"This sort of match needs to be umpired by a man... you need a lot of strength to go against the crowd."

Said the tennis player Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, who is from Paraguay and who lost in the French Open to a French teenager.

Quoted in "Adolfo Daniel Vallejo fined $65,000 for sexist remarks at French Open/Paraguayan receives biggest fine in Roland Garros history after saying that his second-round defeat by Moise Kouame should have been umpired by a man" (London Times).

The female umpire, Ana Carvalho, in his view, did not succeed in controlling the noisy, distracting, partisan crowd.

Vallejo stands accused of sexism, but he was, it seems, accusing the spectators of sexism for not yielding to the authority of the female. 

Slip.

"You've had sex with him... all 3 times."

Let's take a look at that "Major Events Timeline" on the whitehouse.gov webpage.

My screengrab from the page:

Click the little arrow... there's more:

And there's one more panel:

Check the details. I'm sure "upgrading the historic 1902 structure" is wrong. I agree that the "main residence" is preserved, but there seems to be nothing left of "the historic 1902 structure," the old East Wing. Maybe the underground part? And though Obama may have met with "members of the Muslim Brotherhood" in the White House, that photograph of him was taken in Kenya, not at the White House. As for the famous photo of Hunter Biden enjoying a bath, that was not a White House bathtub. Was it?

Anyway, highlighting the lowlights of Democratic administrations — replete with semi-nudity — that's rich. "Major events" ≈ most embarrassing events.

This is a good example of Donald Trump always moving forward, always fighting back. Oppose him, and this is what you get. 

"We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity."

Said the memo from the United States Tennis Association, quoted in "USTA asks broadcasters to censor reaction to Donald Trump’s attendance at U.S. Open" (NYT).

"We regularly ask our broadcasters to refrain from showcasing off-court disruptions," said a USTA spokesman.

If the President is showcasing himself, shouldn't the anti-President forces get their say? Well... the President's attendance at the event is to watch tennis, which fits with the USTA enterprise of displaying tennis to all of us, traditionally done with celebrities in the live audience. The protesters' opposition to the President has nothing to do with tennis. They want to speak/"speak" on a different topic. The President is only "speaking" (silently) about his (possibly bogus) interest in tennis, so it's not really censorship... is it?

If you feel that Trump's occupation of the presidency is a highly alarming catastrophe, these fine distinctions are outrageous and intolerable. I'm sure I'm not the first person to bring up Hitler's showcasing of himself at the 1936 Olympics:

Funky-looking and tentacular.

I'm fascinated by the mysteries of sportswriting, and these 2 sentences jumped out at me:

Even the way he plays, all funky-looking forehands and tentacular court coverage, is far from conventional, and at times polarizing. Away from forehands and backhands, he has always been a master of the dark arts, knowing how and when to work a crowd to his advantage, and being more than willing to turn a match into a circus if he thinks it will give him an edge.

That's written by Charlie Eccleshare, at the NYT, in "Daniil Medvedev, tennis’ walking Rorschach test, asks the U.S. Open what it sees."

"Tentacular" — a word I'd never noticed before. I see that H.G. Wells used it in "The War of the Worlds" (1898), to refer to the Martians with “long, tentacular appendages.” The use to describe the tennis player is close enough to the literal meaning. Apparently Medvedev was octopuslike.

But the word has appeared with a more attenuated connection to creatures with tentacles. Grok tells me that the philosopher Donna Haraway writes about "tentacular thinking" in the book "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" (2016). There's some notion of "multispecies, interconnected, and responsive" thought to be distinguished from "human-centered, linear, or hierarchical" thought. I'm told there's something called "tentacular empathy" and "tentacular relatings of kinship." Strangulating, and yet I get the sense we're supposed to love it.

Of course, the octopus is a mainstay of political cartoons. Here's one from 1877 that has some present-day resonance:

Lots more here, at "The Octopus in Political Cartoons/Russia, Germany and the United States have all been depicted as octopuses by their nemeses.

