During the US Open final for women’s tennis, Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka were playing for the Grand Slam Title and 3.8 million dollars. During the match Serena Williams was being targeted for cheating and other controversial penalties throughout the match. Even though Williams was losing the match there continued to be unfair calls and accusations. Umpire Carlos Ramos, who is a well known umpire around the tennis community fed Williams fire when issuing unfair calls when he’s never done this to a male player. This sparked interest, because men and women are treated unequally in 2018, and women in sports have dealt with this for awhile now. More recently women in the tennis community have been targeted for the outfits they decide to wear and for finally sticking up for women’s rights in equality.
During the match Ramos and Williams started to argue over penalties that should of never been given out. Ramos quickly fought back with her not wanting to get yelled at by a female player by giving her 3 penalties throughout the match. The first argument Ramos and Williams got into occurred in the second game during the second set, when Williams coach Patrick Mouratoglou supposedly tried to coach her with hand signals. Ramos gave her a warning and made sure it wouldn’t happen again during the match. Williams didn’t appreciate this call because she had not seen Mouratoglou give her any “signal” because she was on the other side of the court. After Ramos made this call she went up to him and said she would never cheat and “would rather lose the match than be accused of cheating.” Ramos made this call even though Williams was on the other side of the court and couldn’t see her coach do this.The second argument came during the second set between the third and fourth game when Williams slammed her racket down on the ground and breaking it from frustration after losing her own service game. Ramos called this and gave her a point penalty. This made Osaka start the next game 15–0 instead of love all. Ramos commented that the penalty came from the coaching during the match as well as Williams slamming her racket. Williams was already frustrated by this point in the match as she was losing and also getting points taken away from her. After the game change she went to the sideline yelling at Ramos that she deserved an apology from him and called him a thief. Ramos gave her an infraction calling it “verbal abuse” and took an entire game away from her, meaning Serena would be serving for the ninth game and the final game of the match. Osaka ended up winning the match and got her first Grand Slam title but fans were so upset that Williams lost they were booing and yelling at her taking the special moment away from her.
After the match, Williams went on to do an interview and congratulated Osaka but mentioned how men and women get treated differently in sports. Men are allowed to say and do much worse things and not get in trouble while women playing sports are getting in trouble for much smaller things. During The French Open earlier this year, Serena Williams got in trouble for wearing an all black catsuit. French Open Foundation decided to ban the suit even though Williams explained it’s for blood clot prevention after she had a rough pregnancy. Earlier in the week during the US Open, French player Alize Cornet took her shirt off for less than five seconds after realizing she had it on backwards. The umpire gave Cornet a code violation because she took off her shirt and the audience saw her sports bra. Sports want to see women dress a certain way making it impossible for women to wear and do what they want. This is causing a lot of news because men are allowed to take off their shirts for periods of time during matches and they don’t get an eye batted at them but the minute a woman takes her shirt off for half a second she gets penalized; this isn’t fair.
In an article by Reality Check team on BBC News according to them, the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) believes there should be no difference in standards of tolerance provided to the emotions expressed by men and women and is committed to working with the sport to ensure that all players are treated the same. We do not believe that this was done. This is from the WTA and they agree that women are getting treated differently, Williams and Osaka match just proved that even more. Umpires are more likely to give penalties to women than men because they feel the need to stick up for themselves. Later in the article it states men can say 10 times worse and don’t even get a warning.Men such as Rafael Nadal a year ago yelled at Ramos, calling him much worse names but only got warnings and didn’t get any penalties. Women and men are divided in the sports community all together. Men will not get punished or in trouble while women are fighting for their rights. After the match Williams was fined 17,000 dollars in penalties just because she was emotional during a match.