The Tennis Fan Today (Part 1)

Professional tennis, and the watching of professional tennis, are two completely different matters. A person can love professional tennis as I do and yet never watch it, and not miss it, and not even mind when it isn’t being played. This empty Wimbledon pandemic fortnight, after the blank where Roland Garros should have been, leaves me shrugging with equal indifference. Of course, if Maria Sharapova hadn’t retired my guess is I’d feel differently, bothered at least if not somewhat heartsick on her behalf. I’d have loved to see her win more titles. But as it is, I don’t care.

Blame the impedimenta. To attending in professional tennis events in person in a normal year, a long list: inconvenience, jacked-up prices, extreme overcrowding, intrusive security, feral bands of child autograph hunters, terrible pop music playing on the changeovers (put this at the top of the list) and all over the grounds, the air thick with beeriness and meat smoke, the fatigue-slackened faces silvered by Jumbotron light pollution: a horrible time and this is with comp tickets, forget about having to pay for them.

But to follow from afar is not much easier nor any more pleasant. What started out, for one thing, as too many commercials has become too much to pay monthly for a premium cable subscription: an annoyance has grown into a major barrier. Beyond which is “the product” itself—always a product, professional tennis have never been more of one—how it looks and what it contains. When I’ve been able to watch on occasion these past several years, I’ve seen the commercials haven’t gone anywhere, they’ve multiplied inside the broadcasts and overrun the tournaments, the courts, the players’ persons. Information-wise, it’s a wasteland of pointless statistics, canned themes, obfuscation and hacky hagiography. The commentators chatter without ceasing. I especially dread the national embarrassment that settles in as the Americans mispronounce every single “foreign” player’s name. It’s deliberate, I’ve even heard them refer to the “Americanized version.” The embarrassment and sorrow at how our media hold us back, we the people who could use better training from childhood onward, these deep feelings get in there and spoil my enjoyment, over time they’ve helped to erode my wish to watch at all.

Slash a way through all these unpalatable trappings and there is professional tennis, the game itself and the act of watching it being played. Without question, we see our human civilization at a peak here—more than one, really. As sports go, like baseball, it’s full of perfections. Unusually, both sexes reach the highest levels of play, of reward, and of fame. The best men are like demigods. And where else have women, rising in white skirts out of immemorial subjections, made such a sustained display of active liberated female bodies, unrestrained and self-directed, excelling in competition? Simply to sit and reflect on the last century in professional women’s tennis is to be in touch with the highest ideals, while memory fills with heroics and proud moments. Tennis in thought is very beautiful.

In finding ways to make the pleasure of watching professional tennis outweigh the depressing nastiness of actually doing so, the modern fan leans hard on personalities. Attachments and infatuations bind us to the sight of certain players so that we’ll put up with the most aggravating coverage in return.  Also, great players, like Maria Sharapova, make it worthwhile to watch them. Though too many beautiful quiet tensions have gone from today’s noisy game (which despite what people say won’t be appreciably quieter in her absence when play resumes this year), a mute control brings goodness back, like a magic wand whose wave leaves us alone in the hush with our love idols.

I’d stopped muting Maria years ago, however, when I began to love the way she vocalized. Her whole game just captured me. Here is a tinyloop from a final she played at Stanford in August 2010. Victoria Azarenka’s voice is first, Sharapova’s second.

2nd Roland Garros title

After Wimbledon | Ladies

The scary Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard hasn't managed to inspire any warm feelings in me in the couple of years since her star began to rise. She is aggressive and antique portrait bust pretty, very Gilded Age; other fans of Edith Wharton might have noted her exact-in-many-points resemblance to Undine Spragg. Yesterday at Wimbledon she played and was flattened 6-3 6-0 in the Ladies Single final. Even though I am a major Petra Kvitova fan, here was my chance to loosen the heartstrings and sympathize with the kid a little; I didn't, I enjoyed watching North American princess type Eugenie Bouchard get thumped and sent packing in less than an hour by "my" player. Very much!

