So Long, Melbourne
ALISHA SULLIVAN
There is a reason I started this space.
It happened one summer when, in the span of a week, my sister was subject to nineteen articles dedicated to assassinating her character, and over half of them were sprinkled with thinly veiled (a lie, it was overt most of the time) racism.
It takes a lot to bait Naomi. A lot of what was being said wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before, and for the most part, she’s pretty resilient to it.
But, I dunno, finding out that someone compared you to a zoo animal in a supposedly respected publication will wear you down.
There isn’t much you can do to stop that from happening, but when I asked if I could do this thing, where she would get to control some of the narrative, she said, and I quote, ‘Might as fucking well’.
She set two boundaries: nothing she didn’t approve of first, and her private life stayed that way. She wasn’t going to mine that just to remind everyone that she was a human being.
Given that this space started and is still going, clearly, I’ve stuck to those boundaries.
Knowing she had control of it helped. So did avoiding rabbit holes that sent her to dark spaces, but I think she only managed to stop doing that because she knew there was something somewhere that was always going to be on her side.
I’m not unbiased. She’s my older sister and the greatest person I’ll ever know.
But this space isn’t about being unbiased.
Despite my youthful imaginings, I’m not a journalist. I don’t need to be unbiased.
My primary goal here is to provide an antidote to the vitriol that gets sent her way. Just by existing.
Or doing parts of her job.
Naomi was the one to withdraw her and Sam from the mixed doubles in Australia.
She did it while Sam was still on court as he ticked closer to a five-hour match.
For reasons unknown, someone somewhere decided to run with the idea that Naomi did so without Sam’s permission, and with this outright lie, a whole host of things have been written, all sprinkled with a nice, healthy dose of yet more poorly disguised racism.
The decision shouldn’t have actually warranted anything more than one article confirming that it had happened.
But every day, one with a ‘new angle’ cropped up, offering nothing to the conversation except that it kept Naomi in people’s minds.
And not because she was winning. Which she was. The only match she lost was the final.
So, let me clear up some things.
Singles comes first. It always has, it always will. Naomi and Sam saw the schedule and knew Sam, who had to play best of five matches, was going to have to double up. They talked about what the cut-off would be to trigger a withdrawal.
Sam reached that trigger point. Naomi did what she needed to do. That was it.
It would be great if someone could explain to me how Sam was going to be able to play a doubles match after playing for just under six hours in the middle of an Australian summer’s day. He barely made it through that match.
And within hours of finishing it, he had to withdraw from the tournament completely. And all the others until we reach the desert.
If he’d known that at hour four, he would’ve retired from the match and then withdrawn them himself, because as we saw with Wimbledon, the media was much more considerate of the withdrawal when it came from him.
But that isn’t what happened.
What should have been a good week was instead tainted by this non-story that somehow became the only story.
Although it did prove once again that Naomi is capable of greatness, even when people want to try to drag her through the mud.
Wish it wasn’t a sight I’d had to see quite so much over the last twelve years.
For the record, we were always off the schedule until Indian Wells.
This isn’t her disappearing in shame or whatever random path some people might want to go down, and she’s not injured.
It’s just body management. March through to August is intense, and she wants to play as much as she can during that time, so we’re home.
Already can’t wait for her return to the clay…
Until next time, from my bed in London, because flying back from Australia is no joke, and that’s where I live now.