Well, Justin Gimelstob may have made few headlines as a player, but he certainly seems to be wanting to make them now he's on the ATP board.

On Anna Kournikova: "I just despise her to the maximum level below hate."

On his forthcoming exhibition doubles match involving Kournikova: "I'm going to serve it right at the body, about 129mph, right into her midriff. If she's not crying by the time she comes off court then I did not do my job."

He also called rising young French player Alize Cornet a "sexpot". (ATP official or tabloid reporter, one wonders?)

Full details here.

Justin Gimelstob has always been a twat. He is (was) everything I hate about American sportsmen: obnoxious, self-absorbed and up his own arse with lack of talent.

(This should not be confused with a rant about per se: American 4x100 sprinters... they have talent)

*edit: I should point out, that I am not anti-American. (But feel free to have a go at me). I am sure there are millions of examples of magnanimous winners from the States. Personally, apart from a few baseball players and Michael Johnson, I cant think of any (too early) right now.

Never heard of him.

Reading up on this guy on Wiki, he seems to have been Number 1 in every junior category all his childhood before becoming a bit of a journeyman player as an adult. So maybe he's bitter.

Yeah, I remember when he was just coming through, he got quite a lot of hype, but never got near to living up to it.

Just read the wikipedia article too, and discover the BBC one left out more of what he said:

QUOTE:
He added that he would not like to sleep with Kournikova, "because she’s such a douche". Instead, "I wouldn't mind my brother, who is kind of a stud, nail her and then reap the benefits."

Bloody hell...

He's rather popular around here, for whatever reason. He's friendly with a lot of the local media and often comes on The Sports Junkies if there's a big tournament to discuss and last night he was on the Washington Post's Sports show on Comcast talking up the Washington Kastle's upcoming season in World Team Tennis which will include a visit from the St. Louis team that includes Kournikova.

So he's more of a media personality than a sports man.

I had no idea he was such a douchebag.

The hatred directed toward Anna Kournikova from various directions is unmerited. She played tennis to get out of Russia. She wasn't all that good and she wasn't all that interested in it but she managed to parlay it into a modeling career. Many of us have jumped from a job we didn't like to a career we liked more. No shame.

The odd thing about Kournikova, that everybody now seems to forget, is that she was actually pretty good. She reached the semi-finals of Wimbledon at the age of 16, got into the world's top 10 a couple of years later, and was beating players of the ilk of Graf (ok this was late career Graf) Hingis and Davenport. The only reason she first came to anyone's attention was because she was doing well at tennis tournaments.

Then she suddenly got more interested in modelling and sponsorship contracts to the detriment of tennis. Fair enough, her choice, but who knows how good she could actually have got had she continued?

What Jimski said.
As I pointed out to a co-worker last week, she was one of the top 20 woman players for three years and I'd hazard a guess that very few people could claim to be in the top 20 in the world at anything.

I reckon I'm top 20 in the world in a few things:

1. Ability to enjoy eating pizzas that I've made a complete hash of in one way or the other - too much sauce, overcooked, undercooked. Still for me, it's tasty. Other people would find it unsightly and unedible. There may be others that would enjoy these wads of dough, saunce and cheese, but there aren't 20 who'd enjoy it as much as me.

2. M-Network Baseball for the Atari 2600 - My brother, the Parizek boys from across the street, and I played this at a very high level long after the game was out of print. I imagine nobody enjoyed it as much as we did, so we'd all be in the top 20.

3. My Scout troop finished second at the 1987 Juniata Valley Council Klondike Derby. The team that came in first worked way harder at it than we did. I don't think many councils do Klondike Derby's so if there'd been a national and international competition after that, I'd be that we could have trained up for it and done very well.