Closing Arguments?

I don't recall this term, closing arguments, being applied to a campaign.

Obviously, a lawyer term, the idea is the last thoughts these campaigns want to impart to the electorate. How much are people paying attention right now with days left to go?

The Politics of Hate

Politicians like to tell you they are going to run a respectful campaign. After all, they like telling people what they want to hear. How many people will admit to saying that they want to hear slander about their opponent?

And yet, time and again, politicians resort to negative ads because as long as the campaign season is, as lazy as people are to verify what is being said, that's how effective negative campaigning works.

If you ask someone that is going to vote Republican what they think about Obama, they'll have numerous negative opinions and say he's wrong for the country. If you ask an Obama supporter their opinion on McCain, they are likely to say the same thing. Indeed, most people seem to hate the opposing party's candidate more than they love their own.

Lest you think that this phenomenon is restricted across party lines, consider the rather lengthy primary between Obama and Hillary. At the end, Obama supporters hated Hillary and Hillary fans hated Obama. This wasn't a collegial competition between two friends, but two adversaries. The fact of the matter are the two voted quite similarly on a number of topics.

OK, so the one big difference was their stance on the Iraq War. Obama wasn't a senator then, although Hillary was. Nevertheless, he could point to his stance then (and there's a video of him saying he was against the war).

How can we solve this problem? One way, that would never work, is to allow the opposing parties to approve ads. However, if that were done, there would never be any ads allowed. These days, they try to force the candidate to say "they approve the ad" so at least the candidate can't claim ignorance that the negative ad was done without their knowledge (even if it was done without their knowledge).

Until voters can demonstrate that they vote for a candidate's positive side (and even then), then negative ads will continue to air. And yes, they air because they work, because people won't check whether these ads or true or not, and because they will make decisions based on your middle name.

Whereforth Politico?

Have you heard of the website, politico.com? Here's a website that reports on American politics, and has cracked a lot of interesting political stories including stuff about Joe the Plumber and the amount of money spent on Sarah Palin's clothing.

But where did they come from?

Less than two years old, many places, like Keith Olbermann, cite Politico showing its increased importance in the political discourse.

Has anyone heard of them prior to, say, 2008? Their reputation has increased from virtually nowhere and that's surprising.

Radio Days

Once upon a time, just before television, the way people would get their entertainment was the radio. Families would perch on their couches listening to shows. Shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, westerns that, like Star Trek, were commentary on today's society filled the airwaves. Many of the shows made the migration to television.

After the advent of television, radio evolved in other directions. In particular, radio excelled in a medium that was purely auditory. Music. Radio stations played music. Later on, as cars became more prevalent, as commutes got longer, and traffic jams contributed to the long journey to work, long as in time, rather than in distance, other things filled the airwaves.

Beyond music, sports shows with sports pundits became common. Men, who loved their sports on the weekends and Monday nights, could now get their fill of sports as they head to work and returned, listening to the opinions of sports broadcasters. On the flip side was the radio station of the elite, educated, the meritocracy built on intelligence and rational thought, namely, national public radio. This has been augmented by its political cousin, CSPAN for radio.

Thus, television became for the home, and radio became for the road. Indeed, for the average person that's less than an audiophile, the best radio they own, possibly the only one they own is in their car. Few people seem to invest in a nice radio the way they invest in a nice television. Indeed, the only other radio I own, and I barely even think of it as a radio, even though that is what it is, is my clock radio.

Why did that happen?

Indeed, why isn't my television also a radio? I should be able to pick up local stations and listen to the radio, possibly even as I watch television. Perhaps I would prefer commentary on some sports event from the radio rather than television (except, with many shows delayed by at least a few seconds, the audio and video would likely never match).

It's weird that I know how to get a decent television, but have no clue on how to get a decent radio.

And that's perhaps to my everlasting regret.

Tennis Update--Forehand

This is one of those posts that you can quickly check out on. While blogs have been compared to diaries, they are clearly different. The obvious public nature of a blog means that entries that are generally of little interest to anyone except the author would not likely see the light of day. Even so, blogs record content, so it does satisfy the need to have it etched somewhere semi-permanent. And you never know, someone might actually care enough to read it.

