Lost Innocence

Greetings, Tribe. I've got to make this one pretty quick, because I need to bolt before 3 PM to make the run up to the farm in game-rich Andes. This is a bit of a bummer. My wife Lisa and I had planned to go to a holiday party given by good friends this evening, and then head up north tomorrow morning, en famille. But there's a wicked nor'easter brewing and the weekend is going to be a mess. So I'm doing one of those solo mad dashes - hope to spend tomorrow plowing snow (I don't even have the chains on the tractor yet!) and hanging out with our beloved cat Biscuit, who hasn't seen hide nor hair of us for a month. Given the weather forecast, I need to be back in New York late Saturday. I will drop by then and probably post on Sunday.

I more or less reprised my Six-to-Nine Club for ESPN for today; it should be live in a little while (Thought I'd throw that in there, just to give JB a chance to accuse me of flogging an expired equine again) Not much new in it, if you kept up with the comments at that recent thread, as well as the discussion over at theCoulda, Woulda, Shoulda post).

Remember, we have the TW on-line holiday party on Monday. I am also inviting all of you to participate in our TennisWorld year-end awards. Once again, we will be singling out specific posters for acknowledgement, as in: Poster Most Likely to Violate TW's No Caps Rule - Tina. Or, Class Valedictorian - Snoo Foo. You know, that kind of thing.

But  PLEASE, send your suggestions to me via the Contact tab; DO NOT foreshadow the awards by publishing them in the Comments. If I get enough entries, we'll post the most amusing ones. If not,  we'll just forget the whole thing, but still name a Poster of the Year (MarieJ is the defending champ) and do a few other things of that nature over the break between Christmas and New Year's.

Now here's a question for y'all: do  you think Monica Seles ought to try this reported comeback? I'm of two minds on this one. Apparently, Seles has been playing with the likes of Jennifer Capriati and Martina Navratilova, so she's presumably striking the ball pretty well. On the other hand, Seles is 34, and she was never know for her movement, or level of fitness. She was a superb shotmaker and hellacious competitor in her prime, but her uncanny accuracy and fighting spirit seemed to diminish even before she faded from the tour (after a comeback from that awful stabbing incident).

I always felt that Seles benefited greatly from living in a kind of bubble  early in her career. Protected by her doting father, Karolj, and her selfless mom, Esther, she had not a care in the world - other than targeting the lines with laser-like groundstrokes. More than any other player I can think of, Seles won because of her pure shotmaking. She seemed to be playing darts, not tennis, and putting most of the missles into the bullseye. That will win you many, many tennis matches - especially if you can do it against the likes of, oh, Steffi Graf.

Curiously, that ability seemed to declineafter the bubble was burst by a few unanticipated events - Karolj's death from cancer, and the attack upon Seles by that German knife-weilding maniac. The way Seles played the game (and she got off to a faster start, major title-wise, than any other woman of the Open era)  somehow seemed bound up with her youthful innocence. And those awful events she had to endure ended not just her innocence, but her period of greatness, too.

I'll tell you one thing, though. Seles seems to have matured into a great beauty. The recent pictures of her blew me away - who needs Maria Sharapova (or even Ana Ivanovic) with Monica around?

Okay, have at it! I suggest you use this post to discuss tennis-related issues, and Heidi's recent Deuce Club posts for general chit-chat and Off-Topic conversation. Have a great weekend!