Tennis and Tyranny – Two Blogs for The Price of One!

I haven’t blogged in about a month, and briefly considered never blogging again. But what the hell, it passes the time, so….

Today I present two separate blogs – at no additional cost. They don’t have much in common, but both topics have been on my mind, for different reasons. I even included two different headlines and two different images, which is another bold step for me as an international blogging sensation with millions of followers, or about 50 or so — I can never remember which. Anyway, hope you enjoy,,,,,

Meet The New Bosses

Anyone with more than a passing interest in professional tennis knows that the men’s game is coming off its greatest era in history, thanks to a three-headed beast named Federer-Nadal-Djokovic.

Together, the much-celebrated Big Three won 66 major singles titles between 2003 and 2023, or roughly 80% of all the major championships played during that period. That’s unprecedented. It’s crazy, unimaginable.

The next three on the all-time list (Sampras, Emerson, Laver/Borg) have a combined 37 major titles between them, and they mostly played in different eras.

As I’ve blogged about before, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are easily the three best men’s tennis players of all time – and they all played in the same era. Name another sport where that happened. You can’t, can you? Any one of the Big Three might have won 35 major singles titles if not for the other two. To put that number in perspective, consider that before the Big Three came along, the record for major singles titles was 14, by Pete Sampras.

Well, that era is pretty much over. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have both retired. Novak Djokovic continues to compete at a high level, and is probably still the third-best player on the planet, even at the age of 38. But because the two players above him are so far ahead of everyone else right now, being third-best at men’s tennis is kind of like being third-best at ice cream flavors behind vanilla and chocolate.

The two players ranked ahead of Novak are Jannick Sinner and Carlos Alcarez, a pair of youngsters who have separated themselves from the pack so quickly that they almost make you forget the previous era. Almost.

*****

Sinner and Alcarez just played in the Wimbledon final, with Jannick winning in fairly straightforward fashion to secure his first title at The Championships (always The Championships, if you want to sit in the royal box). The match itself was kind of a letdown following the pair’s epic French Open title clash a month earlier, when Alcarez won in the most stunning fashion you can imagine.

At Wimbledon, Sinner was the better player pretty much throughout the match. He more or less blew the first set, but then righted himself and won the next three in a manner that left no doubt as to who was better on the day. Carlos never really had an answer. Prior to Wimbledon, Carlos had beaten Jannick five times in a row. He still leads their head-to-head matchup as a pro, 8 matches to 5. But on this day, he was clearly second-best.

I was pulling for Carlos – not because I dislike Jannick (I like him fine) – but because I just love Carlos’ game and energy and attitude. He just seems to have a great time out there, using a combination of skill and imagination and joy rarely if ever seen before, whereas Jannick goes about his business with massive ground strokes, superhuman quickness, methodical precision, and a stoic expression.

*****

Alcaraz and Sinner have now combined to win the last seven major titles. They have a total of nine titles between them (five for Carlos, four for Sinner) – and they’re both very young (Jannick is 23, Carlos is 22). You can see them dominating men’s tennis for the next decade-plus in much the same way that Roger/Rafa/Novak dominated during the previous two decades.

I have mixed feelings about all this, by the way. Being an American, I long for an American man to win another major singles title, because it has been For.Ev.Er. The last Yank to do it was Andy Roddick, way back in 2003.

If you had told me then that Roddick’s US Open win that year would be the start of a 22-years-and-counting major title drought for American men, I would have told you to bet on it, and I would have bet every single dollar and possession I had at the time. Seriously. Roddick was the heir apparent to the Sampras-Agassi-Courier-Chang era of American men’s tennis that pretty much dominated the 1990s. No way I believed American men’s tennis would suddenly end its winning ways.

But it happened. I would have lost that bet.

Well, anyway.

The current crop of American men are getting closer. Four of their players — Taylor Fritz, Ben Shelton, Tommy Paul and Frances Tiafo — have hovered in around the world’s Top 10 over the last few years. Fritz advanced to the US Open final last year and lost a tough 4-setter to Alcaraz in this year’s Wimbledon semis. He had a very good chance of pushing it to five sets, and probably should have.

