I am not particularly familiar with the British tennis player Katie Boulter. But then, I am not particularly with more than a handful of modern tennis players since Andy Murray retired. But my reference to her has little or nothing to do with her abilities as a tennis player than to the price she is apparently paying for her fame. The amount of abuse she gets is terrible and as my attempts to become an established and successful blogger/writer foundered years ago, I wonder if actually that turned out to be a good thing.
When I launched this blog back in 2014, I soon switched off comments because some of them were seriously unpleasant. Perhaps, I was a bit of a snowflake back then because I really didn’t enjoy seeing my work – and I still refer to writing as my work – get torn to pieces, usually in a blizzard of often personal abuse. 11 years on, resigned to the fact that stardom has clearly eluded me, I have a firmer hide, so to speak, and in a world that is brimming over with hatred and dislike, I’m quite happy to slip under the radar, writing for my loyal reader and, frankly, myself.
Just look at some of the comments Boulter endured:
‘Hope you get cancer.’
‘Katie Boulter buy candles and a coffin for your entire family with the money you earned from the rigged match, corrupt player, I’ll (expletive removed, not by me) your entire family, I’ll your grandmother’s grave, if she’s not dead by tomorrow.’
‘Go to hell, I lost money my mother sent me.’
Some speculation suggests that many of the accounts spewing abuse like this are linked to failed gamblers (are there any other types of gamblers?), but it doesn’t change the narrative. There are a lot of nutters and, for all we know, dangerous nutters out there.
Naturally, they are all anonymous nutters, too. Of course, they are. They know, or at least I hope they know, how they’d be looked upon if they went public with their identities, so it’s far easier to pour out the venom when no one knows who they are. Sad people, for sure; pathetic inadequate men, I’d guess, who can’t get a girlfriend and try to make themselves feel better by threatening those who are far more successful.
Ms Boulter described how the abuse affected her in this BBC interview and reading it, I feel a little sick. I cannot understand how an actual human being can say such ghastly things to another human being, especially one they have never met and hopefully never will meet. I can only conclude there’s an element of madness at work here.
I enjoy a readership that on a good day reaches three figures and I am grateful to everyone who is sad enough to put aside a small amount of time to read this blog, if only to then say: what a load of shit that was. At least my loyal reader isn’t wishing me to die from cancer, which is what Ms Boulter has had to read. I doubt that these abusers have ever even met someone who has cancer because if they had, I’d like to think they’d act a bit differently. But as an old pal of mine used to say: you can’t educate pork.
Is this really the price of fame, that if you make it in your chosen field you are fair game to those repulsive scumbags whose self-appointed role in life is to just hate? I rather think it is. In which case, as the words ‘you never made it’ echo round what’s left of my brain, perhaps my abject failure in the literary world is actually a blessing?
