The Disappointers

Janko Tipsaveric: first round straight sets loss to Florent Serra.

Philipp Kohlschreiber: first round straight sets win over Andreas Seppi, but don't worry, he'll probably lose to Stepanek in the third round.

Ernests Gulbis: first round straight sets loss to Andy Murray.

These are the Disappointers. Each has enough game to play comfortably in the ATP top ten, but none advances beyond the first few rounds of any tournament. Tipsarevic has more power and speed than practically any other player on tour, and yet he is a fucking dunce. (Is this your homework, Larry?) Kohlschreiber has, hands down, the best form of anyone in the men's game--better than Djokovic, better even than Federer, and yet he too is a fucking dunce. (Is this your homework, Larry?) But most distressing is Gulbis--Latvian enigma, prep school flunky, and all around Sam Weir lookalike. (We know this is your homework, Larry.) His serve and forehand are thunderous weapons, almost acts of God in their overwhelming force and necessity. Like the furious Satanic engine in Melville's underworld that ceaselessly manufactures blank paper--oh! infinity of echo!--they must go. They probably could raise Kant from the dead and convince him to reconsider his examples of the dynamical sublime in The Critique of Judgment, so paralyzing and apocalyptic are they. But he's ranked 98th in the world. He smirks a lot as he loses, which is often. He does not understand the vital importance of being Ernests.

A motley confederation of underachievers! Let us celebrate their dubious commitment to the ideals of the Grecian urn. Eternally poised on the verge of fulfillment, they nevertheless remain incomplete men, men frozen at the precipice of unknowable orders, driven to chase the blank chimerical whims of Great Nothing while never quite capable of catching or quitting the impossibility of their pursuit. They have a poetry about them. Even if they retire never having achieved anything of distinction, we can admire their dedication to a simple, too often unacknowledged law of aesthetics: that imperfection is far more muscular and compelling than its contrary, mere perfection. May they continue to lose, I say, and happily; like Zarathustra, they have studied long in their caves and at last have descended the mountain in order to speak to us--but they have nothing to say.

Excelsior!