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Holiday Greetings, everyone. We're in the middle of that long grind that now begins officially the day after Thanksgiving and ends abruptly, one day into the new year. Say what you want about how "soft" we've all grown - our sheer ability, as a species, to gut out the "holiday season" is an enduring testament to the human spirit. . . or stamina. . . or greed. . . or the wholly understandable willingness to trade loads of money and the inevitable measure of emotional stress that is part of all holidays for - days off from work.
I think I'll slip out tonight to catch the 11 p.m. showing of The Road, just to restore my balance after two straight weeks of listening to the Christmas music station in my satellite radio. I hear that Wham! song, Last Christmas, I Gave You My Heart one more time and I'm gonna go all Serena on someone.
The Holiday season: it giveth. And it taketh away. Now what the hail did I do with the receipt too that ridiculous Eco-Sleep clock radio that wakes you to the sounds of the (fast-disappearing) rain forest instead of a good old-fashioned buzzer, or the voice of some coffee-addled morning talk show host. Why don't people give me nice presents, like a Come Along winch, or a Sawzall?
Anyway, this headline caught my eye this morning, and is as fine an example of irony as I can find. If Federer was named the European Athlete of the Year, he's probably right in the thick of the battle for earning the Swiss athlete-of-the-year honors, too, right?
Actually, it makes me feel bad for all those poor yodeling skiers, archers, figure skaters, cyclists and, of course, the titans of the luge. You may be the best race-walker or curler Switzerland has ever produced, but as long as that Federer character is around, you've got not shot at being named the athlete-of-the-year - or if they do find a way to bestow that honor upon you, even if it's just out of a desire to something new and different, how can you accept that abstract metal trophy (it could be truly useful if you attached to the line used to anchor your dinghy on Lake Geneva) with a straight face?
By the way, even before we learned that Tiger Woods is more swordsman than golfer, I felt that Federer was the athlete-of-the-decade, world-wide, hands down. As John McEnroe once said of golf, "I thought you had to run for it to be a sport. . ."
No disrespect intended toward golf, here. I'm not a fan, but it's a great game requires enormous skill, fabulous eye-hand co-ordination, yadda-yadda-yadda. But at the end of the day it's still more game than sport. There's a essential component missing that disqualifies golf from the pantheon of sports. That's something I would call "physicality." I'm not a big fan of figure skating, either, but there is physicality involved, despite all those ridiculous costumes the skaters wear. You don't jump high enough, you don't get that burst of acceleration that gets you there in time to catch the girl before she cracks her head on the ice and you don't have a shot at success.
I recall reading somewhere that Tiger spent a lot of time in the gym (he didn't just fall off the turnip truck; every gym on the planet is crawling with hotties in thongs, clutching bottles of Evian). But so what? Everyone these spends a lot of time in the gym; fitness, like climate-change, has become religion. So that angle didn't sell me on the fact that Tiger is a great athlete, although it certainly suggested that Tiger improved as a golfer because he decided to pursue fitness as diligently as the average Manhattan bond trader. It was a useful narrrative though, helping to boost the prestige of golf. Do you really want to tell me that golf is a demanding, physically challenging sport when it's the recreation of choice for eighty per cent of the blowhard, overweight corporate executives in the world? I'll consider the argument when all those guys I see on the golf course join a Thursday night boxing group, or trade their clubs for pitons and ice-axes, just for a change of pace. . .
No, Federer is the hands-down athlete of the decade in my book. Physicality is essential to tennis; take away the explosive first step, the ability to withstand the shock inflicted by a sport predicated on violent bursts and sudden stops, the stamina required to go fives sets under a broiling sun (we'll know more about that in a few weeks, when things get underway in Melbourne), and and you've got. . . a pretty darned good golfer. Or someone who could be that, at any rate. They ought to divide what is commonly called "sports" into two distinct categories: sports and games of skill. For McEnroe's Duh! line is actually a very accurate and reliable way to separate the two. On a sliding scale, tennis veers strongly toward sport; golf would skew heavily toward game. The gap separating the two activities is wider than the distance of either from the pole toward which it's drawn.
I'd be curious to know what you all think about this.
-- Pete