"I'm reading about a tennis player who smelled so bad that her opponent was heard complaining, and I'm wondering..."

"... if a sports player might in some cases, perhaps this one, deliberately acquire a bad smell to gain a competitive edge? Are there known cases? Do the rules cover this behavior? It could be a way of cheating. Beyond sports, what other areas of human competition offer opportunities to gain an advantage through smelling bad?"

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok.

You can read Grok's answer here.

And here's the news story that prompted my question: "British tennis player Harriet Dart apologizes after asking opponent to wear deodorant during match/Dart told the umpire that her opponent, Lois Boisson, 'smells really bad'" (CBS Sports).

Things I talked about with Meade this morning.

1. How Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that Bari Weiss is a fraud and not honest at all. She called Tulsi Gabbard a "toady" and she didn't know what "toady" meant.

2. The similarities and differences between the Bob Dylan song "You Got to Serve Somebody" and the Band song "Unfaithful Servant."

3. The use of the tuba in popular music recorded in the last 60 years and why it matters if they had an actual tuba player in the studio as opposed to a digitalized tuba sound.

4. "Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole."

5. Whether flags of foreign countries should be waved by members of Congress and how the use of the flag may mean different things to different people.

6. It was Richard Nixon who originated the wearing of a flag lapel pin and how everyone followed along and now they can't stop.

7. The way some people these days are calling their loved one "my person." I heard it in Salman Rushdie's new book "Knife" and I opened The New Yorker at random and saw it in a Roz Chast cartoon.

8. Some people call a dog's owner the dog's "person," and that seems related to the old joke "Are you walking him or is he walking you"?

9. Bill Maher asked why people want drag queens reading to children and said it would be better to have disabled people reading, but drag queens are entertainers and disabled people are not. 

10. How little children shouldn't be exposed to overly exciting entertainment and even peekaboo can be too intense for young minds.

11. How it's already too late to go south for warmer weather and we are better off here in the north, where there was frost on the grass this morning.

12. How fluent and funny Tucker Carlson was describing his boss at the New York Post who had a hairy back that he would rub against the door jamb while he talked to Tucker and the 5 or 6 ways that Tucker could have known that the man had a hairy back.

13. What a big part of life hairiness is — for the lower animals and for us, the humans. 

14. Was the hairy-backed man John Podhoretz? Carlson mutters the name.

15. The annoyingness of Carlson's laugh and how hard you have to commit to do a good enough imitation of it.

16. The energy Joe and Tucker had. Doesn't Tucker wear a hairpiece and Joe just shaved off all his hair.

17. Meeting for coffee and not an entire meal so you're free to leave whenever you want and how some people have trouble getting out of small-talk conversations and this one simple trick that's all you need.

18. The perception that a conversation can't end until both participants want it to end and the way some people keep adding new topics as if keeping a conversation going is a game.

19. The very low level of tennis playing that has you just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

20. How all this talk is taking the place of writing on the blog, but I could just make a blog post out of all the topics that didn't make it onto the blog because I was talking about everything with Meade.

"Why So Many Tennis Players Don’t Want the Covid Vaccine."

 A NYT headline. But are we told why?

Only about 50% of professional tennis players are vaccinated. Is there something about the sort of person who plays and excels at tennis that makes them less likely to get the vaccine? I start thinking of stereotypes about tennis players and how they connect to resistance to vaccines. I don't follow tennis at all, but I think the stereotype is that these people are more aggressively cantankerous than average. So, I'm thinking this article might find an interesting pathway into understanding vaccine resistance in the general population.

But I'm searching the text for any sort of answer:

While some players are openly skeptical of the need for a vaccine as a healthy young person, some simply haven’t prioritized it....

That could be true of any professional athlete. Tell me why it's especially true of tennis. 

The French veteran Gilles Simon [said] “I’m not very scared of Covid, actually... My basic philosophy is: ‘If you’re afraid of it, you get vaccinated; if not, no.’ It’s still a choice.”...

