Phthursday Musings: Causing a Racket

This past Sunday, a few miles away in London, the Wimbledon men’s final was followed by the Euro 2020 final. Both were a culmination of long and interesting tournaments. I watched a lot of the Euros, including the final; and I also watched a few Wimbledon matches, including at least some of both the women’s and men’s finals.

In 1984, to pick just one year, the Wimbledon winners were Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe. And I think I saw those matches too. I definitely remember seeing Martina win Wimbledon - though of course she did so many times.

I definitely did not watch any European soccer match any time in the 1980s.

I got to thinking a little about this while talking about these competitions with people. The men’s winner this year, Novak Djokovic, has now won 20 majors, tying him with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. They are clearly the three GOATs of men’s tennis. Not that I can very effectively imagine a match between Djokovic and McEnroe in my mind. But McEnroe can, and he was calling the match for ESPN, and I know he is very happy to have never had to face the three GOATs during his own prime.

And while maybe I can’t compare the finer points of their games, there is at least the point to be made that I have, little by little, been watching tennis on television for probably 40 years now.

I specifically remember watching tennis at my grandmother’s house. This seems illogical to me because I can’t recall my grandmother having any interest in tennis. (It is possible, though, that she thought some of them were good looking men. I’m prettye sure if she’d ever seen Rafa Nadal play, that’s exactly what she would have said.) But, I can place the scene really well. Another hot July day, thereby warranting that the fan - the one with blue blades that oscillated - be running, me probably sitting on the rocking chair some and on the floor some, this being before the carpet got replaced so when on the floor it was like I was sitting on a gigantic calico cat.

I also remember similar scenes, perhaps even later the same day, but instead it was golf on the TV. Now: my grandmother didn’t have cable in the 1980s (did she ever have cable? I don’t think so) and so you were limited to whatever was on one of four channels, and on summer Sundays, that likely meant golf versus a nominally even less interesting sport (from a wide world of sports???) versus some random movie from 1972 starring someone who eventually starred across Goldie Hawn but not yet. And so it was like, oh, look, there’s Seve Ballesteros, and what an exotic man he must be, because really who else is named Seve?

Friends.

There is no good reason for a child to be sitting around watching golf.

Except, that was what was on, so that’s how it went.

And I think I must have watched a lot of golf under auspices like this. And I also think I watched a lot of stock car racing under similar auspices. Good gravy, there is nothing more boring than watching stock car racing on television. I mean, the pit stop is the interesting part. Oh and I guess Richard Petty’s hat, I mean, Richard Petty was kind of cool. Srsly tho, how god awful boring must it all have been years later when the guy who got all the airtime was Jeff Gordon?

But golf, I think I figured it out, golf is the sports television equivalent of muzak. Unless you are bothered by the boredom in and of itself, the whole thing is designed to be just enough sports to make you think, oh, sports, and accordingly drink beer or whatever, just like muzak in the grocery store was designed to be just enough music to make you think, oh, music, and accordingly buy beer or whatever.

Today, nobody would actually accept going out in public and being subjected to muzak. If you walked into a grocery store and hear some sort of muzak version of, oh, “Easy Lover”, you would probably become incredibly angry. At least play actual songs, damn it!

Similarly, why on earth would anyone sit around and watch golf today?

But I kind of grew up watching it, and I suspect all of you around my age - at least the guys around my age - grew up watching it too. You saw tennis, you saw golf, you saw auto racing. You didn’t see soccer.

And I wonder how what we did and didn’t watch affected us. See, the sports we all did watch, overwhelmingly, they involved men who were white and/or American. I think back to watching baseball, basketball, football in the mid-’80s, and they were all men, and almost nobody was a non-white non-English speaker. Even baseball, a sport with a long storied history of Latin players… just look at the rosters for the 1984 All-Star Game. Some of the non-starting position players were Dominican (Alfredo Griffin, Dámaso García, Rafael Ramirez, Tony Peña), one was Venezuelan (Tony Armas). Some of the pitchers were Dominican (Mario Soto, Joaquín Andújar), one was Puerto Rican (Willie Hernández), one was Mexican (the incomparable Fernando Valenzuela!) But none of the starters. So there were some guys, but none of them except Fernando were really big-name stars. And this was indicative of most of the MLB rosters at the time too, as best as I can recall.

I joked about Seve Ballesteros, but seriously, that was the most exotic guy on television. He was from Spain! He was swarthy! I mean, look at the man, described in this article as “swashbuckling”:

I mean, sure, that’s cool and all, but… swashbuckling? He’s golfing! It’s not like he’s goddamn Jonathan Richman:

Surrender!

