Let the Globe be your umpire:
"Tennis star trailed by allegations of abuse; After a Hall of Fame playing career, Bob Hewitt became a coveted coach. But some young girls he taught say he preyed on them sexually. Many years later, they want him held to account" by Bob Hohler, Globe Staff / August 28, 2011
In summer 1976, Heather Crowe Conner was a Girl Scout and honor student who had never put on makeup or kissed a boy.
She was also a budding junior tennis star.
Bob Hewitt was tennis royalty, one of the greatest doubles players of all time, fresh off a star turn with the Boston Lobsters. He was 36, bound for the International Tennis Hall of Fame and, by numerous accounts and sources within the tennis world, living a double life.
In his everyday life, Hewitt coached tennis. On his first day teaching at a club in Danvers in 1976, he offered to coach Conner, then known as Heather Crowe, for free. She was 14.
In his secret life, Hewitt had begun exploiting his marquee name to build a career as a coach and to sexually abuse or harass some of the underage girls he trained, one of them just 10, according to a six-month Globe investigation that involved dozens of interviews both in the United States and in Hewitt’s South African homeland....
As the eyes of the tennis world turn this week to the US Open, where Hewitt won the 1977 doubles title, the sport’s leaders are publicly confronted for the first time with the accounts of women who say their lives were scarred and the game tarnished by a scandal that some in the tennis world knew or suspected, but which went unpunished....
Not that I want to minimize the sexual assault and rape of children (if in fact this is what happened; obviously, tennis stars rank below rapist bankers in this regard), but I'm kind of offended with the elitist waste of time and print.
This is what the crack investigators over there are doing, huh? Not chasing down all the lies of 9/11 and Iraq (oh, right, they brought and bring them to you every day), or the mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps, collateralized-debt-obligations fraud that has destroyed the world economy as it enriched the very criminals that directed it (oh, right, I forgot I was reading a banker's mouthpiece)?
In an interview with a Globe reporter outside his farmhouse in Addo, South Africa, Hewitt, 71, declined to address the allegations.
How much the trip cost?
Unloading groceries from his BMW after his wife of 46 years, Delaille, stepped away, Hewitt was asked first about the allegations made by Heather Conner, the 14-year-old girl he coached in Danvers in 1976....
That's when some sort of wall blocking me from more came, and with no disrespect intended, who cares?
News should be something that affects my life, and this clearly does not qualify.
--more--"
I think a lot of unread Globes are going to wash away today.
OUT!
