Maria Sharapova's father today escaped punishment for a throat-slitting gesture at the Australian Open, but the "gutter behaviour" cemented his place in the club of infamous tennis parents. Yuri Sharapov has been a fixture courtside at the season-opening Grand Slam, often unshaven, wearing dark glasses and with the hood pulled up on his camouflage army-print sweatshirt. Even his glamorous daughter said he looked like "an assassin". But when television cameras caught him dragging a finger across his throat as Maria was blowing kisses to the crowd after her stunning victory over world number one Justine Henin this week, the floodgates of criticism opened. "What, exactly, is Yuri Sharapov's problem?," asked the Herald Sun Thursday. "He is yet to comprehend the world is interested in his daughter. Not him. "He has become a Melbourne Park clown; a distraction and unworthy of his screeching daughter's excellence. "His throat-slitting gesture was gutter behaviour, but not unexpected from a man who has compiled a string of infractions now worthy of officialdom's scrutiny." The Melbourne Age was equally damning in its coverage. "Sharapov's belligerence, captured by a camera he knew was in his face, belongs in a professional wrestling ring not beside a tennis court," it said. "Even the American National Football League, the world's most violent football code, banned the throat-slashing gesture eight years ago which some players had called "the OJ", a reference to O.
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