Basically, I've been trying to revamp my forehand, with some success. The first clue I was doing something "majorly" wrong occurred end of May when I finally made a video of me hitting tennis balls (I want to say "videotaped", and technically, I am using tape, mini DV to be precise, but I wish there were a better verb than this. The best one I've thought of is video'ed or video recorded).

In particular, I've generally fed the ball (that is dropped it in front of me so I could hit it) very near my right foot. This was because it was easy and convenient. However, because it's convenient, it was leading to a bad habit. In particular, I would get cramped hitting my forehand. Now, I never noticed this, not knowing any better.

Furthermore, I would have a few other bad habits. Rather than turn my shoulders, I tended to just reach back with my arm. To get a sense of this, raise both arms to you side, until you look a bit like a cross. Now, with one arm or the other reach back behind you as far as you can. You might manage 30 degrees or so.

In general, you should never have to reach back at all. Your arms should be roughly to your side, and instead of reaching back, you should turn your shoulders.

I'd also flip my grip in a funny way. Normally, as you take the racquet back (for a righty), the side of the racquet you hit the ball on will face to the right fence (the right fence is the fence to your right as you stare at the net). If you were to open your fist, your palm would face to the right fence.

Instead, I manage to contort my arm so my racquet face was aimed at the left fence. To imagine this, stand with your arms to your side like a cross. Have your right palm facing forwards, with your thumb up. Your fingers on the right hand should point to the right fence. There should be be no bend in your wrist.

Now bend your wrist backwards so that the fingers now point to the back fence and your palm now faces the right fence. Your hand and forearm now form a 90 degree angle.

Now (and this will be a little challenging). flip your hand upside down so the thumb points down. The back of your hand will now face the right fence, and the palm to the left. This is awkward, but easier if you begin to reach your arm behind your back.

This pretzel move is what I had discovered I was doing, and it came naturally after years of ingrained practice. Originally, my fix for it was to repeat the correct motion over and over.

While it worked whenever I wasn't hitting a ball, it failed miserably when I tried to hit the ball. Then I realize my hand orients the racquet, so I just had to think about the orientation of my hand. Even so, this was not a natural adjustment, and I would frequently have to think of my hand, palm faced outwards to the right fence.

Anyway, a week or so ago, I thought I had fixed this issue, and was working on a different problem I noticed.

My follow-through.

When you swing a tennis racquet, there is several phases. There is the takeback where you prepare and then ultimately bring your racquet back to point to the back fence behind you. Then, there is the swing until contact. That is when the racquet makes forward progress to hit the ball.

Finally, there is the follow-through. This is after hitting the ball until the racquet's momentum stops typically over the shoulder or with the arm wrapped around your other arm's biceps.

Although there are three phases to talk about, the entire swing consisting of threee parts should be one fluid motion throughout.

I had spent a fair bit of time on the takeback. This involved two or three things. First, I needed to stop pulling my arm behind my back. Second, I needed to orient my palm outwards and not flip the racquet. Third, I needed to rotate my shoulders more (which is related to the first point). The second part was the hardest to achieve.

When I swing, I often let muscle memory take over, and just focus on hitting, but when you're trying to retrain the mind to do something else, you have to consciously think (or in this case, consciously feel) the change. And it takes lots of repetition, and so far it hasn't felt completely natural.

I felt I had made progress on this, and was starting to focus on the follow-through, rather than the takeback. My follow-through has a bit of a herky-jerky movement, mostly due to the result of how fast I hit my windshield wiper forehand.

A windshield wiper forehand is a style of hitting the forehand where the trajectory of the racquet head (and the forearm) in the leadup to hitting the ball and follow-through looks like a windshield wiper, where the elbow acts as the base of the wiper.

The problem with that analogy are several. First, the elbow should not be stationary. This is more like a two-part windshield wiper. Imagine your windshield wiper is not a straight arm but has a bend in the middle (i.e., like your elbow).

There are two moving parts. The elbow serves as the base of the wiper (in a sense), and the shoulder moves the entire arm, including the elbow. It's tempting to just hit the ball with the forearm and leave the rest of the arm stationary.

