Mad Master of Madrid (CC 10.19)

Mornin', folks. I'm enroute to Montana but I wanted to leave you with this intriguing piece to contemplate while you're waiting for the action to begin in Madrid. However you feel about Ion Tiriac's plans or declarations vis a vis the Grand Slams, this guy is always worth listening to - at least partly because he always challenges the conventional wisdom on any issue he tackles.

When Tiriac talks about something, you often feel like you're hearing about the subject for the first time. it has been this way for years, long before Tiriac became a billionaire entrepreneur. That he became one is, in and of itself, amazing. Granted, he was always shrewd. He was clever. But he was an outlaw and a system abuser, a notorious gamesman who butted heads with the world and never, ever gave an inch. He seemed to revel in his disreputability, yet he ultimately seduced legions with his uncanny business instincts and cold, dispassionate love of the deal. And his mind for business proved to be nothing short of brilliant.

When somebody denounced Tiriac and painstakingly detailed how Tiriac had cheated or otherwise abused him, Tiriac would respond with the most persuasive and logical counter-argument that you might imagine - only you didn't imagine it, because only Tiriac could imagine something of that nature, although there was nothing seemingly fabricated or refutable about it.

Tiriac's most striking and sometimes disturbing talent has been his absolute genius at playing - probably being - the devil's advocate. For instance, he could convice you - or come darned close to doing it - that he was the real victim in that notorious 1972 Davis Cup final. If Tiriac were disposed to law, he would have wound up as the guy representing the most heinous criminals imaginable, and framing his defense of them in infuriatingly clear, logical, acceptable and persuasive terms.

I think the ideas Tiriac expresses in this story are compelling in exactly that way. Finished reading it, you practically leap from your chair, shouting Holy cow, this guys is one-hundred per cent right! The thing holding tennis back is the stranglehold the Grand Slams have on the game.

But something may stop from you doing that, which is either your BS detector kicking in, or - and this is the tricky part - your fear of accepting an argument that doesn't fit your view of things, no matter how irrefutable and fact-based it may be (I find that this often happens in political discussions). That is, you reject his argument on some kind of emotional grounds, even though it is logical, clear, fact-based and intellectually irrefutable.

Of course, that's what makes Tiriac such a fascinating guy. He seems devoid of sentiment and "emotion." He seems attached to nothing (like, for example, tennnis tradition), beyond his own preoccupations as an empire-builder. His logic is impeccable, but impeccable logic tempered by no deep-rooted and perhaps even illogical convictions or beliefs nothing else can lead you to some very strange places (among them, for example, complete de-criminalization of lethal drug use - but that's just a handy example rather than some pet cause of mine).

It's very hard to refute the logic Ion Tiriac uses in the story linked above, but I'm still not sure that he's "right". All I know for sure is that Ion Tiriac is one strange dude.