Anyone might say that. Was there anything tennis-related that made him more likely to say that?

"Although golf — the game of choice of most presidents, especially Donald Trump — is obviously the great signifier of wealthy indolence, tennis is not far behind."

"Until comparatively recently, and sometimes still today, it has been among the whitest of sports, a game of country clubs with restrictive admissions policies. And, weirdly enough, this is not the first time it has caused a presidential public-relations headache. In 1978, James Fallows — then a White House aide, now a longtime Atlantic contributor — described Jimmy Carter’s poor management skills with an anecdote about the president’s signing off on every appointment booked at the White House tennis court. (Carter denied it on-camera, but there’s a paper trail.) It became a memorable encapsulation of Carter’s flawed presidency: focused on trivia while the big sweeping visions and crises over the Middle East and the economy went unaddressed."

From "Here’s the New White House Tennis Court No One Has Been Waiting For" (New York Magazine). 

For more trashing of the tennis court — really, it's a new building, a pavilion replacing a shed — here's "Melania Trump faces backlash after revealing new White House tennis pavilion/First lady’s announcement sparked a slew of Twitter responses including a terse ‘282,345’ from Washington DC journalist David Corn." 

I see the pavilion was privately funded, but there's a pandemic, so it's supposed to be an outrage. That is, there's a pandemic, and Trump is President. If the pavilion went up during the Biden presidency, the stories would be about Joe's impressive physical fitness that inspires us all to keep in shape, which is so especially important in Covid times. And if Obama were President, the pavilion would inspire people of all colors to take up the ancient sport, heretofore associated with white people. But it's Trump, so it's reprehensible — unempathetic and... racist, because who can think of any black tennis players? 

How ancient is tennis anyway? There was something like tennis in the 12th century and the use of a racket and playing within lines evolves by the 15th century.

"The former Wimbledon champion Martina Navratilova has been criticised for 'disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic' comments after she argued that allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sporting tournaments was 'insane and cheating.'..."

"'To put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organisation is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires. It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.'... Under guidelines introduced by the International Olympic Committee in 2016, trans men are able to compete without restriction, while trans women must demonstrate that their testosterone level has been below a certain cutoff point for at least one year before their first competition.... 'Simply reducing hormone levels – the prescription most sports have adopted – does not solve the problem,' wrote Navratilova. 'A man builds up muscle and bone density, as well as a greater number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, from childhood.'"

From "Martina Navratilova criticised over 'cheating' trans women comments/Former tennis player says trans athletes competing in women’s tournaments is ‘insane’" (The Guardian).

Men are penalized much more than women in Grand Slam tennis tournaments, but does that mean Serena Williams is wrong that women are held to a higher standard?

I'm reading "Are Women Penalized More Than Men in Tennis? Data Says No" (NYT), which offers this striking comparison:



I don't want to get sidetracked by the 2 categories where women have received more penalties, other than to note that both of them seem to involve interacting with other people — a coach or the press — and to see and pass up the opportunity to say women are more oriented to relationships. (I'm just assuming the "no press" violation is about interacting with the press.)

Ah, but you see I'm assuming that the 2 violations that women have gotten called on more are the things that women do more, not things the officials are more critical of women for doing. We could make the same assumption about all the things that men have been penalized for more than women: Men do these things more — audible and visual obscenity, verbal abuse, etc.

Look at the prison population. It's less than 10% women. Does that mean men are held to a high standard of behavior? I think we're comfortable with the extreme gender disproportion because we feel awfully sure that men commit many more crimes, especially the kind of crimes that deserve a substantial prison sentence. We like thinking that the prisons are confining individuals who pose a danger to the rest of us, and we think of those people as overwhelmingly male. Maybe we're wrong, but you can see we're pretty resistant to the idea that there's a "double standard" that's unfair to men.

