WIMBLEDON - Way out on Court 17, where the sweet scent of fried noodles mingles with the bready odor of baked pizza, there was great disappointment Mondaythat the sounds did not add much to the sensory experience.
Fans had traversed their way through alleyways for one reason only: to hear the famous, shrieking player, Michelle Larcher De Brito of Portugal. Come one, come all, to the sideshow on the sidecourt. They had come to witness the Ethel Merman of tennis, only to get the thin vibrato of Taylor Swift.
"You come for the noise, and then nothing," one spectator grumped. Larcher De Brito, 16, was a theatrical disappointment, not nearly matching her operatic French Open performance that drew complaints from one opponent and renewed the silly debate about the proper place of female grunting on a tennis court.
That discussion grew legs here at Wimbledon, thanks in part to the predictably Neanderthal attitude of Michael Stich, past champion and forever caveman. Stich, like Richard Krajicek and Justin Gimelstob before him, is one of those men bound to make a mean clown of himself whenever the words "women" and "tennis" appear before him in the form of a question.
During a pre-Wimbledon interview, Stich told the Daily Mail that the grunting detracted from the players' "sex appeal."
"Just play it back to the women," said Stich, now a BBC commentator. "It sounds disgusting, ugly, unsexy."
Stich said other dumb things, that the women's tour is about "selling sex" and that the only way to stop the players from grunting is to shoot them. It was a reminder why Boris Becker, who always liked women very much, never liked his German countryman.
Clearly, this whole discussion intimidated Larcher De Brito, because in her 6-2, 7-5 first-round victory over Klara Zakopalova she was measured well below the decibels uttered around here by the likes of Monica Seles, Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams - plus an abundance of men, who seem to avoid such inspection.
"I tried to be quiet for you guys today," Larcher De Brito said, smiling. "I start off good, and I didn't think it was necessary to really go any louder than I was. The grunt goes through my intensity.
"The grunt goes itself. If my body feels like it needs to grunt more, it grunts. If not, it stays quiet."
The fact is, grunting generally is viewed by coaches as a good thing, as an indicator that the player is in the moment and unaware of her surroundings.
"When Serena grunts, it means she's moving into the point," her father, Richard Williams, said. He was pleased to hear Serena grunting loudly at times Monday, particularly late in the first set when her match grew more difficult.
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