The Severed Cortex

I should be working on redesigning my web site. I should also be researching football. Come to think of it, I should be catching up on stuff I'm behind on at work, fixing the garage door light, putting silicon around the sump pump discharge, etc. Instead I thought I'd comment on a couple things that happened in sports recently.

I'm certainly no fan of tennis. Men's tennis is only slightly less than boring women's tennis. I do feel these sports model the tendencies of their respective genders. In general women's tennis is measured and deliberate, each combatant waiting for the other to make a mistake. Volleys tend to last 20 minutes per point and you rarely see a woman tennis player self-destruct. Men's tennis on the other hand tends to be more aggressive; forcing the opponent into making a mistake. Still it all revolves around hitting a ball back and forth over a net and that my friends is mind-numbing. I can appreciate the athleticism involved though because I certainly couldn't run around on concrete/grass/clay/mud for 4 hours at a time; much less whack a fuzzy ball travelling 140 mph. (Short pants, fuzzy balls, love-love ... sounds a little effeminate doesn't it?) My ignorant perceptions about the game aside, it doesn't take an idiot to recognize when a game has lost one of it's greats. Andre Agassi is clearly one of those and maybe the last remaining link for me to the game. Even growing up where I did I was exposed to tennis. My friend David Gubin was a pretty good player as were several other of my friends. Hanging out at their house you might run across Tennis magazine. Never interested me, but I still knew a few big names: Jimmy Connors, Ilie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, Vitus Gerulaitis, John McEnroe. Later there was Pete Sampras and Michael Chang and of course Andre. Now with Andre leaving the game there are no more big names for me. There are no more links to those childhood greats.
Maybe it's just a blip on the radar to me, but it seemed like a big deal for tennis based on the reception that Andre got on Saturday. Perhaps that's because of the same reason; there are no more big names in tennis and Agassi is the last link back to those glory days. Andre Agassi is the last of the titans for his sport and we should all recognize that perhaps the end of a tennis era has just occurred.