Furthermore, people view the windshield wiper as symmetric. The path that starts the windshield wiper (at least, up until the racquet points face up) is mirrored on the way down. That is untrue.

The motion on the way down is complicated by the elbow also moving (to the left). Furthermore, once the racquet has moved so that the wrist straightens out (it starts at a 90 degree angle), then the wrist, more or less, stays straight. This is really hard to describe without a picture.

The result, in any case, is that most pros finish the follow-through to the left of their body (for a righty). In a sense, it's much like a comet whose path around the sun is severe near the sun, but elongated at other parts of the orbit. The follow through is most arced at the beginning, and the arc stretches out at the end.

I was working on that (somewhat unsuccessfully) when I noticed the takeback had broken down and I had regressed to hitting my old forehand.

Alas, it's disappointing, but at least I am aware of it.

Balls to the Wall

I had been contemplating titling this blog entry with something more noble, more austere. Something like The Wall. It reflects more of the tenor of the entry, but the title, despite it's provocative nature, is, quite literally, the subject of this monologue.

I was introduced to "The Wall", by my tennis buddy, Adam. The Wall is actually four walls, that reside at Cabin John, near a baseball field, adjacent to a sand filled volleyball field.

This Wall isn't meant for tennis. It's meant for the venerable sport of handball, which is seldom seen. The Wall towers nearly 20 feet high, much higher than typical walls which are, unwisely, only as tall as the fence that surrounds a court, and as many a tennis player will tell you, not quite tall enough to prevent the scurrying of an embarassed player out into grass or woods or worse to fetch a golden orb and bring it back from the elements.

So few people play handball that the Wall is free, most days, for tennis players to hone their strokes.

I'm new to the Wall. As common as tennis courts are, decent tennis walls are rare. And, as much as the Wall is meant to teach you how to hit a ball, it is not a real tennis partner.

Indeed, when you first meet the Wall, it's hard to control the ball. Balls hit against the wall come back quicker. It's not obvious why this is, so I'll explain.

Normally, when you hit the ball, it must make it from you to across the net. That distance is then doubled while on your opponent's side of the net. The ball must cross the net and reach the opponent, and then the opponent must hit the ball and the ball makes a return path back to the net. Finally, it crosses the net and bounces and you get a chance to hit it.

When you hit against the Wall, that doesn't happen. The ball doesn't really cross the net. It impacts the Wall. All the time spent in the territory of your opponent, that round trip time, is gone. The Wall reflects the ball back and you must react to it sooner.

And because the Wall is passive, not active. It doesn't impart spin, it doesn't hit a weak shot, and it likely moves the ball higher or lower than you expect.

It takes a while before you learn how to hit a ball against the Wall so that you don't hit too high, nor too low. Very often, beginners to the Wall, as some kind of rite of passage, must learn how to avoid sending the ball too high.

Furthermore, balls must generally be hit "down the line", which is basically in front of you, so that the Wall doesn't apply a bit of physics and take the angle of incidence and flip it as the angle of reflection, thus causing you to scamper across to fetch the ball again.

While this strategy works well in racquetball where you get the benefit of side walls to bounce off, in tennis, it means running.

The Wall encourages a bit of complacency. Many who seek the wisdom of hitting against the Wall believe the objective is to "Hit The Ball As Many Times As Possible". It is a game, after all, and the game is to hit over and over and over again. But because the Wall has peculiar behavior, the time that it robs you from hitting the ball most glaringly, the goal of hitting against the Wall often forces most players, unwittingly, to ease up on how they hit.

I've seen many a player that look quite good hitting against the Wall. The technique appears solid. They can get the ball back quite a few times in a row. But once they go to the court, their strokes are weak. They lack purpose. They may have steadiness, but they often lack the control to maneuver the ball to difficult positions on the court. The Wall encourages mostly straight ahead hitting. The variety and purpose of shot isn't something you can easily practice.

If you want power, you must resign yourself to the fact that you must hit the ball quite low and that no, you aren't going to hit ten shots in a row. Power, how hard you hit the ball, is an important component of tennis, and the Wall lulls you into treating it as a secondary consideration.

Once you get past the fact that the Wall isn't a truthful partner, then you begin to find some truth.