 

Petra Wins Again

But ever since, when I think about what she was up against, thinking back on that match, I've felt more and more sorry for Genie Bouchard. In my mind's eye I can picture her, a pretty blonde girl with visor, braid, racquet, white multi-million dollar Nike contract tennis dress, the works--she's on one side of the net. And on the other side, I know, is Petra Kvitova, I've watched the match twice (on-line, via ESPN embedded on the Wimbledon site all the way through the finals, all courts, with replay, very civilized and great despite buffering problems). And I see Petra Kvitova; she just hit a crosscourt forehand. At the same time a spirit photography-style double exposure occurs in my memory and hovering all around her I see white brick walls and parts of industrial structures--concrete loading docks, power plant smokestacks, thick steel beams with rivets for their alien double spines. As I recall, I see poor Genie Bouchard with no weapons but a strong chin versus some kind of dark Satanic Mill, a human female mega-factory for the production of another Wimbledon title.

 

 

Honest

So, here I am writing this huge novel about professional women’s tennis and I can’t stand Serena Williams. She just won the US Open again, I don’t know for which time, I don’t care.

I took against Serena Williams when she was still a child, the first time I ever saw her on television. It must have been 1994, she hadn’t turned pro yet but her big sister Venus was making a splash somewhere and their “unique upbringing” was always a big part of the story. So one day they stuck little sister Serena in front of the cameras to show off the success of the family’s educational methods by having her recite the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from Macbeth. She mangled it. She must have been about eleven or twelve, she could have done better—but no one mentioned this fact and no one corrected her. Macbeth is my favorite play and I felt offended on its behalf, she mangled it that badly, giggling all the while. Why no re-take? There was no re-take. Because she was being cute, because she had a wide toothy smile and a head full of beads and wasn’t shy about performing on camera, because she was maybe a future major tennis star if the father’s predictions were to be believed, the network ran what she gave them, as if it were just fine to get mostly all the words wrong in a filmed recitation of Shakespeare. When—in my opinion—it wasn’t. Isn't. When—as I continue to believe—she’d never memorized that speech at all, she just wanted to make a boast of it. I’ve always tended to like lively truth-challenged children but this one I didn’t. Just like that, like with a finger snap, I parted ways with Serena Williams. She might have been a charming American girl who claimed to have parts of Shakespeare by memory and really truly did; she’d have won me over in that case, I would have been her fan, probably forever. I’d have admired her had she cried out, “No, no, let me try again, I can do better, I really know this!” Instead she came off as a big mealy-mouthed child liar.

The U.S. Open Women's Singles Trophy (r)

Eighteen years later, she’s got no eyebrows except those she inks on, and sideburns—otherwise she hasn’t changed at all.

Fact 1: What I think about Serena Williams doesn’t matter. Fact 2: Serena Williams has always been just as sloppy and greedy and narcissistic and disrespectful of Shakespeare as she’s been allowed to be—just as dishonest, too. To blame her for being successfully rotten misses the point. The plain truth is that if she didn’t play such an error-strewn game I’d have grown fond of her by now, but she just slaps so many wide, so many long, as if it didn’t matter—and then it doesn’t matter, she still wins because she hits so hard.

Pro Women’s Tennis (and Animals)

An explanation: Yesterday morning I finished reading JM Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, the first book of his I’ve read. It’s extremely impressive and highly polemical. So last night in the spirit and somewhat under the spell of that book I ended up writing a polemic—I wrote “a brief polemic” first but maybe it didn’t seem that brief. I should add that I have no evidence for the part about the early absconders and their role in the latest crash and recession, only a strong feeling that it’s true.

I’m back to the What is Famepunk blog after a month of line by line revisions to the manuscript of the second part, Middlemarch. This week I should be sending out the files to CreateSpace over at Amazon and start the first proof copy going, for late September print publication. The Kindle version will be available sooner. I have a lot of work to do at the computer on all this file preparation but I’m very busy, instead, becoming a vegetarian and watching the US Open live streaming. This whole week, it’s been exactly like Wimbledon wasn’t: six courts simultaneously on-line, viewer’s choice, and free. At home my buffering isn’t the quickest but that’s not the end of the world, not when I can watch defending champion Samantha Stosur play a tough match on Armstrong while CBS showed men’s tennis, only, from noon to 5:50pm, at which point they showed one game from Stosur’s second set, cut to commercial, then showed part of another game but cut away in the middle to broadcast live shots of the grounds and some wrap-up commentary by a guy with a cartoon hairstyle.

C2

This close to football season on the Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, the networks are competing for the male gaze, obviously—it is also true (see above) that men don’t want their women to see Samantha Stosur’s body because it might cause lesbianism.