In that light, look at what Serena Williams said:

“There are men out here who do a lot worse than me, but because I’m a woman you are going to take this away from me?” she protested to Brian Earley, the tournament referee. “That is not right.”

Yes, the statistics show that men are penalized much more than women, but it might nevertheless be that men also get away with more and women are penalized for less. What I'd like to see are qualitative comparisons. Show me the worst things male players have done and escaped a penalty. Is there a higher level of abuse and misbehavior that is a baseline among the males that would in the woman's setting be seen as going too far? Is there a norm of better behavior among the women that changes the standard and causes as penalty to be called at less bad behavior?

The NYT article doesn't talk about that, but it does discuss another reason to discount the higher numbers in the "men" column on that chart: The men play longer games. There are 5 sets in men's tennis and 3 sets in women's. Now, there's a double standard.

ADDED: If and when they make a movie about Serena Williams, I wonder what are the chances she'll get the "I, Tonya" treatment and we'll be encouraged to laugh at her histrionics. Extremely low, I think.

"Serena Williams has part of it right. There is a huge double standard..."

"... for women when it comes to how bad behavior is punished — and not just in tennis. But in her protests against an umpire during the United States Open final on Saturday, she also got part of it wrong. I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of 'If men can get away with it, women should be able to, too.' Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?"

Writes Martina Navratilova in a NYT op-ed. According to Navratilova, Williams was being coached, whether she knew it or not, and once she'd been given a warning, it "couldn't be dismissed retroactively," smashing the racket was "an automatic violation," and the umpire "had no choice but to dock her a point."

If, in fact, the guys are treated with a different measuring stick for the same transgressions, this needs to be thoroughly examined and must be fixed. But we cannot measure ourselves by what we think we should also be able to get away with... [B]ut it is also on individual players to conduct themselves with respect for the sport we love so dearly....

I don't love tennis. Do you? Quite aside from matters of ethics and character, I should think that people who are invested in the sport — whether they "love [it] so dearly" or just have a big money stake in it — should pay some attention to how spectators and potential spectators feel about it. They should want people to love them.

Is it a sport full of jerks? I don't believe that good sportsmanship is genuinely about lofty values. It's more of a con, isn't it? Like "civility" bullshit in politics.

If throwing tantrums on the court and getting melodramatic with umpires is what draws spectators, then they'll do it won't they? But maybe some people like to watch players who are polite and stoical and concentrate on demonstrating athletic prowess. I don't know. I'm not going to start watching tennis either way.

ADDED: I asked "Is it a sport full of jerks?" but I should also ask: Do we like jerks? I mean, Donald Trump is President. Let's stop being so prissy about what we like and don't like. What are we watching and what are we voting for? Let's stop lying about ourselves.

The WTA sides with Serena Williams.

The New York Post reports that the Women's Tennis Association agrees that Williams was the victim of a double standard:

“[Saturday] also brought to the forefront the question of whether different standards are applied to men and women in the officiating of matches,” [WTA chief executive Steve Simon wrote on Twitter]. “The WTA believes that there should be no difference in the standards of tolerance provided to the emotions expressed by men vs women and is committed to working with the sport to ensure that all players are treated the same. We do not believe that this was done [Saturday] night.”

And the winner of the men's title, Novak Djokovic, said:

“I have my personal opinion that maybe the chair umpire should not have pushed Serena to the limit, especially in a Grand Slam final. Just maybe changed — not maybe, but he did change the course of the match.... [It] was, in my opinion, maybe unnecessary. We all go through our emotions, especially when you’re fighting for a Grand Slam trophy.”

2 views of Serena Williams.

1. The Atlantic: "Serena Williams's U.S. Open Loss Was Humiliating—But Not For Her/What happened to the superstar was shocking. It was not surprising."

Taking a game away from Williams for using the word “thief” during such a high-stakes match is unlikely to do much to quash the notion that a double standard exists between men and women in today’s competitive tennis field. And the stakes of that double standard can feel even higher for women of color....

