By Alaa Abdel-Ghani This will be the first year since 1996 that will not be playing professional tennis. Am I devastated? No. Unable to sleep? Not true. A wee bit upset or disappointed? Can't say that I am. Stupid then? Perhaps. But I have my reasons. Apart from Tibetan monks, who, you might ask, would not want to see Kournikova, the Russian bombshell. She's gorgeous. She has the face that launched thousands of web sites, the first tennis pinup girl of the Internet age. And rich. Conservative estimates put her earnings at more than $10 million annually, and that was off the court. She made more money in a weekend hit-and-giggle exhibition than most of her colleagues will garner from playing a year's worth of tournaments. And so, so famous. Exceptionally photo-and- telegenic. The most photographed woman in tennis and one of the most recognisable athletes in the world. When she played at Wimbledon, she would be plastered on 1,500 billboards, 25 feet high, all around London. (Also at Wimbledon, against Sandrine Testud, 36 photographers had their lenses pointed firmly in Kournikova's direction -- even though Testud was a seeded player. Kournikova was not). We could talk forever about Kournikova except where it should have counted most -- her tennis -- simply because there was not much of it. And herein lies the problem. In nine years of playing, Kournikova never won a singles title. In 1997 she reached the Wimbledon semi-final but that was all she would write. There would be a couple of doubles wins and she would eventually make it to a few finals, never a Grand Slam, and no further. Amazingly, though, it didn't matter much. A long time ago good looks eclipsed her tennis but that bothered hardly anybody. Still, Kournikova's wealth and popularity represent a disquieting trend. Aesthetics and charisma are winning out over sporting performance. And some people resent that. We all like pretty women. Most of us don't mind seeing them any time, anywhere. But Miss Good-Looking should be where she belongs: on the catwalk, in The Bold and the Beautiful, in our dreams. And in sports, too. No problem. Just as long as the game is on a court where marketability does not count for more than match results. Many attractive women have played pro tennis. Gabriella Sabatini, Chris Evert, Carling Bassett, Gussie Moran and her lace kickers and before her, Suzanne Lenglen and her gossamer dress, the tennis poster girl of the roaring 20s. But they were also good, many times brilliant at what they were doing for a living. They combined looks and Grand-slam winning talent. There was style, but there was substance as well. These days, as L. Jon Wertheim writes in Venus Envy: A Sensational Season Inside the Women's Tennis Tour, "we reward sizzle over steak... This not only runs counter to a meritocracy. It unfairly punishes older, less attractive players." Looks are a prerequisite for many film roles but should be incidental to success in sport. Yet the tour isn't shy about giving Kournikova and other pretty faces attention disproportionate to their results on court. They don't apologise for having attractive players any more than Hollywood studios apologise for Julia Roberts. This might have done wonders for women's tennis, cementing its status as the world's most popular and financially successful women's sport. But when its most visible player can't win a tournament, it cannot but threaten the integrity of the product. We could have talked about a lot of events that made up the 2004 sports calendar. We could have talked about the Athens Olympics, how it almost never was, but in the end was surprisingly successful. Or how Euro 2004 was won by -- surprise, surprise -- Greece. How the Red Sox broke Babe Ruth's jinx in stupendous fashion, the basketball brawl at Auburn Hills, doping, the Ryder Cup, India, Pakistan and the cricket in between. We could have talked about all this and much more but I instead wanted to focus on Kournikova, who announced her retirement in March -- not a moment too soon. A player who has never won a tournament, yet was promoted more heavily than better players, could not possibly have been good for tennis and sports in general. Selling sports based on glamour not only runs the risk of alienating spectators and players but alters the very reason we watch sports: to see who will win or lose, not who will lose but wins all the same. Even if she attempts to make a comeback like many athletes who retire prematurely, if it's true that Kournikova has married Enrique Iglesias, then the Latin crooner and perhaps pampers should mean that even though she is only 23, we will not be seeing much of Kournikova for a long time. Which is something I and some others can live with. , you were always poetry in motion but nothing ever rhymed. Worst of all, it never made a difference. So thanks for hanging up your racket and making way for true athletes. Make babies instead.
