World Team Tennis

For those of you unfamiliar with its cock-eyed rules, let me explain World Team Tennis to you. First, it is not a lifestyle; it is a style of lifelessness. Second, it combines every conceivable version of tennis (excluding wheelchair tennis) into what essentially is a boardgame populated by real people instead of tiny metallic thimbles and shoes. The court is a kaleidoscopic pastiche or Persian rug or an Uno card. I don't know. Games prohibit ad-scoring--which means that when players reach deuce, the server chooses to serve either to the deuce or ad-court, and whoever wins that point also wins the game. Matches last only for one set, and sets last only for five games. Tiebreakers end with single rather than double-digit margins. In short, World Team Tennis is midget tennis. All it requires in order to complete its quest for the emptiest use of a human body is random scoring, blindfolds, and horses on which to play.

Today, the Washington DC "Kastles"--yes, with a "K"--defeated the New York City "Buzz." Now, the sport's faux-thuggish format makes me retch. (This is what happens when Billie Jean King interrupts her Caveman-themed cameos to work an administrative gig.) But what really bothers me about WTT is that it fundamentally obscures the seriousness of competition. Players, like Venus Williams, who usually wouldn't slow down to avoid killing a passing bird with the ball, stoning it like an Iranian adulteress--how about that medieval shit, by the way??--laugh and giggle and shrug off wild errors that they wouldn't condescend to make in an exhibition match. Supposedly it's all in good fun and staged to advertise the sport. Bullshit. It makes money. Fun is not innocuous and for the kiddies. Fun is a business, and Billie Jean King, that shrewd elderwoman, knows how to twist its corporate guts for profit.

I have no idea how they choose teams. Probably a number generator. Today the Kastles--with a "K"--started, get this, Rennae Stubbs, Leander Paes, Venus Williams, and Bobbie Reynolds. We all know who Venus Williams is. Rennae Stubbs is a six-time Major winner (two in mixed-doubles, four in doubles), Bobby Reynolds is a veteran chump, and Leander Paes is the greatest, most perfectly oval-shaped doubles player on Earth. He once hit a volley winner off a pass so fast that he hit the ball before the neurons in his brain even had time to fire instructions to his hands to hit the ball. No joke. And he looks like a perfect oval. He's Indian. Some kind of cosmic Hindu stuff there?

So Williams, Stubbs, Reynolds, and Paes take on. . . Martina Hingis, two players ranked so low (well outside the top two hundred) I've never heard of them, and an eighteen-year-old kid. Hingis once dominated the women's tour, but she's twenty-nine and retired. Today she looked every minute of her age. The two nobodies played like nobodies. And the kid? Yeah. So, naturally, the Kastles--with a "K"--pummeled poor Hingis and her cohort. World Team Tennis isn't exactly an equitable enterprise. Imagine an entire basketball team of LeBron Jameses. And one of them is perfectly oval, his hands quicker than electricity in his own brain.

Oh, fuck it, I'm tired of writing about this. F to myself for watching World Team Tennis. Twice.