Howdy. Well, I’m back from a four-day weekend at Little View Farm, our country place in rugged, game-rich Andes, our Catskill Mountains hideout. I spent a lot of time mowing hay (although I kept breaking the shear-bolt on the tractor’s PTO—if you’re a farm boy, write!) and did a fair amount of pond time. My little one, Cowboy Luke, who’s closing on 3, loves jumping off the giant flat rock at the edge of the pond into my arms. The only frog Luke had seen before this weekend was some variation or other on Kermit, the Sesame Street frog. I caught him a real one, and he got all excited and started shouting, “Jump, froggy, jump.”
Which is what I always say to Luke when he’s jumping on our bed. The kid’s no dummy, despite my genetic contribution.
I’m trying to get back in the swing of things here, and want to update those of you who were kind enough to write in to inquire, “What’s up with TennisWorld?”
Well, there’s a lot going on. I’m off to a press conference in a little while featuring John McEnroe and Michael J. Fox (I’ll post on that tomorrow) and I need to get a few columns for TENNIS Magazine edited. For those of you who don’t know, I assign and edit the Tennis Life columns, as well as Jon Wertheim’s contributions to our back page (the My Point real estate). The 40 Greatest countdown has also been my beat.
This morning, I did a television taping for an E! Entertainment Network show on Brooke Shields. The producer, Ashley Crary, is a huge tennis fan going back to the days of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova’s rivalry. I talked mostly about Andre and basically argued that at heart Andre is more like an actor than a tennis player, which probably made it extra hard for two people like him and Brooke to have a lasting, stable relationship. The motto for all celebrities (and top tennis players), of course, is “It’s all about me!” But I also gave Andre props for having worked his way through that annoying if necessary mind-set through his charitable work.