I’m not a huge fan of tennis, although I do class it as a sport (unlike cricket).
However, on the rare occasion I do manage to show enough interest to peer at the TV screen when a tennis ball is being chucked around, I always end up pissed off by all those silly bints who shriek, grunt and scream their way through the whole ordeal.
They sound like they’re giving birth, or at the very least incredibly constipated.
These grunting wenches are to tennis what the vuvuzela is to soccer: an annoyance that should be banished.
Perhaps the players should all be fitted with those collars that are used to train dogs to stop barking: they’d get a wee warning buzz on the first grunt and a good wallop of volts if they did it again. It might not stop the grunting but it would be bloody entertaining.
I’d pay to watch that.
Sadly, it looks like the grunters are here to stay. Research in the United States a few month ago determined that the grunting confuses players on the other side of the net and can slow their response time by as much as several milliseconds: “It doesn’t sound much but when the ball is travelling at 185 km/h, you need all the time you can get.”
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