To see Williams’s comeback after a traumatic birth stymied over seemingly minor infractions seems unnecessary and malicious. To see the devastation that those penalties wrought on two women of color at the top of their sport, during what should have been a joyous time, is heartbreaking.

During a post-game interview Williams was undeterred: “I’m here to fight for women’s rights and women’s equality,” she said....

2. New York Post: "It’s shameful what US Open did to Naomi Osaka."

Here was a young girl who pulled off one of the greatest upsets ever, who fought for every point she earned, ashamed. At the awards ceremony, Osaka covered her face with her black visor and cried. The crowd booed her. Katrina Adams, chairman and president of the USTA, opened the awards ceremony by denigrating the winner and lionizing Williams — whose ego, if anything, needs piercing....

ADDED: Another iteration of view #1. In The Cut (by Rebecca Traister): "Serena Williams and the Game That Can’t Be Won (Yet) What rage costs a woman":

"Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Why? Because tennis is so damned lonely."

"Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players—and yet boxers have their corner men and managers.”

Wrote Andre Agassi, quoted in "Nick Kyrgios, the Reluctant Rising Star of Tennis/He has been called the most talented player since Roger Federer. But does he even want to win?" by Louisa Thomas, who adds: "And, during a match, unlike boxers, tennis players can’t talk to or touch even their opponents, let alone a coach." (New Yorker)

I'd heard that article in podcast form on my walk today. Searching the website to get to the text, I used the terms tennis and boxers and happened upon this article from last year about David Foster Wallace, who wrote about tennis (which he'd played with some success at the junior level):

It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too. The perfect game for Wallace.

"If she played the men's circuit she'd be like 700 in the world... That doesn't mean I don't think Serena is an incredible player..."

"I do, but the reality of what would happen would be I think something that perhaps it'd be a little higher, perhaps it'd be a little lower. And on a given day, Serena could beat some players. I believe because she's so incredibly strong mentally that she could overcome some situations where players would choke 'cause she's been in it so many times, so many situations at Wimbledon, The U.S. Open, etc. But if she had to just play the circuit - the men's circuit - that would be an entirely different story."

Said John McEnroe, and I guess this is making the news because 700 is so low. 

Interesting factoid: "President Donald Trump approached McEnroe 17 years ago about playing a $1 million, winner-take-all match against Venus or Serena Williams at his Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City."

I remember the "Battle of the Sexes" matches in the 1970s, with Bobby Riggs bragging tauntingly about the superiority of men and then trouncing Margaret Court. (Later, under questionable conditions, he was beaten by Billie Jean King.)

I see Margaret Court is in the news within the last month. She said: "I mean, tennis is full of lesbians because even when I was playing there was only a couple there but those couple... took young ones into parties and things. And because they liked to be around heroes and what you get at the top is often what you will get right through that sport."

Court, 74, is a Christian pastor, and she was speaking on Vision Christian Radio.

"When I see a woman rip a 40-yarder off the goalpost, then I’ll agree they deserve more pay."

"When I see a woman control the ball, dazzle à la Maradona or Messi, then I’ll agree they deserve more pay. But they can’t and they don’t. The women’s game is good but so far beneath the men’s game, men’s skills... there’s no reason they should be paid the same..... And interesting that the other women’s sport screaming for more money, and getting it, is tennis — good as Serena is, she wouldn’t win a game off the 500th ranked male. Probably not a point on his serve."

A comment by one "Abie Normal" of San Marino, California on a NYT article about equal pay for female soccer players.

On that commenter's name...



On that "wouldn’t win a game off the 500th ranked male"....

How the NYT presents the "session on diversity" that the University of Missouri requires for its new students.