Ahem.

Look:

We fucking grew up thinking that Mr. Belvedere was somehow a wild and crazy dude because he was from another country. We went goddamn apeshit for fucking Crocodile Dundee. We were still going apeshit over a decade later when Austin Powers hit the scene. We as a country clearly had no capacity to absorb anything actually challenging, like the idea that Vietnam was an actual country with actual people in it. (Exception of course noted for our complete and utter unquestioned acceptance of all those Led Zeppelin songs about hobbits.)

I’ve written before about how, from a young age, baseball was for me an antidote to racism. Go back and look at the 1984 All-Stars. Ozzie Smith! Tony Gwynn! That they were Black was totally irrelevant. When I got to be 11 and the baseball team I was on was racially mixed, well, I’d like to believe that what we looked like didn’t matter a whole lot to us. Maybe it did. But I think by virtue of being together it helped it not matter so much. We were kids, we were a team, we could all play ball, we even won the league championship. School? That reenforced racism. Baseball challenged it. Football, I suppose, did too. Basketball, definitely.

But we never saw soccer. I didn’t see any World Cup matches until maybe 1994 (when it was in the U.S.) And, alas, that was, and is, the most international of sports. Why couldn’t that have been on television instead of golf? Oh, yeah. Because soccer, unless intentionally played to be at its absolute most brutally boring, is completely antithetical to muzak. It’s colorful, rolicking, emotional, and can even be all of those things when the final score is 0-0. America had no use for anything like that. Oh, sure, someone tried, they brought Pelé to New York, yadda yadda. But I’m especially talking about the Reagan years here. Peak Muzak. If you were there, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Back to tennis.

One of the things about tennis is this: It was the only time you ever saw professional women competing against one another in sporting events.

Yes, there might from time to time be women in other sports on television, maybe gymnastics, maybe figure skating. But those aren’t competitions where you have opponents who can impact your showing, or at least not in nearly the same way. There was no women’s basketball, women’s soccer, no women’s team sport of any kind on television. The totality of what was presented to us at that time, anywhere in such a realm, was tennis.

Maybe it is truly the case that tennis is the most aesthetically pleasing women’s sport to watch. I don’t know how you’d prove that, and I’m not going to argue that it is. But maybe it is.

I’m going to assume though that it’s just a matter of preference. And if putting women playing tennis on television was effective, then, damn it, so too would have been putting women playing basketball on television, or putting women playing softball on television. They just never did it. They gave us more damn golf and stock cars.

They did give us tennis, though. And I suspect that from watching women’s tennis, and from spending so much time at the diamonds watching my mom play softball, I internalized early on, more so than most kids, certainly more so than most boys, that of course girls could and would play sports too. Maybe they couldn’t kick a ball as far as boys but that didn’t mean they didn’t want to play and that didn’t mean that some girls couldn’t metaphorically (or, um, literally) beat the crap out of some boys.

The only broad societal vector for this, though, was tennis, and the epicenter of the tennis world was Wimbledon, which meant that the entire notion of individually competitive women excelling at sports was also wrapped up (and is still wrapped up) in wearing perfectly white outfits with short skirts, and maybe there’s something about all this which makes sense on some level, but when you really step back and think about it, what an absolutely fucking insane way for the world to be.

I’ve taken my son now to many Chicago Red Stars matches, and also a few Chicago Fire matches. The Red Stars are our women’s team, the Fire are our men’s team. I can’t deny that the ambience at Fire matches was more exciting - the stands were packed, they’d shoot off fireworks if the Fire scored a goal, you felt like you were part of something bigger. The Red Stars matches though have often felt like better matches. With the men there’s a lot more fouling and yelling. With the women there’s less of it, and, at times, I’ve felt the games have been more open and free-flowing. (To be fair, at other times, I’ve felt like the games were stuck in slow motion, suffering from a tremendous lack of creativity, but that’s just how soccer seems to go sometimes.)

