Howdy, all, and I hope you had a Merry Christmas and a great holiday break. There will be no Deuce Club post today (Heidi is off to a conference). so this will by an OT thread where you can discuss anything. I am off to the farm in game-rich Andes tomorrow afternoon, but will have some posts for you for the long weekend, including some of our TW awards and citations.
We had a fine time last weekend and over Christmas. I did not get to take Cowboy Luke to the mall, because Sunday was damp and drizzly (Rudy3 - thanks for that story you posted about a similar jaunt). So we went to see the Hopper and Turner exhibitions at the National Gallery. Hopper is something else. I thought he was great as that oxygen-sucking freak in the movie Blue Velvet, and now it turns out the dude can paint, too!
I'm not really nuts about Turner - all those Victory at Sea images, mixed with mythological scenes and Venetian land, er, sea, er canalscapes. Some of the pictures trembling at the very verge of abstraction are awesome, though, and I guess they're visionary, given what would come down the pike soon enough.
Thanks for posting some of your own Christmas stories at the last post. I noted that a comment poster (Codepoke?) really hit the nail on the head when he wondered whether posting that story took "courage or shamelessness." While I'm pretty certain it took no courage, it did take a little shamelessness (although I did cringe when I hit the "post now" button?). But in a way that was the point in my writing it out of me. In a way I don't count that shoplifting episode as "shameful" in the classic sense because I was nothing but a rebel-without-a-clue - a kid in the grip of emotions I couldn't recognize and over which I had no control. Which doesn't excuse or justify anything, because I was a crafty little devil, too, who knew how to turn the proverbial inch into a mile. But more than anything I'm still surprised by the basic innocence and out-to-lunch woefulness of what I did that snowy day before Christmas Eve.
I also saw that least one poster found that my confessional explained my love for the farm (yes, it;s a lifelong thing with me), and one or two wondered how an admitted juvenile delinquent turned it around to become, for all intents and purposes, a (marginally) useful citizen. The question itself makes me uncomfortable and self-conscious, because my past, like everyone else's, is as much a part of me as my present. But here's the thing: although I experienced some tough and even ghastly times because of certain rebellious or thrill-seeking instincts, I always had the lodestar of writing, and that kept my life from being - or becoming - aimless or purposeless, which I think are real, towering dangers.
I knew I wanted to be a "writer" from eighth grade; there was never much question. And this is one of the reasons I have so much respect for some tennis players, including Pete Sampras and Roger Federer. Pete has told me that he never wanted to be anything but a tennis player, and I am looking forward to The Mighty Fed's autobiography - partly to see if he too, never wanted to be anything but a tennis champion. That they succeeded in realizing their ambitions to such a degree is inspiring and extraordinary. And it makes me have great empathy for the journeymen on the tour.
Which brings us to another issue (I can hear JB gnashing her teeth, although this being the post-Christmas eating season, I suppose that ought to read Noshing her teeth) . A comment poster the other day more or less called me out, demanding to know whether or not I had actually watched the Macao exo between Federer and Sampras. At the time, I didn't want to answer the question for a couple of reasons that are no longer important. But here is part of what I ultimately wrote in a later, private exchange of emails (with a few edits and tweaks):
On another note, here is one of my favorite exo stories: Early in their careers, Jimmy Connors really lorded it over Bjorn Borg. Then, between 1977 and '78, the two fought see-saw battles, with Borg struggling to get out from under the thumb of Jimbo. It was the golden age of their rivalry. The Swede was younger, of course, and unquestionably intimidated by Connors - who was as great a gamesman and bully as every set foot on a court, except when it came to players who wouldn't take his crap.
At any rate, Borg turned the corner in the rivalry at an exhibition event called the Pepsi Grand Slam, which took place in January. It brought together four Grand Slam finalists, who played a weekend exo at a brand-new Florida resort (the idea was to get on the public's radar and sell condominiums). I attended a couple of them and had a great time, partly because Vitas Gerulatis was around and that was always a blast.
The critical PGS followed the 1978 US Open (at which Connors tagged Borg in four-sets, on green Har-Tru clay; it was his finest moment in the rivalry). Borg won that PGS, 2-and-3. He then traveled to Philadelphia (Hi Sam!) to play the US Pro Indoor. I was at that event as well, and the PGS match came up in Borg's first press conference. Responding to a question about his rivalry with Connors, he pointed out how he had hammered Jimbo in the Pepsi Grand Slam just days earlier. A reporter said something to the effect of: Oh, but that's an exhibition, that doesn't count.
Borg, who was usually unflappable and the model of self-control, snapped: "You think that doesn't count?"
Well, as soon as the words left Bjorn's lips, we knew that it counted - or at least that it sure counted for Borg. As for Connors, I don't honestly remember if anybody went back to him with Borg's reaction, but I'm pretty sure Jimmy's response, if they had, would have been to shrug and say something like: Oh, that? That was just an exhibition.
This anecdote has no relevance to the Pete-Roger issues we've been talking about, but it does underscore that you have to be careful when talk about exhibition matches. They can be meaningless, but they aren't by definition meaningless. They are rarely fixed, but they are almost never comparable to all-out, Grand Slam-grade throwdowns. You have to take them on a case-by-case basis, and if it's infuriatingly difficult to say to what degree any one of them might be germane, it's also very, very difficult to know when they are irrrelevant because they are fixed.
The plain truth is that you don't really need to fix exos, not any more than a player needs to prove anything by his performance in one - most of the time.