The article, by John Eligon, is called "University of Missouri Struggles to Bridge Its Racial Divide." I was able to tell I was reading about a required "session on diversity" from the caption on the photo at the top of the page: "New students at the University of Missouri must now attend a session on diversity." I would have had a very hard time figuring out those basic facts from the text of the article, which begins:

Scott N. Brooks, draped in a dapper shawl-collar sweater, looked out on the auditorium of mostly white students in puffy coats and sweats as they silently squirmed at his question. 

Did they literally squirm? If they did squirm, how would you know it was at a particular question, rather than at the banal restraint of another required session?

Why, he had asked, does Maria Sharapova, a white Russian tennis player, earn nearly twice as much in endorsements as Serena Williams, an African-American with a much better win-loss record?

“We like to think it’s all about merit,” said Dr. Brooks, a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, speaking in the casual cadence of his days as a nightclub D.J. “It’s sport. Simply, the best should earn the most money.”

It depends on what the meaning of "it" is. We're comparing money made not in the playing of tennis but in the endorsing of products. What does it mean to be better at endorsing a product? But the students have no motivation to needle Dr. Brooks. They can see what they are expected to do, the coercion and pressure. They know they're supposed to say: It must be racist.

Maybe tennis is not as popular here as overseas, one student offered. Dr. Brooks countered: Ms. Williams is a global figure. As the room fell silent, the elephant settled in. Most sat still, eyes transfixed on the stage. None of the participants — roughly 70 students new to the University of Missouri — dared to offer the reason for the disparity that seemed most obvious. Race.

Why is it daring to say what it's obvious the teacher wants you to say? The class was imposed on the students. They're required to sit through it. What might be daring would be to push the teacher back with the kind of statements that have been upvoted in the NYT comments section: "Sharapova looks like a Victorias secret model while Williams looks more like a NCAA football linebacker and that has NOTHING whatsoever to do with race, so don't make it about race" or "However, Serena IS muscular and she is not built with the long-legged model body of Maria. It's a fact that most women would prefer to be tall and thin. It's not a racist fact, it's simply a fact." It would be daring to say that from the classroom (as opposed to the comments section), because you'd risk becoming the lesson, as the teacher uses his superior power and experience to demonstrate why what you just said really is racist, including the part where you engaged in denial that it was racist.

The article continues:

The new frontier in the university’s eternal struggle with race starts here, with blunt conversations that seek to bridge a stark campus divide. 

But it's not a conversation. It's a leader with a lesson in front of a group that did not choose to engage over this topic. The text of the article — unlike the photo caption — has still not revealed that these students are submitting to a required session. Finally:

Yet what was evident in this pregnant moment during a new diversity session that the university is requiring of all new students was this: People just don’t want to discuss it.

Human nature exists. Ironically, in an effort to elucidate the human nature that has to do with race, the university and the NYT act as if they are utterly naive about that human nature involved in the teacher-student power relationship and the resistance to coerced speech.

"When Heather Watson crashed out of the Australian Open this week, she put her poor performance down to starting her period ..."

"... Publicly breaking the silence on an issue that affects all sportswomen. But why is it still something we never hear about?"

I miss Jill Abramson!

Is it just me, or has the NYT become boring since the departure of Jill Abramson?

No need to tell me that you've never liked the NYT. I'm trying to focus on the change since they ousted Abramson last May. Remember, just before she was fired last April, there was an incident, reported in Politico, in which she'd "called Dean Baquet into her office to complain" that the NYT "wasn’t 'buzzy' enough," she blamed Baquet, and "Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom."

In the ensuing power struggle, Baquet got Abramson's job as executive editor, and now we are seeing the results: Not buzzy enough!

I go to the NYT site every day, looking for things to read and, I hope, to blog. I'm finding myself skimming over the front page and then leaving. I can't pinpoint what was there before that pulled me in — perhaps it was overly skewed toward aging, affluent, white females like me — but I'm not going in and hanging around.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

BTW, if you keep owning up to 'aging' then we're gonna have to revoke your status as Baby Boomer. Keep this in mind: we never age!

Here's my take on that, from last year, when I was younger (and so were you):