By way of our friends at Guyism comes this gorgeous photoshoot of Serbian beauty and former world tennis number one Ana Ivanovic, a great change of pace from the busty blondes of debatable weight and nipple-and-lollipops mistresses we normally feature.

My favorite part is how it looks like it was art directed by Rob Zombie, and at any point Bill Moseley or somebody in a hillbilly gimp mask is going to come running up from off-screen and bludgeon her to death with a hammer. It also sorta looks like jeans ads from 35 years ago, so … uh, maybe that’s the better comparison. My second favorite part is how she’s hot as f**king fire.

Images of Ana taken by renowned Hollywood photographer John Russo for the cover of Vanidades magazine. The shoot took place at Red Rock in Las Vegas during the spring.

Anyway, she plays tennis and she’s beautiful, so check out the pics.

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My Google alerts must be messed up, because normally my women’s tennis exhibition match news is the first thing that greets me each morning. But in a recent exhibition doubles match*, Kim Clijsters decided to have a little fun with one of her opponents, Yanina Wickmayer. Sadly, it involved neither pillows nor pudding.

Clijsters took the microphone from the chair umpire in the middle of the match and addressed the crowd in her zany Belgium language – Dutch? German? Swahili? – telling the mannen of the crowd that the first one to rush the court and kiss Wickmayer would win a white car that was parked next to the court. Needless to say, a few guys jumped the barriers and ran at Wickmayer at full speed, which is hilarious because a female tennis player was once stabbed that way. Did I say hilarious? I meant pants-crapping.

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Serena Williams was out and about in West Hollywood the other night, and there’s really nothing else to report. I mean, I sure wish that something awesome happened like she single-handedly kicked the crap out of a group of terrorists who were hellbent on destroying Lindsay Lohan’s cocaine supply. Allegedly. Did I do that right?

Regardless, I was going through my arsenal of random sports photos and I realized a theme that I know other people have talked about, but since I’m a dude I’ve always drowned it out, usually with the Golden Girls theme song. Williams is quite the fashionista when she’s not on the tennis court, and even when she is playing she tends to be a bit more unique and daring. But I thought we’d spend today’s slow news day – screw you, Game 2 – exploring Serena’s status as an American – nay, global! – fashion icon.

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Your first thought when looking at that picture should be, “Wow, how is it that muscular, 5-foot-9, 150-pound Serena Williams is a sports millionaire and still buys her clothes at the Baby Gap?” Then your eyes should sorta slowly rise to meet that weird patch on top of her head, and you ask, “Wait, does Serena Williams have a bald spot?”

That’s the issue of the day on The Young, Black and Fabulous. I can’t say I know a hell of a lot about African-American hairstyles, considering I’m a white guy who was born with hair like Linus from Peanuts, but the consensus of the comments section there is that either 1) it’s a bald spot on the lace front of her wig and that sports blogs and black culture sites only post the pictures to demean Serena, because what else could they do, or 2) an average person who is not a sports millionaire would not go out in public in a wig with a big hole in the front, especially not if they’re going out to a Celebrity Paparazzi Dinner with Kim Kardashian also-ran Brittny Gastineau.

What do you think? Is it evidence that killing your hair makes it die, or just Haters who are gonna hate?

Check out video of the weirdly-invasive paparazzi run-in after the jump.

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ESPN’s new 12-year, nearly $500 million deal to carry Wimbledon (all of Wimbledon, including the semi-finals and finals that were stuck on NBC) was caused by one simple thing — Simona Halep’s breast reduction. NBC Universal President Steve Burke was heard to remark “what is this, this is bullsh**” before throwing down his remote and resting his head in his hands for 40 minutes. “I just wanted to see her play, I don’t even know who this is.”

No, it was because NBC can’t get off their own jock about tape delay, and the All England Club wants their sporting events aired live. That’s all it took. NBC was so dedicated to taping things, then showing them slightly later that they lost one of their biggest and most storied sporting events, at least in terms of sports people don’t really watch. They tried to do it with the Olympics, and now they’ve done it with tennis. In a funny aside, the All England Club felt a live presentation would allow them a “single narrative”.

“We felt it was important to have a single narrative across the two weeks,” Ian Ritchie, the club’s chief executive, said on a conference call Tuesday. He added, “We felt very positively that we wanted to put it into one arena.”

I’m guessing the previous narrative, “these tennis players really want to win at tennis”, wasn’t getting through clearly enough on tape.

“Live is pre-eminent,” Ritchie said. “Live is the nature of the game now on sports around the world, not just for tennis, but for other ones.” He added, “I’m sure there is a place for tape delay and highlights, but the sports viewer wants to see things live.”

Ritchie said that he had had conversations in the past with NBC about changing its tape-delay policy, but gave no details.

“You understand from my comments that live is important,” he said.

An NBC spokesman declined to comment on Ritchie’s remarks.

Either that or he made a comment, and we have to wait five minutes to hear it.

I expected Ritchie to add a “did you see what I did there” or a “do you realize live” before he stopped talking, but here we are with the totality of Wimbledon on ESPN and chances of controversial wind-driven upskirts up 2000%. Sadly chances of Simona Halep nip slips are way, way down.

[via NY Times, with a h/t to Matt Ufford]

Yesterday, 19-year old Simona Halep breezed through her first-round match against Serbia’s Bojana Jovanovski at Wimbledon. Why is this an important thing to share with people on the Internet? For the reason you didn’t start reading this paragraph until you’d stared at the picture for five minutes. Simona got popular a couple of years ago on the reactionary part of the Internet that flips out (in both the good and bad ways, which are open to interpretation) about 17-year olds with humongous boobs, and her success this year is due to losing them; Halep got a massive breast reduction, and it seems to be making her awesome at tennis.

By way of The Daily Mail:

Halep was first noticed on her way to becoming junior champion at the French Open in 2008. In a bid to boost her game, she spent much of the following year recovering from the surgery, which took her cup size down from 34DD to a more modest 34C.

At the time she explained her decision to fans, saying: ‘It’s the weight that troubles me. My ability to react quickly, my breasts make me uncomfortable when I play.

‘I don’t like them in my everyday life, either. I would have gone for surgery even if I hadn’t been a sportswoman.’

I’m going to play the “women are people too” card and say I’m happy for her, even if the loss of such magnificent breasts is sh:tty to the awful, judgmental part of our brain that can only praise women for their beauty or condemn them for looking like steroid monsters. I think those are the only two reactions I’ve ever heard about women’s tennis outside of Ron Swanson: Player X is hot, or Player Y is on drugs and looks like a man and has a penis and could rip off yours. In this example, we’ll say Player X is Martina Hingis, and Player Y is any tennis player with her picture on Fark.

We wish Halep a successful Wimbledon, and now are heads can go back to looking back and forth instead of just straight ahead and slightly down.