Aussie Aussie Aussie

Of the four majors, the Aussie Open is the one I pay the least attention to. The reasons are numerous. It comes on the heels of the holiday season, the French is still months away, and most of the action happens during the middle of the night. This year, however, with ESPN3 streaming and bit of insomnia, I've seen quite a few matches. Another reason my interest is peaked is because this year's tourney has some major storylines. Rafa could win the Serena Slam, and I don't care how good Laver was, holding all four trophies in this day and age would be an unbelievable achievement, perhaps on par with Roger's career titles record. Couple that with Rafa's streak at the French and I believe he has cemented himself in the top five all-time already, and he's only 24. I could go on and on, but instead I'll list my preferences for who I want to win. This list might include people already eliminated.


Men's Draw:

1. Andy Roddick - He's getting pretty old in tennis years and he still hasn't developed the third shot in his game to make him a Slam winner again. His serve still makes him capable of beating anyone on a given day, but the holes in his game are only going to get more glaring as his foot speed wanes. Now is the time for Andy if he wants another major title.
   I wasn't a fan of his in the early 2000's. He seemed as if he didn't want to win, but rather crush his opponent and rub it in. Whereas, Federer never cared  who he beat, he was only interested in winning. but then Andy ran into the Fed Ceiling for 7 years and somehow turned into the loveable underdog. Not to mention that he held it down for American men in tennis when there was literally NO ONE else doing anything significant.  I love Jimmy Blake and Mardy Fish, Dent and Gimmelstob but those guys just never threatened the top tier at all.
    We've seen Querrey and Isner come along and make some noise the past couple seasons, but from 2005-2008 Andy was the Lone Ranger. And he never quit and seemed to work harder than almost anyone on tour. Despite not being as quick or having some of the shot-making abilities of Fed, Rafa, Murray or Djokovic, Andy is always knocking on the door of a major final. And in 2009 he gave us the greatest Wimbledon final ever. I don't care what people say about 2008 Rafa/Fed, Andy holding serve for 14 games against the greatest all-around player ever was unparalleled. Isner/Mahut was the greatest match of all time for reasons other than their actual tennis-playing. Roddick and Roger played the best tennis I have ever witnessed in that final. No one will convince me of anything to the contrary
    He's married to one of the prettiest girls on the planet, but seems to realize he hit the pulchritude jackpot unlike a certain football QB from new England. He's frequently a prick in interviews, but he's always funny, and just self-deprecating enough to let everyone know that he's only playing the heel. If I were him, I'd rather be hanging with Brooklyn Decker than trying to explain to reporters that, "Yes I'm a damn good player, but Roger Federer is simply the best. Stop asking me about it."
    So I want Andy to win. If he doesn't, I'll still be rooting for him until he hangs up his Babolat. Which I'm guessing won't be too long from now.

2. Andy Murray - Great competitor. Needs a slam title to shut the British Press up and to make the two at the top play even harder.

3. Roger Federer - Roger will hit the invisible wall this year. He will turn 30 and play in his 43-47 grand slam tournament. As far as I can tell, no men's player has won a title after their fiftieth slam appearance. Stop with the Martina jokes.
  Fed is arguably the greatest of all-time, and his five years from 2003-2008 are unparalleled. I want to see him get at least one more.

4. Rafael Nadal - There may be a day when we say Rafa was as good as Roger. Right now, I can't say that. But if he gets the ConsecuSlam, or Serena Slam or whatever you want to call it, he will leap-frog Bjorn into #4 behind Roger, Pete, and Laver. If he could follow it with the French and win five in a row? It's just him and Roger.
     I'm ambivalent. While I love when athletes break records, particularly guys like Nadal who are hyper-competitive, but also fun and nice, I don't necessarily want to see the era of Federer ushered out just yet. When sports dynasties end, it is a bit sad, even if they are extinguished by the rise of another dynasty.

At any rate, this is one of the greatest times in Men's tennis in quite awhile.

The women's draw isn't quite as lively, but I do have a few horses I'd like to see win.

1. Kim Clijsters - Like Roddick, I didn't really have much of a feeling for her early in her career. But after her hiatus to get married and have a baby, she's come on like lighting. She's far more confident and waaaay more interesting of a person that she was as a slightly timid teenager, as we all are.
  
2. Venus Williams - She's already retired due to injury, and with Serena out indefinitely there is no Williams left. And majors are always better when one of the sisters is playing. Much like Roddick, Venus and Serena have held it down for the USA when virtually no other ladies have done squat.
 Plus Venus has the crazy sexualized outfit/Jehovah's Witness dichotomy going on. Man that family is crazy. Crazy GOOD.

3. Maria Sharapova - Mascha hasn't won a major in awhile and if she wants to secure any kind of legacy she needs a couple more. Plus she's easy on the eyes. If her serve doesn't kill her, she has a chance. Her forehand is the only one that has compared to Venus and Serena in the last five years.