For dinner which was finished very late because I then watched my favorite player Petra Kvitova lose in three to the amazing Marion Bartoli of France, who was on fire tonight—en flammes!—I cooked a Turkish eggplant dish called Imam Bayidli (The Imam Swooned) and Bulghur Pilav, I’ve never made either dish before, both recipes from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook; highly recommended.

Samantha Stosur (August 2012)

Am I really becoming a vegetarian? And why now? I’m not sure but I return to what I’ve been reading this week. The title character of JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is a famous novelist who receives invitations to give talks all over the world. At some opportunities, she speaks against raising animals to kill and eat. Other characters in the book disagree with her and they strongly object to her comparison of the meat industry with the Nazi death camps. I have a friend who says, if they weren’t going to be eaten they wouldn’t have been born in the first place; she tries to buy only the best kinds of meat, from real butchers who stock heirloom breeds fed organically and raised humanely; she doesn’t hold with having meat every day, either. I really agree with her, on all of that. Then I think to myself, does meat matter so much to me that I’m willing to spend two or more hours each week away from my work on Famepunk making trips to artisanal butchers in Brooklyn’s most annoying neighborhoods? In other words, can I spare the same amount of time for meat each week that I’ll give to watching women’s tennis on a weekend once or twice a year? Unlike my friend, I have a full-time office job—I’d end up someday buying pre-formed beef patties at Whole Foods, I just know this, and I won’t do it. I refuse that future. I made quinoa for the first time two weeks ago, tonight I’ve tried bulgur, also delicious. Onward and upward.

LINK: This role model

About Tennis: Wimbledon 2012

Back when I was younger and the wonders of cable television’s future were being extolled across the land by paid lobbyists—back before most people even realized that’s what was happening, instead we would have assumed it was just the way of the best futures to announce themselves above the rest, in the American way—way back then, I started looking forward to the day when for a small fee you’d be able to watch the major tennis tournaments over three or four channels, all the matches you wanted to see, live and uninterrupted, all the way through. It seemed possible. I can’t say I remember hearing anyone mention the idea on-air but it always seemed reasonable to me. It still does—now more than ever, in fact, when “we” have thousands of channels to fill. But did it ever happen?

No. Even close? Not at all. Up until last year when the Tennis Channel lost its last pissing contest with my cable provider, I’d been paying an extra $6.95 per month for a very poor approximation of what the future should have been by now. When it got dropped I downgraded my subscription entirely to rock bottom. I figured I’d still get to watch a good many major matches on network TV, certainly the Grand Slam finals. Which felt sufficient. I’d already watched a lot of tennis in my life, now I was writing Famepunk and watching so little TV that the biggest part of my cable bill was for nothing. And of course I—“we”—had the internet now, representing the rest of my cable bill. The internet, an endless space for the storage of infinite archives and live feeds of matches, should be a paradise for tennis fans, much better than any cable TV. We can live in hope: at any time, professional tennis might turn an ideological corner and start sharing itself more freely with a huge and grateful international audience watching on-line.

But not watching Wimbledon—not in my house, anyway, thanks to the 12-year contract Wimbledon signed with ESPN last July for exclusive U.S. rights. This year I listened over internet radio from the Wimbledon website. In truth, I’ve gotten to enjoy tennis on the radio, starting back in January with Craig Gabriel at the Australian Open. Tennis and radio are a surprisingly good fit. Even so, nothing beats watching a match on TV with the sound down but I don’t want ESPN in my house again, especially not since they fired Joe Morgan from Sunday night baseball. They’re venal, they’re idiots, they’re pimps for big management agencies, they’re the reason cable television costs so much: this is ESPN, owned by Disney.

