Etiquette? Schmetiquette

 Tennis is a weird sport. Come on, it is.

It's almost as weird as golf, but not quite. At least in tennis you can't touch off a major feud by coughing in the middle of a guy's backswing, or taking half-an-hour to line up a putt.

Or maybe you can.

See, the other day at the U.S. Open a Latvian tennis player named Jelena Ostapenko got smoked by an American named Taylor Townsend, who happened to be ranked 139th in the world. This did not please Jelena, who played lousy and then pretty much gave up when it became obvious she was going to lose. So she took it out on Townsend.

At the net, eschewing the traditional post-match handshake, she shook her finger at Townsend and gave her what-for, telling her she was "uncultured" and "uneducated" and, if Jelena ever got her outside of America, things would be very different.

Now, "uncultured" and "uneducated" are not words you want to use when talking to a black person, which Townsend is. That's because white supremacists have been using those words forever to advance their racist philosophy, which maintains blacks are inherently inferior beings and therefore can't be trusted to think or act for themselves.

Townsend, to her credit, didn't go there. That's because Ostapenko wasn't calling her uncultured and uneducated because she was black, necessarily, but because at one point in the match Townsend won a crucial point on a net cord and didn't apologize.

No, really. Apparently this is a thing in tennis.

It seems proper tennis etiquette dictates that when a player wins on a lucky bounce (like a net cord), that player is supposed to either say "Sorry" to his or her opponent, or make some sort of apologetic gesture. No, I don't know why. Like I said, tennis is weird.

Unfortunately for Ostapenko, her post-match lecture simply made her look like a sore loser. Even more unfortunately, Ostapenko has a reputation for being one. And it's not like she was exactly the Emily Post of tennis etiquette herself against Townsend; when she began to lose she pulled a Cool Hand Luke ("Bathroom break, boss?") and left the court for, well, a bathroom break. An extended one.

Later on, she declared a medical issue and stopped the match again.

The gamesmanship didn't work, alas for her. Townsend still steamrolled her in straight sets, 7-5, 6-1. And Ostapenko was as ungracious in defeat as she was during the match.

Call it a double L.