Tennis is typically played with two people, sometimes more. Even if your partner agrees to practice, there's always some burden. Is the partner good enough to hit a few shots in a row? Do they really want to practice with you? What if you want to hit 10, 20, 30 shots in a row to hone some shot down? And what if you actually have to talk?

No, the Wall, is a predictable opponent. Not as varied as a typical person, but predictable. You can hit against the wall 10, 20, 30 times, and it doesn't complain. And you have time to think.

Sport, most will say, is not about thinking. Or more properly, it is about transcending thinking. Just as drivers who worry about their arms being in 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock and who sit rather rigid and who worry about cars in their blind spots, and look a bit too uncomfortable their first few times behind the wheel, tennis players seeking to improve, to change the way the want to hit, must take time to think.

Once they consciously think of what the body should do, they strike the ball once, then again, then again. The mind understands the body needs time and repetition and waits for the body to "learn". The repetition builds a memory and the goal is for the recent memory to take over the older memory, to replace a worse stroke with a better one.

This retraining is not particular to tennis. Tiger Woods retuned his swing not once but twice in his career. He would spend upwards of a year training his body to swing a certain way, and only through hours of repetitions and thousands of balls struck would the motion chisel its way into his body so that the body would do its master's bidding.

I've gone in cool spring days, and in hot balmy summer days, and seen the changing of the colors of the trees nearby, whose golden leaves listter the court, and brought out the racquet, and bounced a few balls, and hit them against the wall, and again, and again, hoping to find a kind of truth, a kind of purity of swing and motion.

The Wall is a kind of monastery to which I head to, a place of quiet introspection. Monks seek time to themselves, to search for something, they often know not what. They hope to find wisdom and insight in solitude. They are left to their own thoughts, and hope to draw inspiration. Silence and time and a singular objective can create the kind of mix that allows for that.

Perhaps the goal of the perfect tennis shot, as mundane and comical as it sounds, is not that far removed from what monks seek. Perhaps the monks discover as I have discovered that there is no One True Swing, but that each of us forms our own truth, the truth that gives us comfort and satisfaction, and that it isn't really the attainment of Truth that we seek, but the journey towards truth that is ultimately what it's all about.

This journey is far from perfect. We may never obtain the Truth we seek, but we see ourselves getting closer. It is the distance reduced, the effort put forth, that while not entirely pleasurable, gives depth to our cause, our mission. Humans seem to crave a clear goal whose path to fulfillment is not so clear nor easy.

It is when we walk a difficult path, but know that each step is getting us closer, that ultimately makes us keep going. The destination may be a kind of folly, but the journey is what it is ultimately about.

And so the Wall, immovable, implacable serves a quite testament to that journey. And many more balls will be struck upon it. And through this repetition, this penance, one hopes to gain a little enlightenment.

Days of Being Young

Two days ago, I decided to get a haircut after work. Yesterday, I woke up early, around 7:30 in the morning, so I could get in line at the MVA, what some places call the DMV, so I could update my driver's license. I wanted it to reflect my current address. I had hoped, on a chilly Saturday morning, that the lines would be short.

Alas, it was not.

The line went around the building, and it seemed 100 people were ahead of me. Two people in front of me was a guy, perhaps in his late 40s, gray hair, dark moustache, wearing a biker shirt. Apparently, he was there to get a motorcycle license or possibly to renew it.

Bikers were made famous, I believe, from a documentary in the 70s or so about Hell's Angels. Bikers were made out to be rebels of society, groups to be feared for indiscriminate violence. However, as time passed, and fewer bikers were out riding in gangs, the notion of a biker has become more quaint. An outsider, yes, but this guy was remarking how he had withheld a driver's license from his son because he wanted his son to get better grades. According to him, this wasn't effective.

So much for biker stereotypes.

Just ahead of me was an Asian girl. She had brought her book describing the various traffic rules of Maryland. She was planning to take an exam to get her learner's permit. The biker guy was talking to her, asking how things were. I suppose I should have seen it as the casual conversation that it was, but it kept running through my mind that he was hitting on her (though, there really wasn't so much evidence of that except he was talking to her at all).

It hadn't occurred to me that the girl would have needed a ride there, but after a few minutes, her father showed up.