But realistically, for any of them to win a major title, it will probably take a huge element of luck – mainly either Carlos or Jannick (or both) suffering some kind of physical breakdown.

That could happen. But I’m not gonna bet on it.

(Brief interlude: The U.S. women have had a much better go of it, with the dominant Williams Sisters era transitioning seamlessly into the Coco Gauff era. American women have made the singles finals in the last four major championships, and won two of them).

For now, I count myself lucky as a tennis fan and player to bear witness to another era of men’s tennis greatness, courtesy of Sinner and Alcaraz. By the time they retire, I’ll be an old man. Which makes getting older a little easier.

And now we switch gears to a blog about either politics or grapefruit. I can’t remember which….

Tell Us Again About The Deep State, MAGA Warriors

One of the recurring narratives of the Donald Trump/MAGA era is the following:

A shadowy group of “Deep State” bureaucrats controls the United States and everyone in it. According to this narrative, the Deep State is so entrenched that it has unchecked power over not only policies and purse strings, but also basic citizen rights.

MAGA warriors have obsessed over this threat for years. They are so convinced that it’s real that they’re willing to elect (and re-elect) a loudmouth con man like Donald Trump on the promise that he’ll put an end to the Deep State.

Well, Trump made it back to the White House. And true to form, rather than battling the Deep State he promised to oppose, he went about expanding it.

Here are just a few examples of how government control has accelerated under the current regime:

• The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency continues to profile and/or round up immigrants, children of immigrants, and U.S. citizens with immigrant backgrounds without the normal Constitutional protections or due process of law. Recently, armed and masked ICE agents showed up at a youth baseball practice in New York City and started questioning the players about where they are from – even though the players were all teenagers with full U.S. citizenship. This has become standard operating procedure under Trump: armed and masked government agents randomly threatening, apprehending and/or deporting people who might or might not be legal residents. It’s the very definition of Deep State tyranny. When you add in the fact that the targets of this tyranny are almost exclusively dark-skinned people, you can toss institutional racism into the mix as well.
• Many of the immigrants are being carted off to countries not of their origin. This is another expansion of the Deep State under Trump with little precedence in America. And again – it’s not just illegal immigrant/criminals who are being rounded up. Legal citizens have been rounded up as well. The courts have pushed back, but the Trump administration simply ignores the court orders.
• Under the current regime, the Justice Department and FBI have targeted Muslims through deportations, profiling and travel bans. They’ve also threatened to punish citizens, universities and organizations that speak out against Israel’s endless bombing of Gaza under the war criminal Netanyahu. It’s a clear violation of free speech rights, but the Trump Deep State doesn’t care.
• Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – once led by Elon Musk, a fellow fascist who is now a bitter Trump enemy – has been granted unprecedented access to personal, sensitive and confidential information involving tens of millions of Americans. If you’re looking for evidence of Deep State tyranny, look no further than DOGE.
• The current regime has expanded the government’s crackdown on abortion rights, which essentially means the Deep State now has control over the female population’s bodies and birth control decisions.

It’s not surprising that the Trump regime has ramped up the Deep State – because as much as they pretend to oppose government control, they actually love it. They want to control the lives of others. They want to have dominion over the citizenry, to tell everyone what to do and believe, and to make the nation bow to their own ideology. This is what all tyrants want.

The only part of the government they really oppose is the part that provides essential goods and services, and protects people and resources from corporate greed and similar threats.

Instead of fighting the Deep State, Trump & Co. have been on a fevered quest to dismantle agencies that provide healthcare, emergency relief, educational resources, senior benefits, child benefits, nutrition assistance, housing assistance, and all those other things that Trump’s corporate/fascist buddies don’t give a shit about.

His MAGA cultists will ultimately suffer the fallout — because many of them are dependent on the very programs Trump has worked overtime to eliminate. He doesn’t really give a shit about them, either. Some have finally begun to figure that out. Most haven’t, and probably never will.

Images: Google