Sometimes we Americans can go a little overboard when it comes to our star athletes, particularly in sports where our collective interest in them is more sporadic. Tennis is one of those sports that only commands mainstream attention a few times out of the year. The current spring clay-court season puts a fine point on the overall indifference for the sport in the US, as only the most hardcore of fans lament how the poor coverage of the red dirt’s biggest events are in the States, from Monte Carlo and Rome all the way to NBC’s annual horror show next week.

This inherent apathy among those who only pay attention during the grand slams was exposed this week with the outsized reaction to the news that the French Tennis Federation has declined to seed Serena Williams in the women’s draw. That of course means that the 23-time grand slam champion could face anyone in the first round, including the current top players in the world. Serena v Simona Halep, the world No1? Serena vs Caroline Wozniacki, her beloved bestie and the Australian Open champion? Serena vs Venus? Serena v hater Maria Sharapova? Everything is in play for round one.

Amid Serena’s comeback from the birth of her first child, the FFT’s ruling has drawn the ire of many part-time followers of tennis. Some feel that Serena should have been given a seed that would have reflected her protected ranking – she was No 1 in the WTA rankings when she won the 2017 Australian Open before going on maternity leave – customarily given to players who are out of the game due to pregnancy or injury. And though the women’s locker room is split on the pregnancy seeding debate, as former WTA doubles star and ESPN analyst Rennae Stubbs indicated on CNN, big stars such as Halep, Sharapova and Italian Open winner Elina Svitolina come down in favor of the seeding protection.

That, even with the practical and mathematical complications of how a player’s protected seeding would be applied after a few tournaments, is a sensible change to discuss.

However, we Americans had a typical overboard moment when USA Today’s Nancy Armour (and whoever writes her headlines) deemed that Serena was being “punished” by the FFT for their decision.

Let’s dial back the hyperbole, tout de suite.

The FFT would be “punishing” Williams if it were treating her entirely different from all her elite colleagues on the tour and former co-workers who experienced pregnancy during their career to then comeback. Yet the three-time French Open champion is not facing a contrasting set of rules and behaviors that her friendly rival Victoria Azarenka encountered in her return from the birth of her son Leo around this time last year.

There were no strident and sentimental columns from Armour last year about how Azarenka should have been given a protected seed by Wimbledon and was being punished by the All England Club. Nor was there any approaching this level of consternation or debate here in America, or throughout the entire global tennis community for that matter, about whether the Belarusian received harsh action from Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association.

A campaign for elite women’s players to have their seed protected in grand slams and the big tournaments just beneath them was also imperceptible from media figures everywhere when Kim Clijsters made her comeback, or as she dubbed her “second career”, in 2009. The Belgian, who had stated years prior to her first retirement the desire to have children early in her life, was the template example of how the seeding rule for elite women on maternity leave should have been implemented back then by the WTA, the International Tennis Federation and the four slams.

In her first major back, Clijsters would go on to win the 2009 US Open (keeping her cool opposite an infamous Serena implosion along the way), but did it as an unseeded, unranked entrant without a hint of the groundswell the FFT’s decision elicited this week, say nothing of the breathless cable news discussions. Only for the biggest star, the American and global icon Serena, did it all of a sudden become cause célèbre.

If we are to show full respect for women’s athletes and the betterment of tennis overall, it is salient for the punditry to care about about all of the players all of the time and not just when it pertains to Serena or other American luminaries.

The FFT did not punish Serena. But we all punish the WTA, and tennis in general, when we don’t consistently keep the whole picture in view. Especially we Americans.