Lawn tennis, its laws and its administrators attainted with moralising fogeyism, is one of those areas. No wonder one of the principal critics of Serena Williams’ exhilarating show of passion-emotion at the US Open is Margaret Court, the notorious Christian prig, who throughout her long and emotionally-inhibited career never said an on-court boo to a goose, let alone to an umpire. A great athlete with no visible personality is an eerie, robotic thing.

Give me, instead, in all areas of life (and of course tennis is not just a sport but is a matter of Life), impassioned people. Give me people sufficiently energised about the great, mysterious drama of Life to involuntarily suffer public meltdowns, to powerfully spit dummies across vast distances, to sometimes in the grips of their passions smash their (actual and metaphorical) racquets.

I am addressing this issue not only because tennis, so Shakespearean, is bigger than a mere game. It is also that as a veteran tennis reporter and tennis analyst I know I have an informed columnist’s sacred duty to help a bewildered public to understand what the Serena Williams imbroglio means.

First, though, watching Serena break her racquet during the Open final, I had the amusing thought that clever modern technology might enable racquet manufacturers to enable racquets to emit digitally-contrived screams of pain when they are abused. It’s not that I want the great players to stop abusing their racquets (it adds colour and movement and drama to a tennis match). But agony-expressing racquets might save the battling poor the terrible expense of having to replace broken racquets. No one is going to abuse a racquet if it reacts as if it is a living thing, a kicked dog, a tortured cat.

Tennis moralisers need reminding that players’ racquet abuse, like Serena’s in her Open final, is almost always self-directed. Serena the perfectionist was angry at herself for having played a dumb shot. How typical of tennis, with its daft, pommy, Wimbledonian, stiff upper lip ambience, that it has a rule that penalises its athletes for being openly cranky with themselves!

Insufferable tennis is unique in this. Imagine if you had a rule in football (soccer) that penalised a player for showing open despair when he misses an easy shot at goal. If, on his knees, he bangs the turf with his fists is he guilty of turf abuse?

Similarly, can we imagine a sport other than moralising tennis where it is thought immoral, cheating, an affront to the Gospels, for a coach to coach from the sidelines? It was a coaching/cheating allegation by the umpire that deepened Serena’s wrath.

Cartoonists must be free to be unfair but in his now world-famous cartoon Mark Knight was unfair when he depicted a hopping-mad Serena as a madwoman jumping up and down again and again on her racquet so as to smash it to smithereens. In fact what she did, giving her Wilson one powerful, angry, euthanasing wallop on the hard court with one swing of her mighty arm had a kind of dramatic elegance about it. A connoisseur of these things, I gave it an 8.5 (out of 10). I have never been able to give Nick Kyrgios more than a 5.7 for his unpoetic racquet abuses.

Was Mark Knight’s cartoon racist and sexist, as accused?

Certainly, though again I half-forgive him, it was sexist, partaking of the double-standard that applies to judgments of male and female athletes’ shows of emotion. Would he have thought a male athlete’s show of emotion remarkable enough to be cartoonable?

Serena herself at the time, and since then Billy-Jean King, (what a contrast she has always presented with our priggish Margaret) have seen some sexism in what happened.

“Did [umpire] Ramos treat Williams differently than male players have been treated? I think he did,” King has diagnosed.

“Women are treated differently in most arenas of life. This is especially true for women of colour. And what played out on the court [in the Open final] happens far too often. It happens in sports, in the office and in public service. Ultimately, a woman was penalised for standing up for herself. A woman faced down sexism …”

Tennis is still so artificially polite, genteel, morally uplifting and Anglican. For example it must be played in sterile silence (imagine requiring that of footie crowds, of ice hockey fans!) and its female players must be winsome and ladylike. Serena’s US Open open angers offended against the dear old sexist expectation that female tennis players will be decorative damsels to be seen and not heard, save for the scrape of their plimsolls on the Plexicushion.

Tennis, still so insufferably Anglican (with grim Presbyterian traces) somehow still attracts so much of this moralising.

So for example fogey-aged tennis fans become apoplectic about unladylike female tennis players giving on-court shrieks and war cries (which I, courtside, have always found pleasingly erotic). But, hypocritically, these same old sexist prigs can’t get their bloomers equally knotted about male tennis players’ far louder roars and bellows.

Ah, priggish tennis! How badly it needs its pioneeringly passionate, it’s anything-but-serene Serenas.