Sunday, September 17
Round Robin: This week's round robin is the last of the season. It is scheduled for Wednesday, September 20. Tennis starts at 6:00.
Men's and Women's Doubles Tournaments: Both tournaments are cancelled.
Want to be invisible? Check out the new Members section of the CTC website. All information on members is invisible EVEN WITH A PASSWORD. But, if you want club members to be able to find your telephone number or, dare we say it, your email address, you can edit your personal information, make visible whatever you want by checking a box. What fun! Or keep everything invisible. Give it a look. Check off some things.
John McEnroe: The September 4 issue of the New Yorker features a profile of John McEnroe written by Calvin Tomkins. The title of the profile is: The Tennis Artist (People loved booing John McEnroe. Now he's the game's best ambassador.)
Tomkins writes:
"For years, I was almost embarrassed to admit that the one (tennis player) I'd most enjoyed watching the most was John McEnroe. How could anyone like McEnroe, that perennial sorehead, whose on-court philippics against line judges and umpires had earned him record-breaking fines and suspensions? It is generally agreed that McEnroe was a tennis genius - the most naturally gifted player who ever lived, according to Arthur Ashe and many others - and his record as an active player is pretty spectacular: seventy-seven doubles titles; a record fifty-nine wins (singles and doubles) in Davis Cup competition; the No. 1 ranking in the world in 1981, 1983, and 1984. A serve-and-volley player who depended on quick reactions, touch, and court sense rather than on brute power, he could dismantle an opponent's game with a variety of shots and angles that frequently brought audible gasps of surprise from onlookers. At its best, his tennis had a heady, Mozartean inventiveness that made your spine tingle."
("Phillipics" and "Mozartean" - that's why we read the New Yorker instead of, say, Sports Illustrated.)
After leaving the circuit, McEnroe horsed around for a few years. He organized a rock band; he remarried and had more kids; he opened an art gallery.
Now he has returned to tennis as the Davis Cup captain and for the past two years as the dominant player on the senior men's professional tennis tour (over 35's). He won 10 of 12 tournaments that he entered last year. And he's a tv commentator. (In another article written a few years ago, David Foster Wallace wrote about how disheartening it was to see McEnroe in a tv commentator's sports jacket. Wallace compared McEnroe doing color commentary to Faulkner writing Gap ads.)
McEnroe has calmed down some. He has 6 kids. He has houses on the Upper West Side, Malibu, Sun Valley, and Southampton. He makes millions. He's Captain of the Davis Cup team.
But he still lets fly some corkers: "Any good male college player could beat the Williams sisters, and so could any man on the senior tour."
And: "They (the judges) should have defaulted me more. I'm not going to say I didn't test these people. It was their job to come through and show some integrity, and they didn't do it."
Nice, John, nice.
Here's a link to a big tennis site that you might take a look at. Tennis Server has a column by Ron Waite called Turbo Tennis. Click on Waite's 'Current Column' and if you like what you see, click on the 'Turbo Tennis Archive' on the left-hand column.
Court Conditions: Courts 1,2,3, and 4 are very good. Court 5 is playable.
The time and temperature icon is a link to a Boston weather site. Give it a click.
Joe DeBassio Webmaster.
Website Note: The honey-comb icon is also a link. It takes the clicker to an archive of all the past news pages so's you can catch up on what you missed. The less-than link (<) next to the honeycomb icon will take you to yesterday's page.
