Today's Spin comes from the somber side of tennis. The bleak side, even. This is bad news, and no one relishes that, but it's a story that needs to not go away. Every outlet in the mainstream media should be reporting it, and some have. It doesn't involve Serena, Venus, Maria, Federer, Rafa, or the Djoker—those one-title bastions of page views—but it does involve stark humanity and violence. It shows the dark underbelly of the sport's brutality in the mental, emotional, and even physical arenas.
Dutch player Elise Tamaela suffered severe injuries after being attacked by her Danish foe Karen Babat's father, Mihai, at a match in a $25,000 Challenger event in Germany. The events unfolded on and after Monday, August 8, with the Babats bizarrely fleeing the scene.
How in this world between heaven and hell a man can be allowed to scamper away from the scene of a brutal attack, and on a female, is astounding. It is ribald. It flies in the face of what professional sports staff and security workers should know by now. Consider the plight of Monica Seles. That was April 1993. Have we learned nothing?
Surely there are two sides to a tale. However, it severely hampers your case when you leave the setting of an incident, uprooting all your efforts there and more or less going on the lam. The Babats have a history of erratic behavior, as evidenced by Ben Rothenberg's reporting in the afore-linked article. For one, daughter Karen has at least once deployed her 13-year-old brother as an on-court coach. (Yea, just when on-court coaching couldn't get more awkward.)
Mihai may take the clichéd cake as nutty tennis parents go. And that's no small feat. Without belaboring the point, he needs to face serious criminal charges and ITF-leveled repercussions both, if these allegations are indeed true. And it seems that Tamaela's injuries speak for themselves, not that Mr. Babat hasn't basically implicated himself already, anyway.
If so, and it seems likely, he now resides as the most feckless and utterly disdainful bottom feeder of the "Bottom 5"—my own list of those tennis dads the world could do without. Those other notorious types, both recently and historically infamous, in no order:
—Damir Dokic (of Jelena Dokic): Threatened to bomb the Australian embassy in Belgrade.
—Jim Pierce (Mary Pierce): Child abuse.
—Marinko Lucic (Mirjana Lucic) Child abuse.
—Roberta Radwanski (Agnieszka Radwanska): Oppressive coaching.
Father knows best ... except when he seems to know nothing at all. These men, and the most recent offender, reap their respective whirlwinds, whether familial or monetary, legal or karmic. Rest assured: They will get theirs.
—Jonathan Scott (@jonscott9)