Weirdly, as I think about it now, my son is less exposed to women playing sports than I was. I haven’t taken him to other women’s sports. Grandma is retired from softball (though if she went out there I’m pretty sure she’d run circles around women half her age.) He doesn’t sit down and watch tennis matches on weekend mornings. Now, he also doesn’t watch as much sports overall as I did. But here I’d been thinking that I would make conscious decisions to get him exposure to things, and then when I sit back and really think about it… maybe the more passive stuff is eluding us. And as you can tell from how much I’ve written about this so far, that passive stuff - as experienced sitting in my grandmother’s living room watching television - is absolutely part of what’s formative to the young mind. (I actually have saved off somewhere a long piece, written after Roy Clark died in November 2018, all about watching Hee-Haw in that same living room. Not understanding where to publish that piece was one of the things which led to coming up with META-SPIEL.)

A couple of months ago I mentioned how, at my other grandmother’s house, magazines just started showing up, including Tennis.

I have to admit that ever since writing that, I’ve been thinking I should get a couple of rackets and teach my son how to play.

Will it hold his attention for more than 8 minutes? Of course not. Nothing does, except videos of dudes playing Minecraft.

But anything which can hold his attention for 8 minutes is worth pursuing, and I suspect that giving him something called a racket and telling him to smack a ball over a net might just pull that off.

What I didn’t mention then is that, in college, I did play some tennis. For reasons which remain obscure to me, Illinois Wesleyan actually had a physical education requirement. All such classes were pass/fail and, if I remember correctly, they each lasted half a semester, but I swear I think we had to take four of them. I know I took bowling (our two person team was named Not 4 You), and I took wallyball (volleyball, but with a kickball, on a racquetball court), and, I think, two levels of tennis. I even played tennis at other times. Racquetball too.

I have not played either sport in a very long time. Probably over 15 years. But I’ve always wanted to. I would love to play either now. I would be terrible, but anyone liable to play me would probably also be terrible, so it’s okay, unless I hurt myself, which I definitely would.

Alas, I have not acquired rackets, much less signed him up for tennis lessons.

I did, however, sign him up for six weeks of… archery.

Oh, and, I’d be remiss not to point out that the one sport my wife actually enjoys is badminton.

A bit more about golf.

Once upon a time I owned clubs. I played a few times. This was roughly 28-33 years ago. That is a long time. I think I last actually played golf in 1993.

Absurdly, I have been asked to participate in an annual golf outing held by one of my company’s important customers. I said yes. I figure, what the hell. Silly things like this only come about every so often. This way I’ll get to explain to my kid that I’m going to play golf in Michigan. That’ll be a fun explanation, if nothing else. Maybe I can send you a Pokémon GO gift from the golf course.

Golf on television might be muzak, but actually playing golf is just… walking around whacking a ball with a stick. It’s a fine diversion, I suppose.

Growing up, mini golf was a ver ver common activity, and there were numerous courses around Rockford. There was the Arnold Palmer course on Alpine, and the one on Harrison attached to the soft-serve ice cream place, and Hickory Knolls way out on East State past the Belford, and a place up in Loves Park or Machesney Park on Windsor, and for a while an indoor place in the back half of the building where the 229 Club was by Five Points. And see, this is how I thought about the city I lived in. We had four or five mini putt places. We had four or five places where Mom played softball. We had four or five movie theaters. We had four or five Beef-a-Roos. We didn’t just have stuff, we had multiples of stuff. Never doubt that Rockford was a real city.

Today? I suppose the Beef-a-Roos are still around. But the mini putt places are all gone, aren’t they? There’s one of those indoor glow in the dark ones, and what looks like a newer bigger one way out off of Riverside, but all of the places I mentioned above, miniature golf was the business in those places, not just part of the business.

I feel like that’s something which is lost today. It’s just so hard to maintain a tiny business like that. Arnold Palmer’s was small, it didn’t have waterfalls or crazy shit. It was also inexpensive. It was always a nice thing to go out and do. Then maybe get ice cream or whatever. Smaller, cheaper activities like that are a lot harder to come by. If you don’t have buckets of cash sitting around, you have to treat going to the mini putt place, with all the other bells and whistles involved, like it’s a big event. It can’t just be a 90 minute family diversion. I feel like we would all benefit tremendously from access to more cheap 90 minute family diversions.

Anyway, I played mini putt, and then at some point I was old enough to actually golf, I guess, and I got to go golf I don’t know four times or whatever, and that was about it, because unlike mini putt, golf is an expensive hobby, even though that too ideally would really not be expensive, but really it has to be because golf courses are crazy places filled with all kinds of crazy chemicals and when it comes to crazy you’ve got to pay to play.

But, if you pay, and give me all of the requisite equipment, fine, I’ll go whack ball with stick just like any good seven year old.

And now, like one good seven year old I know, it’s time for bed.