Motivation Quote by Thomas Muster

Muster’s line lands like a locker-room punchline, but it’s also a snapshot of an era when elite men’s tennis treated gender as a convenient insult and pain as a legitimate tactic. On its face, he’s describing gamesmanship: aim a ball at an opponent’s groin and you might steal a weaker second serve. The casualness is the tell. He’s not talking about winning with placement or spin; he’s talking about bodily threat as strategy, framed as clever rather than dirty.

The subtext does two things at once. First, it equates masculinity with resilience and femininity with fragility, as if “serve like a woman” is self-evidently “serve worse.” That assumption isn’t argued; it’s smuggled in as a shared joke, relying on the listener’s complicity. Second, it turns injury into a kind of moral correction: hit a man in the balls and you can feminize him, reduce him, make his body betray his status. It’s not just competitive; it’s disciplinary.

Context matters here. Muster came up in a 1990s circuit that prized intimidation and swagger, where “mental toughness” often blurred into cruelty and where women’s tennis, despite massive popularity, was still treated as the lesser mirror. Today the line reads less like edgy candor and more like evidence: how effortlessly misogyny and machismo were woven into sports talk, and how winning was sometimes narrated as domination, not excellence.