The Entitled

This slightly disturbing story and subsequent commentary was moved by the BBC a short while ago, and I don't know if it should elicit laughter or tears (although I'm pretty sure that it would be "tears" if you're an long-suffering tennis fan in the UK). I'm not sure that this kind of stuff isn't business as usual for kids today, and a contemporary version of, oh, paying the old wino who hung around the liquor store to buy you a bottle of cheap flavored vodka or wine (not that all teenagers do such things, but I'll spare all of us a show of hands).

In fact, that bit about the kid "fatty" sitting surrounded by pizza boxes is actually quite funny. Isn't that what all teen-age boys do, eat pizza until the explode or pass out, whichever comes first? As for that terrible crime of racing around a supermarket stuffed in a shopping cart, scattering screaming soccer moms left and right, it has a strange ring of familiarity - and idiotic innocence.

Teenager subcultures have always existed; talk about a Tribal sensibility ethos! But now they're much more transparent, thanks to the new media kids use to communicate - those media are pretty easily cracked by authorities ranging from parents to, well, tennis officials. As we now see.

To me, the most unsettling part of this story is what I'll just call the Lindsay Lohan Quotient, leaving it at that. And it points to a reality that exists in junior tennis parallel to many of the positive aspects of youngsters dedicating themselves to the sport, especially in institutional or institution-supported contexts. It's a serious and risky business, taking kids and installing them in environments where they develop a sense of entitlement, or where most of the governors on a kid's behavior are disarmed (those controls include accountability to parents, teachers, and even a broad range of peers, many of whom are superior in some important areas while inferior in others, like tennis).

Among other things, advanced early training in tennis tends to age kids quickly. The most powerful impression I had when I last covered the Orange Bowl a few years ago is how danged grown-up those 16 and 17 year olds were, not just compared to kids in my youth, but even kids today (if you can believe that). But what can you expect? The kids travel alone or with coaches who have their own agendas. They have their own rooms, cell phones (I didn't have one at that time), and they mostly dressed like extras in a racy MTV video. In some ways, I admired their precocious sophistication and grasp of adulthood. In some ways, they made me feel a bit sad about what innocence that had cashed in along the way.

In that regard I can even have some sympathy with girls or boys suffering from LLQ. Who isn't going to accept the invitation to be Caligula, especially when they're young and dumb enough not to understand what a mixed blessing it represents?  It doesn't help to demonize the kids, or even their parents. The bottom line is that kids who are given entitlements are going to treat them as either a responsibility or license, with plenty of room between those two extremes. But it's also true that a hothouse atmosphere can advance group-think, impose the values embraced by an unofficial leadership, accelerate the "one bad apple" process. Nobody likes to be the square -  especially under those conditions.

The increasing emphasis on early development, and especially on state-supported development, as if winning the tennis race was as important as winning the race for a cure to cancer, is one of the more unsavory elements in this (or any other) sport. This isn't a "let kids be kids" plea, although that's never a bad idea. It's a warning that allowing and even insisting that kids be more than kids, or allowing a situation to develop where even the most innocent among them feel obliged to conform to the hermetically developed social order, is a dangerous and slippery slope -  especially when it is being navigated by people with an ulterior motive - in this case, producing champions for the greater good and glory of the UK.

Plenty of kids survive and flourish under conditions like those at the National Tennis Centre. In some ways, this scandal is sadly familiar and evocative of a thousand similar episodes of boarding school hi-jinx. But that it occurred under the auspices of a state-supported facility is disconcerting and creepy. Heads should roll. And not the heads of kids.