Thoughts about Tennis Tradition...

[gzhpcu]

An interesting quote from "The Game of Singles in Tennis" by William F. Talbert and Bruce S. Old, 1962:

In today's top-flight singles, base line play is the forgotten segment. The long, exciting rallies of the golden era of tennis, as exemplified by the play of Tilden, Johnston, Cochet, Lacoste, Vines, Perry and Budge, are completely missing in the current serve and volley game.... As a result, singles has suffered a real loss in popularity as a spectator sport.

The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth it seems.

What we need is a good mix of both, but hard to see how it could be done...

[don_budge]

Björn Borg practicing...

Interesting video…Björn Borg practicing. First in the mid '70's with Marianna Simonescu. Then a clip of him using his traditional Donnay practicing against an up and coming Swede in 1985. He looks a bit futile against the new equipment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5apFRFE2KA

[gzhpcu]

Bread and games - ancient Rome - gladiatorial games, nothing new under the sun.

[stotty]

Brave New World...

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

[don_budge]

Aldous Huxley...Brave New World…2016

"It seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods." -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 1959


The Presidential Reality Show...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAH6klFQwiM

I pity the children. The poor children.

The number of kids on anti-depressant medication has doubled in the last seven years.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/number-of-children-prescribed-anti-depressants-increases-by-50-in-seven-years-a6920576.html

I pity the children...

[don_budge]

Socrates…a long time ago

"To find yourself…think for yourself."

[don_budge]

Aldous Huxley…Brave New World 1959

"It seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods." -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 1959


The Presidential Reality Show...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAH6klFQwiM

I pity the children. The poor children.

[don_budge]

The very foundations of life (tennis)...

The very foundations of life, as Dostoevsky saw it, were being thereby shaken loose and the whole structure was beginning to sway underfoot. Those old enough to have been raised before the disorder set in still managed somehow to maintain their footing by sheer habit. But the young stumbled, fell, and tried desperately to discover new ways of keeping their balance. Many of them, however, were only too willing to crawl and scatter in search of the nearest cracks and holes to take refuge in dank darkness.

So it stands to reason that if you were not fully cognizant and aware by the time the year "1984" one would have a difficult time discerning all that transpires today under the guise of truth.

[curiosity]

Hast broke my head acrosst and given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too.

Twelth Night, Act 5, Scene 1

"AGUECHEEK. For the love of God, a surgeon!
Send one presently to Sir Toby.
OLIVIA. What's the matter?
AGUECHEEK. Has broke my head across, and has given Sir Toby a
bloody coxcomb too. For the love of God, your help! I had rather
than forty pound I were at home.
OLIVIA. Who has done this, Sir Andrew?
AGUECHEEK. The Count's gentleman, one Cesario. We took him for a
coward, but he's the very devil incardinate."

Assumptions have consequences often unpredictable as to good or ill.

[bottle]

Hast broke my head acrosst and given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too.

[bottle]

I was adored once too.

[curiosity]

The old days of tennis? Banging the ball on green lawns or asphalt is an innovation invented practically yesterday.

Tennis has been evoking waves of sentiment and retrospection for more than 500 years. We know that even in Shakespeare's time tennis in varied forms had been well established for more than 100 years. In renaissance Italy the tennis court had low walls, a net, no roof, and the players used racquets to hit a cloth ball stuffed with compressed fur or hair. The Italian game as evidenced in art appears to have been more like the modern game, perhaps, than Réal tennis as played in Shakespeare's England (or, if you like, today in Newport, RI.)

We know with certainty the identity of only a few of the books which Shakespeare had read. Among those few is "The Book of the Courtier" by Baldesar Castiglione. Published by Aldo in Venice in 1528 it quickly became famous, a sort of bible of conduct in renaissance courts. It was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. The game of tennis referred to in the book can be seen in representation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, via a painting by Herri de Bles (c. 1480-1550). Shakespeare himself was wont to take swords seriously and make light of tennis as something a regular part of upper class life, but for leisure.

In about the year 1508, when attached to the court of the Duke of Urbino, Baldasar Castiglione recorded a series of remarkable conversations among the courtiers, a collection of some of the most prominent men and women in renaissance Italy. At one point Count Ludovico da Canossa remarked, in considering the virtues a man at Court should have, that he needed to be fit, strong, and skilled with weapons. Noting that various exercises or sports were suitable to condition a Courtier for more serious endeavors, the Count remarked "another noble exercise and most suitable for a man at court is the game of tennis which shows off the disposition of the body, the quickness and litheness of all its parts, and all the qualities that are brought out by almost every other exercise." So too, in this series of transcribed dialogues Federico, Duke of Montefeltro, noted that "the game of tennis also is almost always played in public, and is one of those spectacles to which the presence of a crowd lends great attraction. Therefore I would have our Courtier engage in it (and in all other exercises except Arms) as in something which is not his profession, and in which he will make it evident that he does not seek or expect any praise; nor let it appear that he devotes much effort or time to it, even though he may do it ever so well."

The association of swords and tennis goes back quite a way. I am reminded of a well known photograph of Mats Wilander seated in his hallway, épée in hand.

Second Part of King Henry IV: Prince Henry speaking , Act II, Scene II.
"But that the tennis-court-keeper knows better than I; for it is a low ebb of
linen with thee when thou keepest not racket there; as thou hast
not done a great while, because the rest of thy low countries
have made a shift to eat up thy holland."

Even in Shakespeare's day it was possible to overdo tennis as a hobby/, turning it from good exercise to bad dissipation, as indicated in Hamlet, Act II. Scene I. As Polonious said, in suggesting how
one may belittle another man's reputation:
"He closes thus: 'I know the gentleman.
I saw him yesterday, or t'other day,
Or then, or then, with such or such; and, as you say,
There was 'a gaming; there o'ertook in's rouse;
There falling out at tennis'; or perchance,
'I saw him enter such a house of sale,'
Videlicet, a brothel, or so forth."

and elsewhere, in answer to a question as to what has happened to an old man's beard:
Prin. Hath any man seene him at the Barbers?
Clau. No, but the Barbers man hath beene seen with
him, and the olde ornament of his cheeke hath alreadie
stuft tennis balls.

[bottle]

"The older I get, the better I used to be."-- John McEnroe as reported by Clifton Matthews at the beginning of his concert in Winston-Salem. Clifton Matthews is the mentor of genius piano players at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

[gzhpcu]

Griping about the "Good Old Days" is nothing new....

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1356&dat=19560702&id=x3RPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=wgQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4025,512374&hl=en

Then it was about "now a player can fly so quickly from one tournament to another"...

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days then a bad memory

Franklin Pierce Adams

[don_budge]

My Favorite Tennis Poster...

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/c0/73/69/c073690836ae959eba45fd39b4b2b51f.jpg

Surprised?