Apparently, she goes to the nearby Rockville high school, one Richard Montgomery, where my friend Adam is an alum. I had mentioned that he graduated around 1991 or 1992 and she pointed out that she was born in 1991. Ah, so young.

She was confident enough to talk to strangers, inquisitive enough to ask questions about college, and graduate school. I've seen the type, and perhaps been the type minus the bit of extroversion. Kids who look at their books, trying to cram facts into their heads, heading down the road of destiny that will take them to college. These are the high achievers of American society, the so-called elite that a McCain campaign so roundly decries.

At a time when most kids should be eager and ambitious in life, using their intellect to make good decisions, we seem happy to raise a generation of youth that are happy not knowing much, that listen to what's told to them, without questioning it, and more importantly, without the ability to question it. They prefer a night of drunken carousing rather than a night in front of the books.

Oh, they would argue, that people should have fun, but not at the expense of education. And most well-educated students do have a measure of fun too, and then they have real jobs.

Right now, schoolwork is this girl's life, and perhaps a few other extracurricular activities. Her life isn't so much different from the one I lived once upon a time, but things change as you get older. Priorities change. Life changes.

Still, for a brief moment, I was filled with a touch of nostalgia for days gone by, for a time when all that mattered was test scores, applications to fancy colleges, and leaving family for the first time. When I look back, it wasn't such a bad time, after all.

The Internet Economy

There have been a bunch of ideas on the Internet that, if you were to mention it to anyone 20-30 years ago, would have been laughed at, but because the Internet evolved the way it did, it has allowed the kind of use that no one would have expected.

Let's start with free email. Back in the day, when free email was available, you were limited to 10 MB or so of email space. Anything more and you'd have to pay for it. Let your email account stay idle, and it would get deleted. GMail, Google's mail, changed that. It offered free email with 1 GB of space, which was considered outrageously huge for the time. Needless to say, many companies had to fall in line.

Best yet, it was free.

But here's one that's even wilder. YouTube.

Think of a business that would allow any user, for free, to upload as many videos as they wanted. This has allowed people an outlet to make their videos available anywhere. With cheap camcorders, the most expensive part of the video making process is the computer itself.

Without the "free" part, a video site would have a tiny fraction of the videos it has now. That has its pluses and minuses. Because anyone can upload a video, a site like YouTube has tremendously more videos than it would otherwise. Free speaks to people like nothing else. That is both good and bad. It allows a great deal of freedom to video creators, but places an immense burden on the site to keep the presumably millions of videos accessible.

This notion of free, I'm sure, appeals to a great deal of computer types who would like to see all notions of digital stuff for free. Free songs, free videos, free software, and so forth.

Are we ready to see real content like that for free or not? Right now, the industry says no, since it wants to make money on content by "real" singers and directors and actors and so forth.

But the Internet has seen things as strange.

You never know.

Primal Fear

They've been showing Primal Fear, a film with Richard Gere, from 1996. This was the first big film by Ed Norton, who was pretty unknown at the time.

This movie is a nice showy role for Ed Norton, who plays a guy with a split personality. He's Aaron, who stammers and stutters and is sweet and innocent, and he plays Roy, who is psychopathic. The secret, revealed at the end, is the real guy, whoever is, is faking it.

And this, once you think about it, makes no sense at all. Aaron is a bright guy. But somehow he thought it was a good idea to play a mildly retarded fellow and join a church where he is subjected to sex video tapes.

I mean, why would he do this? The film only makes sense in that it tries to trick the viewer, and has a gotcha moment at the end. But the real answer makes no sense whatsoever.

Even so, it's a nice showy role for Ed Norton.

CSPAN is cool

CSPAN does something that every network covering the debate should do, and that is to display the question that is asked. If they would do this, you would see how much the politician evades the question being asked.

And believe me, they do a lot of evading. The average listener often forgets the question. So the networks should be obligated to put it up.

That is all.

