Tennis stars used to be sturdy women with a solid backhand, now they're pouting calendar girls and the tennis skills are optional, writes Julie Burchill.
Whenever some burnt-out, glossy magazine art director can't summon an iota of inspiration over what to do with some lady celeb, he'll always resort to dressing her up as one of a handful of icons. Marilyn in the white dress standing over the air-vent, from The Seven-Year Itch. Hepburn (Audrey) in the LBD with the up-do and the fancy fag-holder from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Ursula Andress coming out of the sea in her big bikini in Dr No. Or there's the Tennis Girl Scratching Her Bum.
As a rule, this does nothing more than draw attention to the diminishing appeal of modern sex symbols - with the exception of Kylie, of course, who could be decked out in an al-Qaeda T-shirt, swastika armband and Ku Klux Klan pointy hood and we'd all, including me, go: "Oh, beautiful Kyles! Bless her!" Usually, though, dressing up like past icons just highlights the fact that "she's no Marilyn/Audrey/Bond Girl". Or Bum Girl, even.
What is it about women's tennis? It's not that big or clever: ladies' hockey draws much bigger crowds in England and female football involves a whole other level of sassy broads who aren't afraid of the F-for-feminism word. One would have to conclude that a good part of its appeal is pure smut: the little white dresses, the mandatory showing of knickers and, most blatant of all, that disgusting, pre-orgasmic "Uhh!" noise a lot of them make when they hit the ball. You didn't get Rachel Heyhoe-Flint running after her hockey puck moaning, "Give it to me, big boy!", and this is probably why the noble sport has the practically subterranean profile it does today.
On more occasions than one cares to remember, teenage girls have been sexually assaulted in the queues for oh-so-civilised Wimbledon. Put all this together and it would be easy to conclude that all male fans of female tennis are big pervs.
Yet my dad - the most ocean-going, all-round good-guy I ever knew - adored the ladies' games. From Wimbledon, his favourite player was Billie-Jean King, whose name he adorably and unintentionally pronounced "Jelly-Bean King". He admired her no-nonsense approach and her solid marriage equally, and was visibly taken aback when her gay, secret life was revealed. Until his death he refused to believe that his beloved Jelly-Bean actually played for the other side, and, totally without foundation, blamed her disgrace on the machinations of what he called the "Wade Brigade". For some reason, he found the Blessed Virginia "sly" and "spiteful-looking".
I'm sure that nice Mrs King didn't mean to do it - but after the attempted palimony by that big blonde, tennis was sexed up once and for all. The playboys - Nastase, Gerulaitis, Connors - discovered the Playboy Mansion the playgirls discovered lesbianism. Mind you, very few of them indulged - the majority simply had the very public vapours about being pestered by those dragonish dressing-room dykes. Just after Navratilova came out, there was always some plug-ugly Yankee teenager with a mouthful of metal, or her mother, whining about the sinister Sapphics hanging round the showers. One of them, Tracey Austin, went so far as to paint her nails publicly between sets during one match. The message was clear: I don't dive! Unfortunately, she couldn't play tennis all that well, either.
Navratilova was a bit of a rude awakening for tennis pervs, as it turned out. No doubt a lot of them had wanted their lust objects to be at least bisexual - but, like the wrong kind of leaves on the railtracks, she was the wrong kind of lesbian - a Pyrrhic victory.
It's always been a paradox that if you drew a Venn diagram of "Sexist Male's Wettest Dream" and "Sexist Male's Worst Nightmare", the middle bit would say "Lesbians". All sexed up by frilly pants, balls stored up, damp knickerlegs and porny gasping, and believing now that players had to have big blonde hair and wear stilettos in bed, or that they weren't actually allowed to be lesbians, tennis pervs were bitterly disappointed. They'd wanted Chrissie Evert and Evonne Goolagong stroking each other under a steaming shower; they'd got Martina and her equally sensible gal-pal, looking as if they were about to take the dogs out for a good long walk.
So the pervs began casting around for a bit of tennis-totty worthy of their fantasies. And there were some real lookers. Martina "Swiss Miss" Hingis and Jennifer Capriati. Or Gabriela Sabatini, the sexy Argentinian who retired, burnt out, at 26.
Hana Mandlikova had the legs of a showgirl, but the face of a baby, which made even the pervs uncomfortable - there's illegal, and there's illegal. While in Steffi Graf's face I imagined I could always see the conflict which must occur when the body of a porn star, frequently exposed to the world in skimpy clothes, contains a character of immense seriousness.
The trouble with these girls is that they were simply too good at what they did to be considered truly sexy. A starlet is always sexier than a star because she has less power, and her desire to please in order to succeed can be eroticised as sexual submissiveness.
Come the hour, come the houri, and thus the cack-handed but long-limbed Anna Kournikova became the first female tennis player known more for the calibre of her breasts than her backhand. Fit and buff as Kourni undoubtedly is, am I the only person to have noticed her astounding facial resemblance to Boris Yeltsin, under whose reign over the ex-USSR she first came to fame?
And now the lucky girl who was considered to be the coming Kournikova has let down her fans in the cheap seats - led by the Daily Mail's Weight-Hate Police, of course, who are there to pillory any woman who dares be a pound lighter or heavier than a bunch of sex-starved, middle-aged male journalists decree is correct - by turning up for practice at Eastbourne looking more interested in sport than previously thought, and less shaggable than was presumed.
Oh, wicked witch! Twenty-year-old Slovakian Daniela Hantuchova - formerly the Legs From Slovakia and the Babe From Bratislava - is now known by the Mail, with staggering maturity, as "Hauntuchova - suggested by her deep-set eyes".
The Mail suggests she is anorexic, but maybe she's just smart. A month ago she was a standard blonde babe. Now, she wouldn't look out of place on a Paris catwalk - which means she is no longer the stuff of any man's fantasy, except possibly Alexander McQueen's on a particularly ill-tempered day. You couldn't airbrush her knickers off for the simple reason you'd have to airbrush in her bum first. By losing weight, she has ducked under the clinging net of male desire. Now, it will be her games and not her gams which are scrutinised, which is just how it should be for a dedicated, professional sportsperson. Way to go, Skeletor!