SPORTS SHORTS

FLYING RACKETS AND CLUBS

Have you noticed that the more intense people become about a sport, the more furiously unhappy they are playing it?

Take the professional male tennis player.  We know he started out as a kid who loved the sport.  Now, as he pits himself against another twenty-something gladiator of the racket, who also once loved the sport, we see him agonizing on what we imagine as the cross of competition.  So deeply does he allow himself to sink into his self-inflicted misery that, when he makes a particularly bad shot, instead of seeing it as an inevitable part of the proportion of everybody’s slamming average, he hurls his racket at the insensate court or high into the unaffected sky. 

Or take the once-chipper but now fixated weekend golfer, who sends a shot into the rough or an inconvenient sand trap.  During his early years navigating the course, he would have joked about his misfire and accepted the inevitable challenge of getting back on course.  But now, when a shot happens to go awry, observe how the rabid gamester grimaces with nearly debilitating pain  and then hurls a once- pampered club after the errant ball.

It seems to us that a sport ought to give us pleasure, and, when we take one too seriously, it makes sport of us.

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