String Theory

David Foster Wallace, not yet a month deceased, wrote a story for Esquire in 1996. Early on, he writes the following paragraph:

A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood, L.A. Nor of Tommy Ho of Florida. Nor of Vince Spadea nor Jonathan Stark nor Robbie Weiss nor Steve Bryan -- all ranked in the world’s top one hundred at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Tarango, sixty-eight in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate psychotic breakdown in full public view during last year’s Wimbledon

Notice Wallace is careful to use the hedge word "probably". After all, there might be tennis fans out there who pay attention to players that are ranked outside the top 10, or, as the case may be, outside the top 30.

As it turns out, I had heard of Michael Joyce, Vince Spadea, Tommy Ho (of which I'd say Thundercats, ho!), Jonathan Stark, Robbie Weiss. Steve Bryan, I don't recall so much. Jeff Tarango, yes, I've heard. The meltdown occurred when he accused an umpire, one Bruno Rebeuh, for having it against him. Tarango was a modern day John McEnroe, and like McEnroe, Stanford educated, and a tennis professional, but lacking McEnroe's stellar resume. His wife then was accused of spitting at the umpire. It was a bizarre scene, with lilting French accents from one Mrs. Tarango.

Vince Spadea manages to stay in the news. Spadea looked like one of those up-and-comers. He had played Agassi tough at a US Open, and I thought he'd knock him out. Recently, Spadea tried to make a bigger splash as a self-styled tennis rapper, two words that shouldn't go together. He was recently in DC playing at the Legg Mason. He's got a book about him where he talked about his dad. Tennis is filled with tennis dads, but mostly, they oversee their talented daughters.

They range from Stefan Capriati, to Richard Williams. Jim Pierce, Mary Pierce's dad, was so volatile that Mary's mother divorced him, and he was banned from attending WTA events. Until then, Mary always seemed so stressed. She was so much happier afterwards.

Surely, there are tennis dads that pressure their sons to succeed. Indeed, Andre Agassi fits the bill. He was something like Richard Williams in that he studied the game even as tennis was not his first sport. Sons of tennis fathers generally don't get as much press because the fathers typically disappear after they get good, so we don't see the over-protection. The closest to that might have been Michael Chang's mother, but even after a while, she stopped traveling with him.

Vince Spadea, as it turns out, was a product of a tennis father who trained all the Spadea siblings in tennis. Even as Spadea's older sisters showed talent, they lacked the heart of Spadea, and so it was Vince that held the mantle of Spadea success. In many ways, Spadea is as successful as his dad could have hoped.

Any one that rises to the top 30 has made a huge breakthrough, and even as they may toil in relative anonymity, they've proven themselves to be members of a tennis elite.

Because Wallace was a tennis junior, he understands how hard it is for players to reach the top. Wallace could easily have picked players ranked 300 or below. I've never heard of them. How long do their careers last? Can they afford to be on more than a few years. You imagine these are the younger players, early in their career, trying to work their way up the rankings. It would be hard to imagine, short of independently wealthy players, someone toiling at 500-600 all their lives. The cost of travel would be too prohibitive.

Indeed the top pros have perks beyond perks. If you're seeded (a seed means you get some protection in the draw from meeting other seeds too early--basketball is too nice letting the top seed always face the lowest possible seed at each round, where only a small fraction of players get seeded, so they could easily meet a high-ranked unseeded player), you get benefits.

You get free hotel rooms. You get free food. The perks go to the players that can most afford them. But, they also extend to doubles players. So the Bryan brothers, who don't have much of a ranking in singles, benefit from this. Although the Bryan brothers do fine for a living, they don't make the stratospheric income of a top 5 singles player.

When you're used to watching only the top players, your view is completely skewed. You don't realize what they do is so atypical. I'm sure the same thing happens in many sports. A basketball player who plays in college might look at a top player like Kobe and wonder how Kobe and do the things he does.

What's all the more remarkable, beyond the physical ability, is the mental ability. Top pros will find themselves in close matches, perhaps far more than they want, and yet, they manage to win nearly all the close sets. They lift their games, hit the extra shot, even get a lucky net cord, and win matches that they look like they should lose. Weaker players rarely do this.

People say luck favors the well-prepared. Luck seems to favor the talented too. At times, games, sets, hinge on little things. I was watching a match between Federer and Nadal in Miami. In every set, it looked like one player was dominating the set, but then a few points would get played, and momentum would completely shift. It happens in their matches time and again. Just when you think one is on the brink of disaster, they shore their game up just enough, and then they win the set.

