Lockergate

Written by: Staff on 20th January 2011

Lockergate |

Forget Julian Assange. Trouble not your mind with Wikileaks. No, it is Rennae Stubbs you want to watch out for.

It turns out that the Aussie doubles legend is the Deep Throat of the women’s locker room (yes, I know, I’ll race you to the punchline…). Channel 7’s Todd Woodbridge was looking a bit of insider gossip on Kim Clijsters the other day, so he thought he would text Rennae to get the low down. Was Aussie Kim (an odd moniker for a Belgian married to an American, but let us move on) pregnant, Todd texted secretly.

Rennae, being new to the world of international espionage and intrigue, promptly told Kim about this and showed her the text message. Kim, keeping her powder dry, stored away the information and waited for revenge.

Rennae Stubbs

Her moment came after her last match. Interviewed on court by the aforementioned Mr Woodbridge, she listened attentively to his questions and gave good and full answers. And then she turned the tables on him. “By the way, Rennae Stubbs showed me a text message you sent her last week in Sydney asking if I was pregnant,” she said, backing Toddy into a corner. Knowing full well what was coming, the man with the microphone, looked shifty. “Well are you?” he said, trying desperately to change the subject. “No, but let me tell you what the text message said,” Kim said, watching her victim squirm.

Toddy had, apparently thought Kim was up the duff because “she looks grumpy and her boobs are bigger”. As they say in my little country: she had done him up like a kipper.

Never has a TV interviewer looked so uncomfortable. “That’s the end of my television career,” he said, trying – and failing – to laugh it off as he wrapped up the interview and ran for cover.

A wee while later, Todd was back behind the microphone as Bernard Tomic was beating F-Lo. His co-commentator thought this was too good an opportunity to miss and regaled the viewers with the story, including video clips of the interview. When Todd’s supposed friend and colleague rounded off the saga with the news that he, too, had received a text, this time from Craig Tiley, the tournament director, demanding that Todd come and see him the moment the current match was over, Toddy-kins went very quiet and rather pale. I tell you, Julian Assange would struggle to spread the sort of fear and panic that Rennae Stubbs has created with one leaked text.

You would not want to leave your deepest, darkest secrets with the great Judy Murray either. Judy is the mother of Andy and Jamie and the woman who established Scotland as a force in world tennis (the Muzza brothers have a grand slam title and three grand slam finals between them. In Britain, that makes them a world force. Hell fire, in Britain, that makes them a bloody miracle). She is also a prolific tweeter and happily tells the world about the comings and goings at major tournaments and no one escapes her carefully crafted 140 characters or less, not even her eldest son.

This year, Jamie has teamed up with Xavier Malisse – we at 10sballs.com are allowed to call him X on account of him being an old friend of the site – and they began their Open doubles campaign with a bang, beating the No.9 seeds Wesley Moodie and Dick Norman 6-4, 6-0. But anyone following Judy on Twitter would have known that her eldest son was in devastating form at the moment, so much so that he splattered a sparrow in practise. And mum was on hand to tell her 1,800 followers all about it. “Jamie’s serve bigger than he thought. Just killed a bird (feathered variety) out on court 17: (“ She has now officially dubbed him Jamie “Sparrow Slayer” Murray. That’s what happens when your mum turns up to your place of work armed with a Blackberry.

Wildlife has a rough time of it at grand slams. Michael Llodra vaporised a bird here during a match once, thwacking the poor little flapper with a forehand in a doubles match against Arnaud Clement and Julien Boutter. But the deadliest assassin was Jana Novotna. There she was playing dubs with Arantxa Sanchez on an outside court at Wimbledon when she put up a monumentally high lob, as only she could. As the four women scuttled about waiting for the ball to drop (as it were) a big, fat pigeon fell to earth. Jana’s lob had smacked it, broken its neck and killed it and there it lay, an ex-pigeon, on the manicured turf. Wimbledon, being Wimbledon, suspended play until someone could work out whose point it was, whether they ought to play a let instead or whether the pigeon was merely pining for the fjords.

Andy, meanwhile, nipped into the third round with a swift and efficient 6-1, 6-3, 6-3 win over Illya Marchenko of the Ukraine. This time there were no birds and no tweets, just the world No.5 doing exactly what was required and no more to get through.

Topics: Kim Clijsters, Rennae Stubbs, Todd Woodbridge, Xavier Malisse

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Tennis Around The World | 10sBalls.com says:

January 22, 2011 at 3:53 am

[…] we share the same LOVE. It’s called TENNIS… A must read is “Alix’s World “her Lockergate story is a classic. A shout out to the best photographers in the world. That would be Susan and Fred […]