I must be some kind of tennis nut. As soon as I saw the headline (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/tennis-busted-racquet/bethanie-mattek-sands-has-the-best-hair-at-the-open-200803842.html), I knew exactly whom it referred to.

I have been following the fashion fortunes of this particular tennis diva for years. If she has bright orange hair now, she’s had fluorescent blue and green hair earlier. She has at least one arm that’s tattooed from shoulder to wrist. She invariably plays in knee-length socks. She has worn on court a long series of memorable outfits: among them, a leopard-print dress with a neckline down to her navel; track pants with a pink and blue optical-illusion print; and a top that might have been a full-body photograph of a tennis net. Oh, and there was the time she arrived at a Wimbledon player’s ball wearing a dress adorned with slices of tennis balls and a mohawk-like hat that looked like two juxtaposed brooms with, yes, more ball slices attached.

That’s Bethanie Mattek-Sands for you: far and away, the sport’s most colourful character, and I use that adjective deliberately.

Certainly her hair and outfits attract attention. But look beyond them and this is no mean tennis player. She has won two women’s doubles and two mixed doubles Grand Slam titles (three of those this year), and a string of doubles titles at lesser tournaments. She had a long and fruitful partnership with Sania Mirza; in fact, she has won more doubles titles partnering Mirza than any other woman.

Interestingly, she has also twice lost doubles championship matches to Mirza. She’s not been nearly as successful in singles, though she has been a runner-up at four lower-level tournaments.

Despite that lengthy résumé, if you ask any given tennis nut, he (perhaps more likely than she) will know Mattek-Sands for her clothes and long socks, for the colour she adds to the game. So, I was pretty startled to read in the copy below that headline that “no one in New York seems to know her name". Either that journalist is greatly mistaken, or New York has far fewer tennis nuts than any self-respecting host city of a major tennis tournament should.

More seriously, Mattek-Sands is one-of-a-kind in the contemporary game, a tennis eccentric if there ever was one. The thing is, there have been many. The sport has a long history of oddballs and goofy characters, some quirkier than others. Russia’s talented underachiever Marat Safin once celebrated winning a fabulous rally by bending over and dropping his shorts before a stadium full of wildly cheering Parisians. His opponent, Félix Mantilla, looked on in goggle-eyed astonishment.

Anne White played Pam Shriver at Wimbledon in 1985 in all-white—yes, as the rules demanded—except this was an all-white lycra body suit that left little to the imagination and sent spectators into a tizzy. When the match was halted for the night at one set apiece, the umpire asked White to wear “more appropriate clothing" when they resumed the next day. She did, and she lost.

Then there’s Jimmy Connors, playing a young Andre Agassi in New York. It was a long, tough match and as it wore on, Connors was visibly feeling his age. Then, just as he was about to serve, someone in the crowd shouted, “He’s just a punk, Jimmy, you are a legend!" Connors, ever the showboater, smiled widely and knocked the balls into the crowd, driving the stadium wild. But in doing so, tennis’s senior citizen had bought himself a few precious moments to catch his breath and perhaps throw Agassi off his rhythm. It didn’t work very well, though. Agassi charged back from a 2-1 deficit in sets to take the match.

Those, and McEnroe, Lenglen, Nastase, Leconte, Monfils... I could go on. In their own ways, all have spiced up a sport that a lot of people find staid and boring. I’m not one of them, but I can imagine that audiences tire of the ball flying back and forth across the net. They want something more.

Now, rising to the top in tennis—in any sport, for that matter—can be brutal and lonely in ways that the rest of us probably won’t ever fully comprehend. There are the pressures of practice and competition; the rules that require you to keep overflowing emotions in check; the expectation that you will give everything to the effort of battling your opponent, then politely shake hands with her when the match is done.

Like Andy Murray said after a recent win against Novak Djokovic: “Everybody wants me and Novak to dislike each other and people always try to stir things up between us. It’s impossible to be extremely close when we are playing in these sorts of matches because it’s so mentally challenging and physically demanding and you need to try to still have that competitive edge as well."

Fans don’t want all this to stay hidden all the time. We want to see it erupt. We want to see it expressed in whatever way. It adds a certain extra dimension to the sport, makes it that much more compelling to follow. Because we want to feel that these remarkable athletes—these men and women who play every day with such enormous skill—have their human sides too, whether they come in angry outbursts or in strange outfits.

That’s why I’m such a fan of McEnroe, and now of Mattek-Sands.

I dedicated the last book I wrote to someone “who liked me because I liked John McEnroe". It was as much a tribute to the bond that person and I share as it was to McEnroe himself. So, I’m thinking, this may be as good a time as any to buckle down to my next book. Anyone out there who shares my admiration for Ms Mattek-Sands? There may be a dedication available.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

Twitter: @DeathEndsFun

Death Ends Fun: http://dcubed.blogspot.com

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