A Plea for a Longer Grass-Court Tennis Season

Tim Henman stretches for a volley.

Rafael Nadal, the number-one tennis player in the world, thinks that the tournament seasons on clay and grass should be lengthened and the time spent playing on hard courts should be shortened. Clay and grass surfaces are more forgiving on the players' bodies, he says, and tennis would benefit from it. Nadal is currently suffering from severe tendonitis in both knees and had to pull out of the Queen's Club tournament in London, the major tune-up event before the championships at Wimbledon. At the present time, Nadal's participation at Wimbledon, where he is the title-holder, remains in doubt.

Actually, I think the number of events played on clay during the 11-month tennis season is ample, although I wouldn't object to more. However, I agree wholeheartedly that the grass-court tennis season should be longer. This year, it spans only 5 weeks, and two of those are Wimbledon. Why should that be? Why not start at the end of Roland Garros with something like the following: Week #1: Halle (Gerry Weber Open); Week#2: London/Queen's Club (Aegon Championships); Weeks #3 and 4: Wimbledon Championships; Week #5: Eastbourne (Aegon Open) and a clay court event (Bastad? Stuttgart?); Week 6: S'Hertogenbosch (Ordina Open) and a clay court event (Bastad? Stuttgart?); Week #7: Newport (Campbell's Hall of Fame Championships) and plus whatever hardcourt event is scheduled; and Week #8: Another grass court event in the USA plus whatever hardcourt event is scheduled. Surely there is a tennis club on Long Island somewhere with enough grass courts for an ATP tournament?

Even an 8-week grass-court season overlapping clay and hardcourt events is not much, considering that 3 of the 4 Grand Slams used to be played on grass. Of course, who knows if sponsors could be found, but that's not my department. However, I'm not sure that Rafael Nadal would enjoy my grass-court tennis season, because I want to return to the old days of fast courts with low bounces and tricky hops and players rushing the net. Come on, what's 8 weeks out of an 11-month season? But it would certainly make it more interesting to force the true contenders among tennis players to master a really different surface instead of being able to bang away from the baseline as they do now for the entire year. In today's tennis, to quote Fred Stolle, winning players on grass don't have to come to the net until it's time to shake hands. In my grass court season, those guys wouldn't make it past the first round.

Playing Mafia Wars is better than a Rohrschach test!

The image says it all: Guns and money, baby!

There are all sorts of pitfalls associated with Facebook and other social networking sites. You want to waste time chatting with your friends and taking all sorts of dumb quizzes? Facebook is the place to be. But I never imagined what could happen if you got caught up in playing Mafia Wars. Now I know.

The best way I know to describe Mafia Wars is to compare it to playing Monopoly with weapons. You have a mafia family. How big that family is depends on how many of your friends you can persuade (or coerce) into joining the game or how many new friends you can find on Facebook who will play with you. You join their mafia family and they join yours. You get a nice mafia name (I am Don Carmelo Sgroi) and start out at the most basic level as a Street Thug. You have all sorts of needs: Health, Energy, Stamina, Skills, and Experience. You begin at the bottom (mugging is the first job on the first level) and work your way up. You always need more health, energy, stamina, etc., and that costs money. So you do jobs and attack other mafias to get money. But to do jobs and attack other mafias you need weapons and vehicles and other items. In the beginning you scurry around trying to piece together enough resources to survive and progress. It's a criminal version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: If you want respect, you need money and guns. And belonging-- well, that's the name of the game. The bigger your mafia family, the more potential power you have, but you have to arm and equip your mafia members, and that takes money. And you have an ever-growing overhead, so you need to increase your income, which means buying property, doing more jobs, stealing more money. Does this sound familiar? It's life, except that in my real life I don't use a gun to get what I want. In Mafia Wars, however, you have to have guns and cars to get ahead.

When I started playing the game I had no idea what I was doing. I did the jobs, then ran out of energy. When I had an opportunity to enhance my resources, I didn't know how to prioritize. If I got any money, someone always seemed to appear at the wrong moment to steal it. What to do? I turned to Google, of course. There are lots of Mafia Wars strategy pages, and I slowly learned the basics. Now I am making progress. My mafia family numbers 104, and I am a level-43 Enforcer. I have no idea how many levels there are, and somehow I doubt if I will ever find out, but some of my mafia family members are on levels in the 200s, so there is a way to go. The maximum size of a mafia family is 501 members, by the way. I don't aspire to that. I also don't aspire to be a hitman or buy myself a fancy name. You can do all that and more in Mafia Wars.

The thing I find most entertaining about playing Mafia Wars is what it reveals about my personality, not to mention other people's personalities. A few evenings ago, a priest put out a contract on me. I don't like being snuffed by anyone, so I took out a hit on him. I wouldn't have cared if he were the pope; he was going to get whacked. As in my real life, I have big security needs in Mafia Wars. I started out with an income of $350 per hour. That was hardly enough. I literally begged, borrowed and stole to get more. At the moment I have a net income of $1,966,400 per hour. Obviously, I have progressed. In the beginning stages of the game, I was obsessed with the fear of being robbed. It was very helpful to discover that you could keep your money secure by putting it into the bank. For a 10% laundering fee, I might add. As it turns out, it's worth it to pay the game 10% to protect your money, but what about when you're asleep? Money is coming in every hour, and you are not there to protect it. This can keep you up nights, I'm telling you! And people can damage your property, so you have to get insurance, which costs more money. Mamma mia!

Now that I have a certain amount of money and lots of guns, cars, armor, and other loot, I don't mind it when people attack me. If they get some money, fine. There will be more money in an hour, and I have money in the bank. But if someone kills me (you can always come back to life, for a price) or damages my property, I retaliate. I don't know how many hits I have contracted for. Not a huge number, but enough. The priest isn't the only one I have sent to sleep with the fishes. But I don't overdo it. Everyone has their own style of playing the game. I don't buy more weapons and vehicles than I need to equip my family and protect myself from attackers, but there are people out there who have bought 500 town cars. You get a certificate of merit for buying 500 town cars. I think anyone who buys 500 town cars is certifiable, unless it turns out that you need them to do a job at some point, in which case I, too, will acquire 500 town cars. At the moment I own 65 town cars, which seems adequate for my needs.

All of this is a clever way to keep people tied to Facebook. I realize that. I don't mind, as long as I am amused. You can't play Scrabble all of the time, and I am a lousy chess player. If I don't have a decent book to read, what am I supposed to do? I mean, television is totally boring, but arming the Russian mafia or wiretapping a police detective, especially when you get paid $1 million to do it? That's fun. For now anyway. Soon I'll be on to something else.