Australia’s top tennis player Samantha Stosur believes Margaret Court may leave Tennis Australia with no choice if she continues speaking out on the issue when she made headlines last week on Channel Ten’s The Project.

While Court is now claiming she is the victim of a US-led conspiracy to have her name removed from one of Melbourne Park’s flagship stadiums, Stosur said the 74-year-old Christian pastor may already have gone too far.

“She’s digging a very big hole for herself at the moment,” Stosur said after her third-round French Open win in Paris on Friday.

“And for whatever reason, she wants to keep talking about it, and I don’t think she’s making more friends by doing that.

“And look, I think if it continues down this road, then maybe there may be no other option but to do that (change the name).

“But we’ll see. Again, I don’t necessarily think that’s going to happen.
“I don’t even know who makes the call to do that so … but she’s not helping herself by making the comments that she’s continually making.”

Stosur, seeded 23rd in the tournament, said Court was tarnishing her legacy and isolating herself with comments like “tennis is full of lesbians”.

“I actually really like the column that Martina Navratilova wrote the other day. It was named for her tennis and everything else, but you’ve got to be a good person,” said the former US Open champion.

“You don’t want to be offside with so many different groups of people around the world.

“It’s about the tennis, but it’s also about who you are and I think if there’s not a nice light in that, then why should there be that name up in lights?

“But it’s not for me to decide.”

However, Tennis Australia is refusing to buckle as pressure mounts on the governing body to change the name of Margaret Court Arena following the legend’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage.

 Court bullying claims

Claiming she is being bullied, Court says talk of having the arena named in her honour changed is unfair.

“I think I’ve won more grand slams than any man or woman and if it is (renamed), I don’t believe I deserve it,” she told Melbourne radio station 3AW in a lengthy interview on Friday.

“They could probably get 100,000 petitions in 24 hours because that’s how they work. There’s a lot of money behind it, and it’s coming from America.”

Asked whether she thought there was a conspiracy, Court added: “Yes, I believe there is … I think the (gay) lobby, yeah. They are a minority in number but they do have a lot of money behind them.”

Court family targeted

Meanwhile, Court’s nephew Phil Shanahan, who runs the Margaret Court Tennis Academy in Albury-Wodonga on the border of NSW and Victorian, told the ABC that people had targeted his home, “bashing” on his door on a number of occasions and targeted the academy’s website.

He said he was worried about how the attacks were affecting the students in the program, some as young as 11.

“Some of these explicit messages have somehow got on their pages, which is just not fair on the kids,” he told Victoria’s Statewide Drive program.

“We’ve had a couple of young players achieve great things in the last month and to have people bombard their page with just the most horrific comments has been really disappointing.

“I’m just disappointed that our website, our Facebook page, which is purely for the kids in the academy has been [targeted].

“They’re [the kids] asking, they’re asking big questions. They’re all wearing Margaret Court tracksuits, they’re getting comments in public. You’ve just gotta leave the kids alone,” he told the ABC.

He said his family had been “feeling nervous” for the past week.

“My family, people knocking on my door in the middle of the night, that’s been disappointing. I just want to move on from it all,” he said.

“Just think before you put your hand on the keyboard.”

— with AAP/ABC