During the week between the Indian Wells and Key Biscayne Masters tournaments, the Tennis Channel showed their Greatest 100 Players of all time show. Rankings seem to be partially based on stats and partially on perception. For example, #13 John McEnroe is ranked higher than #18 Ivan Lendl, who was more durable and has one more major title than Mac. I think Mac at his best was slightly better than Lendl, but I also think Serena Williams at her best was better than Steffi Graf or Martina Navratilova. Yet Graf and Navratilova were ranked #3 and #4, while Serena was far behind at #12.

I already knew a little something about many of the players, but I learned that #51 Doris Hart won a career Grand Slam and six majors in singles, and twenty-nine major titles in doubles with a right leg that was impaired by childhood osteomyelitis. Even one side of her face looked impaired in the videos, though I don't see it in the still photo.

#58 Alice Marble had quite a life. At fifteen, she was accosted leaving the public courts, and raped. She survived pleurisy and tuberculosis in her twenties. Days after she miscarried their child, her pilot husband was shot down over Germany in WWII. Towards the end of the war, she was asked to spy on a Swiss former lover. She may have been shot in the back (accounts vary).

 ... she slept with the enemy to find out about treasures Nazis were hoping to smuggle out along with their escape routes during the final months of the war. Like the later pair on television's I Spy, under the cover of tennis exhibition matches, she met her ex, photographed lists in his safe, and bolted out the front door, narrowly escaping.

One reason that #39 Althea Gibson was allowed to play on the tour was due to letters written by Marble.

... Marble was the first to publicly address the sport's segregation practices and challenge the establishment. She wrote her historic July 1, 1950 editorial in American Tennis Magazine. Marble denounced the all-white U.S. Lawn Tennis Association's policy of excluding African-Americans from competition. She exhorted, "Miss Gibson is over a very cunningly wrought barrel, and I can only hope to loosen a few of its staves with one lone opinion. If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it's also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites. If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it's only fair that they should meet that challenge on the courts."

Flash forward fifty years and that hypocrisy is still only thinly veiled. Serena and Venus Williams were not exactly welcomed onto the tennis tour. It didn't help that Richard Williams largely kept them off the junior circuit, or that they didn't even attempt to adapt to tennis culture. They wore beads in their hair and unusual outfits. Detractors claimed that Richard had fixed the matches between the sisters, and that they were arrogant. They clearly were defensive and suspicious. After Venus withdrew just before a match against Serena in 2001, the Williams family claimed that the crowd was hurling racial epithets while booing Serena. Despite it being a mandatory event, they have refused to play Indian Wells ever since.

While Venus eventually seemed to mellow, and become somewhat popular, Serena stayed angry. She was later fined after threatening a lineswoman at the 2009 US Open, “I swear I will take this fucking ball and throw it down your fucking throat, I swear to God.” The lineswoman had called a foot fault against Serena on match point against her, which is unusual. Serena later made light of the incident in a commercial.

People remain frustrated with the Williamses for not playing a full schedule, for having side interests like Venus' design ambitions and Serena's acting ambitions, and even for the ways in which they get injured.

A talented French journeyman player named Michael Llodra did play at Indian Wells. Llodra was playing against another talented journeyman, the Latvian Ernests Gulbis. Tennis journeymen don't win many titles, and don't go far into the majors, but they do make a living.

Llodra was leading Gulbis but wasn't happy. One would think he had heard about the Jeremy Lin controversy, but he singled out an Asian woman in the stands. She was in a group that was rooting for Gulbis—"C'mon Gulbis"—but not taunting Llodra. Nevertheless, Llodra called her a "putain Chinoise," a Chinese whore, and several other choice words:

“He was looking directly at me,” said Barlow, who is Korean-American. “He didn’t yell it particularly loudly. He was turned toward the baseline, toward us, and he looked right at me and said this comment.”

Llodra directed his anger toward Barlow’s section again moments later, after her cluster of pro-Gulbis fans sighed in disappointment when Gulbis hit a double fault.

“You’re crying now are you? Well, you should be crying,” Barlow quoted Llodra as saying. Llodra later called Barlow a Chinese, adding a profane adjective for emphasis.

Llodra seemed oblivious to charges of racism:

Llodra did not make matters better for himself during an interview with a reporter from the Chinese news Web site SINA.com, in which the Frenchman attempted to apologize for his remarks.

“My words were not aimed at China,” Llodra began.

“I love Chinese —  I can totally make love with a Chinese girl,”

I told that story to my French African colleague, and he laughed and said, "Only a Frenchman would say that."

Anyway, tonight in Baltimore is a multigroup rally for Trayvon Martin. It starts at McKeldin Plaza—long since clear of the Occupy camp—and ends at City Hall. I didn't bring my hoodie, but I'll march along with them.