The Deuce Club, 8.22
Lots of business today, Tribe! Fun first: here’s a photo of one of our Tribe members at a family reunion. Let the guessing commence. And as a matter of fact, it’s been so speedy thus far that I’m going to make it harder by not even telling you which person in the photo is the TWer. I will, however, tell you that the photo is of a recent family reunion.
Now to US Open gatherings. As Pete posted yesterday, we’re planning a small BYOB gathering in Manhattan for the evening of the first Friday, probably around 7:30pm to give day pass people time to return. RSVP to me if interested, by email rather than posting, and thus including your own email address. Detailed info will be sent to the RSVP list by email. We already have several RSVPs from Pete's post, so this should be fun!
The West Coast gathering on middle Saturday will probably be smaller, but one last call: if interested, RSVP to me.
Second, Talk About Tennis events:
Fabulous Mariya has asked us to let you know that while TAT will not be hosting a special TW section of their Suicide Pool this time, they do still warmly invite Tribe members to participate. ptenisnet will be helping to track the TW record by compiling and posting TW-only results (his life may be made easier if you add a TW after your username, especially if you use a different name on TAT).
One last summation of the TAT gatherings from GV Girl:
Lastly, my brief thoughts heading into this, the most exciting tournament for many Americans. (I attribute my own love of it to increased TV coverage and time zone proximity.) What everyone really longs for are exciting matches: long, epic battles, full of great shotmaking, vomiting, and these days, some good Shotspot overturns. In the fogs of my mind, I combined that desire with all my theatergoing of the last three weeks, and came out with… Shakespeare. Doubly appropriate, since Pete recently dubbed Shakespeare a grinder in the best tradition of tennis grinding.
In the beginning of Henry V, the new king receives the French ambassadors who have brought their prince’s answer to Henry’s assertion of his rights to certain dukedoms in France. In a scathing rendition of “run away and play, little boy,” the French bring Henry something that they think is more suitable for him: tennis balls.
Henry restrains himself and instead picks up the metaphor and turns it into a deadly episode in the Hundred Years’ War:
Sport crystallizes life, they say. This little exchange didn’t actually happen, but look at how well it elevates the tension of a play that, after all, anyone in the audience may know the ending of, it being a history play. Henry’s rhetoric stages the rest of the plot, transforming the tennis balls into cannon balls to bring castles down. The action climaxes at the Battle of Agincourt, where the weary and vastly outnumbered English defeat the French on a battlefield as muddy, bloody, and violent as any battle in history, and bring them to terms that (at least temporarily) unite the two kingdoms.
The stakes for tennis players haven’t usually been deemed anywhere near as important as the domination of France, but given the way famous athletes are marketed globally today as role models and ‘brands,’ they’re pretty high. So here’s to the athletes, our wranglers of Flushing Meadows, and here’s hoping that they give us one match as epic, in its own way, as the one written by the Big Grinder of English lit.
-Heidi