's a very good argument."

Regardless of the financial imperative in the argument, or whether or not Simon has a point (he says most men agree with him but won’t say it) I think it’s naïve of Simon to think that dragging women’s pay down would do anything even remotely positive for the sport.

All Simon is doing is overlooking the fact that women work just as hard at their careers as men do. They practice just as hard, they spend just as much time developing their craft, and they play with as much intensity. Why all the harsh words anyway? Aren't we all on the same team, trying to grow the game together? Just because the ITF has chosen to have women play best-of-three set matches in Slams doesn’t mean that their product is suddenly inferior to the men’s.

Maria Sharapova put it nicely today when she said “I'm sure there are a few more people that watch my matches than his."

True that.

Simon’s freakout is one of three French freakouts that have hit the tennis tabloids in the last year, but it’s not even really a freakout compared to what Michael Llodra did at Indian Wells in March.

Llodra (French freakout No. 2) is in a class all his own for calling a young Korean-American woman a “Chinese whore” during a match, then sending her autographed clothing as an apology. I mean, really Michael were you assuming that she wanted your autograph after you hurled racist remarks at her?

No, what she wanted is a proper apology. And you never gave it!

And speaking of proper apologies, I don’t know that Yannick Noah, French freakout No. 3, has ever apologized to all the Spanish people he carelessly offended when last November he made the sweeping generalization that all Spaniards are doping. His remarks were completely baseless and they only served to unfairly associate the outstanding accomplishments of Spanish tennis with PED’s.

It's another instant of a French tennis icon uncessarily pulling the sport down and shining an unecessarily negative light on it.

Forgive me for pigeonholing the French here. Let me also say that I am a huge fan of France, French tennis, French wine, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Nicolas Mahut, Serge Gainsbourg, Edith Piaf, French Bistros and the gorgeous, flowing French language.

Still, these three Frenchman are worthy of being called out for their bird-brained comments. I've got to call it as I see it: the French are freaking out way, way too much these days.

Let's hope this is the last French faux pas we see for some time.