4. Sveta Kuznetsova - She's just fun to watch play because she looks like she should be playing in a USTA league in municipal park, but somehow she's won two majors and is never an easy out. And she looks like Ashton Kutcher, not necessarily in a good way.

I Just Killed a Mouse

       John Wilkes Booth was very handsome. His father and brother were the most famous actors in the country up to that point in American history. Abraham Lincoln was as midwest ugly as they come. I don't think that mattered when the trigger was pulled in Ford's Theater. I do think that J.W. Booth was emblematic of the personality type observed time and again in political assassins: Intelligent enough to identify the seat of power and plan a way to get to the seat-holder and murder them, crazy enough to think that their own politics trump the will of millions of voters. Mental health services could have been useful to any one of the people in history who've pointed a gun at the President and pulled the trigger.

      I don't purport to know how to best identify people who are on the brink of committing gun violence. All I know is that I had to smash a small mouse to put him out of his misery this evening and it made me sad and proud of myself and disappointed in humanity. The proud of myself is because, over the years, I've developed a rather intense phobia for rodents. Not just that I dislike them and wish them to be elsewhere, especially out of my house, no, something more.
       It derives from experiences with half-dead rats and numerous squirrels and chipmunks killed by my grandparents' cat, the bodies of which I'd discover underfoot while mowing the grass. the sensation of squishy squirrel beneath your Adidas is...unpleasant. Nowadays, my adrenal glands start firing like mad when I see a mouse. When I had to clean up a dead and putrifying opossum in my back yard, I nearly hyper-ventilated and a minute after I disposed of the bloated body, running away from a stench that verged on vomit-inducing, I was so jacked on fear hormones I bashed my shovel into the ground a dozen times, finally breaking the handle.
       So tonight, when confronted by a mouse that found its way into our house, I set to work. I reset our spin-traps. I baited them with new peanut butter and waited to hear one of the traps snap. These traps hide the smashed mouse body in a larger housing, so that I don't have to see the little sucker after the kill. Very civilized, indeed. Hoping to take care of the problem quickly I set-up surveillance by the kitchen door. I waited and waited, and still no telltale snap.
       Instead, as I surveyed the online clips of commentary and journalism regarding the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six other living souls, I heard a little scratching in my cabinets. Sure enough, my beady eyed tormentor reappeared. He carefully avoided the traps I set, running back and forth between the toe-kicks in my kitchen. Not willing to spend the night with a Beatrix Potter Character, I broke out the big guns. Glue-traps. They are hardly humane, no matter how much anesthetic they might have in the glue. But I did not care.
      And just like that, the little feller ran right into the sticky-icky. I peeked my head out and hoped he would expire quickly. He did not. He wriggled and writhed for a minute and I could stand it no more. I got my shoes on, picked up a dust pan, and scooped up Stuart Little in his gluey infernal device.
      We went outside, Stu and I, and I apologized to him and told him I was sorry if he had suffered. And then I set him in the snow and dropped a large flagstone on him. I am not proud of killing the mouse, I would have rathered he just left on his own. My pride comes from the fact that I didn't leave him to pull his own arms off and suffer through the night, and I'm glad I put aside my own phobia to do so.

         And I thought about this awful, tortured person named Jared Loughner. And I thought about how I'd like to smash him under a rock. Not because I want to exact violence upon him. I do not. My desire to snuff him out under a large piece of limestone stems from a similar place as my desire to keep the mouse from suffering for eight hours instead an eighth of a second. This poor fuck is disturbed.
         He is no Booth, a racist, politically-savvy narcissist, no Guiteau, a campier Booth. Nor is he a bi-polar Communist like Oswald and Czolgosz. He is a paranoid-schizophrenic and he had guns and the internet. Gabby Giffords was the target he picked to try to silence his paranoia. And along the way, nobody figured out how to save this guy from himself and get him some help.
       Sometimes getting help for the mentally ill is impossible. I have neither the time or will-power to spend hours writing about why and how mental health services need to paid for by the public at large. Why it's an issue of public safety and homeland security. Why our taxes must be used to fund health-care for everyone. All I can say is, humans shouldn't end up on glue traps. They shouldn't be left to pull their own arms off and take their perceived enemies with them on their way to oblivion. Disturbed people can be treated. They can be ushered into the proper programs and facilities before they get stuck in the gooey mind-traps that encircle modern American society. They can and must, for the love of humanity, be kept away from guns.  I don't want to feel like we need to put our countrymen out of their own misery before they start killing people. Because that is almost as disturbing as the thing itself.
        The poor little mouse is dead, and I'm glad it went quick. This awful affair with Mr. Loughner will not go quick, I'm afraid. But I am most fearful of the idea that, at the end of it all, nothing will have changed.