Motivation Quote by Martina Hingis

It lands like a joke, but the laugh is doing damage control. Hingis is winking at the camera while quietly negotiating the terms of her own visibility: if you are going to cover women athletes, she implies, do it the way men’s media has always preferred to - through desirability, not difficulty. The line flatters the interviewer, preemptively smoothing the transaction. You get your “pretty” angle; we get the attention, sponsorships, column inches that women’s sports have historically been forced to barter for.

The jab at the WNBA isn’t really about basketball. It’s a hierarchy play inside a scarcity economy where women’s sports compete for the same limited spotlight. By positioning tennis as “prettier,” Hingis aligns herself with a long-running marketing strategy in women’s tennis: glamour as a parallel credential to talent. It’s also an attempt to control the narrative before it controls her. Hingis, a prodigy whose game invited serious discussion, is signaling she understands the rules of the coverage machine - and can weaponize them.

The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: athletic excellence isn’t the only currency; conventional femininity still buys airtime. Yet it’s self-sabotaging, too. The quote reinforces the very standards that shrink women athletes into a beauty contest and pits them against one another. If it’s satire, it’s the kind that doesn’t fully protect its target - because in the real world, the joke gets printed as policy.