Does this happen even among weaker players? I'm sure, yes, to some extent. Perhaps they can simply use their superior shot-making skills, or superior speed, or exploit a weakness of an opponent. There's still some hint that talent can win over smarts and mental strength.

Witness Fernando Gonzalez of Chile, who just whales at the ball. He's a man that seems governed by whim. When he's in the zone, he goes all out on his forehand. It serves him well when he plays well, but when the opponent is holding his own, Gonzalez has no plan B. He plays stupid in those situations, trying to go for bigger, less probable shots, and like a gambler deep in debt, his sense of odds disappears.

Few people understand the level of concentration, the level of confidence, and the level of physical talent needed to win at the very top. Concentration, and the ability to hit the shot when you want, plays a huge roll in winning. Chris Evert wasn't the most physically blessed player, but she could focus, and hit good shots even in duress, and if you weren't pressuring her, she could outsteady you, make you hit one shot, then another, then another.

Basketball seems to lack the concentration element, one that allows a player to keep hitting good shots, even as their opponent is doing the same, and win them at the end.

Golf, on the other hand, is all concentration, and lacks the physical movement and reaction time that tennis needs.

Football has some of these elements, but not over and over and over again, except for possibly the quarterback.

The top players are often where they are because of superior physical talent, but certainly they are there because of their superior mental tenacity, the sheer mind over muscle getting their bodies to do exactly what they want.

Wallace on Tennis

You know that David Foster Wallace knows something about tennis when, in his article about Roger Federer, he credits whom with being the father of modern day power tennis?

Bjorn Borg? Jimmy Connors? No, Ivan Lendl.

If you've never followed tennis, you may not be aware of the Czech player who, for many years, seemed like the Darth Vader of tennis. Tennis has produced its share of striking women players, and I mean their appearance, in addition to their quality of tennis. The 70s didn't exactly produce male studs.

Connors and Borg, who were the top players of their day, were considered reasonably good looking for their time. Connors wore his long hair over his ears, much like the Beatles. Borg wore his hair even longer. And it seemed, unlike Agassi, something Borg preferred to do, rather than a stunt to promote an image.

Lendl, on the other hand, was Eastern European, with dark hair, sunken eyes, and for a while, crooked teeth. Early in his career, he had a nasty habit of spitting all the time. Over time, he stopped spitting, his teeth got straightened, but many still considered him ugly, and as many people liked players like Kournikova for their beauty, they disliked Lendl for his lack thereof.

Furthermore, as Lendl sought to be number one, he saw how McEnroe would argue with the chair umpire and realized that he, too, needed to argue, even as it made McEnroe unpopular, and it didn't help Lendl either. McEnroe was perhaps the premier serve and volleyer of his day. He would charge the net, but early in his career, Lendl showed the kind of blistering power that marked his game. Lendl wasn't above pegging a player on the passing shot, a legal shot that makes it difficult to volley, but considered, in polite company, in poor taste. Lendl would learn to remove that shot from his game.

There were several keys to Lendl's game that lead to its influence over the modern game. His huge forehand was number one. Lendl frequently hit his shot down the line and frequently ran around his backhand to hit inside out. To do this, Lendl would move left. But instead of striking the ball with his backhand, he would continue to move left, then hit the shot with his forehand, but with the same target as his backhand, that is, to his opponent's backhand (assuming his opponent was a righty).

He ran around the backhand because he had a powerful forehand.

Much like Babe Ruth may have hit so many home runs because he tried, Lendl went for winners, because he could. Although bigger racquets have been blamed for causing the increase in power, Lendl actually used quite a small racquet, at 72 square inches. Had racquets been limited in size to about 80 square inches, Lendl still would have had his power game.

The revolution that marked the advent of power tennis may have had more to do with graphite racquets than oversized racquets. Sampras and Edberg used a racquet at 85 square inches, a significantly larger size than the 72 that Lendl used (the old timey racquets were 66 square inches, so Lendl used something only a touch bigger).

