Modras' success irks conservatives

Can a girl play that well, or should she play at all?

ZANESVILLE, Ohio (RWN) - Farah Modras remembers the first time she beat a boy at tennis. She was nine and he was 12, and it was at a court behind the high school in Zanesville.

"I beat him 6-0, 6-0," she said, "and he refused to shake hands with me at the net. He just yelled 'It doesn't matter how good you'll ever be, since you'll never be more than a woman.'"

Modras, 22, hears that a lot these days. She's the best female tennis player in the world, and arguably the best player, man or woman, in the galaxy. Last year, she traveled to Russia to play men's champ Sergei Ivanov, and was leading 6-3, 6-1 when the Russian pulled a hamstring and had to retire. The match was not shown in the Islamic States due to strong conservative protest, but had it aired there, her country would have seen a smirking Modras.

"A hamstring," she said in a post-match. "Yeah, ok. We all know who was winning and who wasn't going to rally."

But that success is costing her at home. Companies won't let her endorse their products. She can't make public appearances without being heckled. And she regularly receives death threats.

"My favorite one?" she said. "Probably the guy who said he was going to kidnap me and make me cook for him. I was like, 'You ain't tasted my cooking, brother, and I bet I spit in your food.'"

It's comments like that that have kept the endorsements away.

"The girl has an attitude, which might have played well in the old regime, but it doesn't now," said Micah Harver, a sports industry analyst at the investment firm Waligore-McCumber. "And who's going to give a woman an endorsement when buying power in this country is firmly in the hands of men?"

Modras has a problem, now. There are a lack of worth opponents on the women's circuit - she's been on top since she was 17 - and the world is too, well, Muslim, for her to play on the men's circuit.

"What's a girl to do," she said. "I could retire at the top of my game like that baseball guy did in the old days. What was his name? Oh yeah, Sandy Koufax."
"Oh, there goes my attitude again."


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