LINK: This Episode

Which also owns ABC so when the finals were finally broadcast on their respective afternoons, it was the ESPN feed from the morning that played. I don’t like getting trapped with ESPN’s garbage whether I buy it or not and I didn’t even watch the women’s match. I’d have watched on-line but Wimbledon posts no matches on its own tournament website because exclusive means exclusive: it sold all its rights, strapped for cash, Wimbledon, with its big new retractable roof on top of five long years paying equal prize money to women. How fortuitous was that roof installation, though, because now the start of the big-ticket Centre Court matches can be timed to the minute and ESPN can stick to the schedule, it works out so well—if not for bottom-tier customers like me, then presumably for large numbers of other people who matter more because they’re paying more and also getting more—more in this case being many hours and even multiple channels of actual live tennis, as Wimbledon says it wanted. Needless to say, desperately poor as it is Wimbledon couldn’t simply start broadcasting matches live to anyone with a web browser: even if it charged a fee, Wimbledon couldn’t afford to make that kind of choice. This isn’t some utopia where $480 million doesn’t rate picking up off the floor, not when you’re just an itty-bitty old lawn tennis club stuck in the super-expensive capital city of a dead empire. It’s a big change for me, not watching Wimbledon, but I’ve got twelve more years to get used to it.

Where it came from

Since childhood I’ve always been a great big televised tennis fan. To date myself, my first great loves were Bjorn Borg and Harold Solomon. Then, when I was in high school, I caught a glimpse of Hana Mandlikova winning the French Open title and my focus shifted towards the women’s game.

I was in my 30s before I attended my second professional match; instead, as much as I could I always followed from home, on television. The broadcast paradigm hasn’t changed. Every two games and at the close of each set there I’d be, sitting through thirty years of commercials for Jaguars I’d never drive and financial services I’d never earn enough to need, triumphal messages from big oil and IBM, athletes peddling swag or dripping Gatorade in slow motion—this hasn’t changed: the same commercial blocks remain fixed in frequent rotation over a whole match, a whole weekend, a whole tournament. In response, I tuned out. I developed or dug out a fantasy world into which I would slip during the pauses, a pleasant underworld where the women’s tennis action continued at a hectic, hugely entertaining pace. I made up fantasy matches. On the one side of the net would be a famous player, someone real. On the other side, a Jewish girl with dark hair and charisma, a balletic trickster, a showboating American troublemaker—a fictional self-projection although I’m not Jewish and I’ve played tennis very little, never well. I had other alter-egos. I’ve also produced ten million cubic tons of obsessive dead-end romantic daydreams—not to boast, but this on top of an active creative life coexisting with various day jobs. Still, over the course of the decades the scenes I pictured between this character and the “other” great players of “her” day (which stretched longer and longer) grew into a fairly detailed story cycle with which I entertained myself during commercials and other odd, idle hours off and on across the year, and always during Grand Slam tournaments.

On Labor Day weekend in 2010, I was casting about for my next big writing project. The previous year I’d published a book of short poems and a short, off-putting novel. Since then I’d been keeping a blog about reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables at work, but I’d almost reached the end. I was sitting at home on my sofa, drafting a blog entry, with the US Open going on television. I started to write about the gigantic quantity of hours I’d wasted—wasted—on daydreams about my made-up tennis player. But then I thought, Maybe not. After a little while, quite tentatively, I started making a list of characters: a sort of key, with the initials of the real-life player-models followed by their new fictional names. Then I started writing, basically transcribing a voice that had started near the end of the story before doubling back to the opening scene. I kept going. Writing at length has always been a struggle for me although I love to do it, I love the re-reading, so I was genuinely surprised at how quickly my notebook pages were filling with prose fiction—and not only in sequence, but in patches. Dialogues and scenes from what I recognized had to be later volumes were presenting themselves, pressing forward, mapping a long journey, it was obvious.

Strangest of all was how quickly the new fiction devoured and digested the original tennis daydream, which is gone, along with a few others. In the battle over my mental economy, this book won. As Famepunk (the title came to me later) it arrived with its own major plot points and story arc in which I recognize scattered old fantasy elements embedded in mostly and mysteriously new material: the combination crystallized at the moment of exposure. It’s very strange, but I’m left thankful to have discovered a life’s work ahead of me, I feel I really caught a wave. I give a lot of credit to Victor Hugo. Four months in, I was through with the first draft of US Open 1987, the not-short first volume, and was already writing the second, which I’ve called Middlemarch. Now it’s finished, too, and in keeping with the title, it’s long. It’s also filled with love and sex between talented teenaged girl athletes. I’ve got a few kind people reading this one in its final draft before I move ahead with wider publication next month; meanwhile I’m making final edits. But I like to keep busy—and there is a first volume out there for sale. So I’m opening this blog for curious readers who’d like to know more than a searchable product description can tell.