Power tennis was going to come whether or not the large racquet did. Case in point. Jimmy Arias. Few people remember Jimmy Arias because his career was so short. Jimmy Arias used the same racquet as Borg, the Borg Pro, which was a classically sized racquet. He had a huge forehand, but an awkward backhand. Ultimately, his diminuitive size hurt him.

Although Lendl epitomized power tennis, it's likely that it would have come anyway. Lendl's began playing his brand of power tennis starting around 1979. He would begin to play superlative tennis around 1982, when he beat McEnroe seven times in a row. Lendl would hit winners off the ground.

Connors hit hard, but his goal was like the classic Aussies. Get to net, and cut the point off. Borg was a steady baseliner willing to run down shots all day long.

Mind you, Lendl didn't hit with flurries of winners like modern day Federer or Nadal. He was raised on European clay, and could rally from the backcourt with the best of them. Like Borg or Wilander, Lendl could and would rally 20-30 shots. But as he improved, he learned to go for winners. He showed it was possible to do this, and it changed the way tennis was played.

It took a while for women to get to that level. For women, the player that made the huge breakthrough was Steffi Graf. Martina rushed the net, and her serves kept opponents off balance. She'd win quick matches because they couldn't pass her. But Graf would overpower her opponents from the baseline. Her biggest nemesis would come in one Monica Seles. Where Graf had a huge forehand, her backhand was an accurate slice, but one she rarely hit winners off of. Strong enough that it was hard to attack her backhand, it was not strong enough to win outright points.

Monica Seles, on the other hand, hit two hands on both sides, and so she didn't have real weaknesses except her speed. Graf was simply a much quicker player than Seles.

It wasn't long after Lendl began showing how power tennis would be played that a series of other players joined in. In the early days, they would have been Boris Becker, then Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. The Bolletieri bunch were actually power hitters that included Jimmy Arias, Aaron Krickstein, before Agassi broke through. Even Ecuadorian, Andres Gomez, was a formidable power hitter with a huge lefty hook.

Really, in those days, you could play a game that was more Borg-like or more classic. Edberg played a classic serve and volley game, becoming the most elegant and precise volleyer of his day, an oddity among Swedes, who preferred to hit from the backcourt. His huge kick serve became a model for others to follow, and while his serve eventually became a liability as others managed to serve harder and harder, Edberg played good tennis for over 10 years, basically from 1983 to 1993.

Wilander was really a throwback. He lacked the power of Lendl, but was quick enough to run down Lendl's shots, and was consistent enough to give Lendl fits. Lendl may have hit winners from the baseline, but not tremendously often. Wilander had his best year in 1988, but then his decline was huge in 1989. Somehow, he managed to stay in the game even through 1994. He was Borg with a lot more variety and thinking.

By the time 1990 rolled around, players like Sampras and Agassi were redefining the game once again, going for even more winners, until you get to 2002 when Federer, then Nadal started their rise. Gone were the days when top players could have weak groundstrokes but big serves and volleys. A player like Roddick, with a huge serve, should be a great serve and volleyer, yet, his game is played from the back, like many of his contemporaries.

It's amazing a top serve and volleyer like Federer can't actually play serve and volley, so he must resort to playing off the ground. He's perhaps the most accomplished serve and volleyer to rarely play that style anymore, partly because passers are so good that he can't do it, partly because he's fantastic off the ground as well.

David Foster Wallace understood a lot of the history of tennis especially tennis in the 1980s and onwards. I grew up watching tennis and would agree with his assessment of tennis. Of course, he used far more eloquent words in his summary of tennis, but he had the tennis acumen to point it out.

Clever Lines

With so many people on the Internets, people come up with so many good zingers that go by the wayside. Some are deemed too harsh, too offensive.

I was just listening to Barack Obama's speech. He criticizes McCain, especially McCain's use of lobbyists on his campaign staff. He says "If you think his staff is working day and night to put themselves out of a job, I've got a bridge to sell you in Alaska".

This drew cheers.

But. But.

Obama could have taken it further. He could have said something like "And his vision for the future of the US, is much like that bridge. It's a vision to nowhere. We've had eight years of that. We don't need four more. I'm sure you will join me in saying 'Thanks, but no thanks'".

I like the twist in using that phrase back on McCain.