Andre Agassi Hates Tennis

Does being made to start playing tennis at age 3 and being forced by his father to continue when he hated it make Andre Agassi an abused child?

Anyone who has ever seen a bio-pic of retired tennis great Andre Agassi has seen video clips of a tiny boy playing tennis like an adult. Every time I saw those clips I wondered if Agassi really wanted to be out there training like a pro and giving exhibitions when he was 7 years old. Now I know. He hated it. Even so, he kept on playing, became the number one player in tennis, fell to 141 in the rankings, then came back and completed a career Grand Slam and won 8 major titles. Now Agassi is retired and has published a tell-all book. He hated tennis. When his career fell apart he took drugs. Even after he made a comeback and became one of the elder statemen of tennis, he still hated it.

You can't help asking yourself: Why did Agassi continue to play tennis all those years? After he had made a few million dollars, why didn't he tell his father to take a hike and quit the sport once and for all? Many tennis players begin playing as very young children, and many have parents who push them to excel. We have heard the stories of Jennifer Capriati and Mary Pierce, who certainly were emotionally abused by their fathers, if not physically. But Andre Agassi? Here is a man who didn't retire from professional tennis until he was 36 years old, and then it took a severe back injury to force him out of the sport. What was he doing all those years he was playing a sport he hated? What was he thinking?

Andre Agassi's incredible return game and powerful groundstrokes did much to change the style of tennis. Being incredibly fit, playing from the baseline and running other players around, having the stamina to play on with ease after he had worn out his opponent--this is how the game is played today by most of its top stars. Yet it's hard to reconcile all that with hating tennis. Maybe a man who dropped out of school after the 9th grade didn't think he had alternatives. Maybe the money and celebrity balanced his hatred of the sport. Or maybe he is just spinning another myth around himself. After all, this is the guy who never quite escaped his early statement (in a commercial) "Image is everything." Maybe this is the new Agassi image?

What to do in Afghanistan?

U.S. soldiers under attack in Afghanistan

On Fareed Zakaria GPS this week (10/18), Afghan War expert Thomas Ricks gave the opinion that the United States should remain in Afghanistan and pursue two strategies. He recommended that the U.S. withdraw most of its forces from the country side and concentrate on protecting and cooperating with the bulk of the Afghan population, located in Kabul, Kandahar, and a few other population centers, while using Special Forces and airstrikes to keep the Taliban and its allies, including Al Qaeda, from moving from Pakistan into Afghanistan as the Pakistani army expands its fight against them. In short, Ricks advocated “the Biden strategy” for the borders of Afghanistan and “the Petraeus strategy” for the population centers of Afghanistan. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach to me, but will it satisfy anybody back home?


Actually, the divide between public opinion and political opinions on the matter is much the same as with healthcare reform. Polls taken in September 2009 show that support for the war in Afghanistan among Americans is declining steeply, with only 39% favoring the war in a TIME/CNN poll, while 58% want to withdraw U.S. forces from the country. In Congress, the progressives want to withdraw, while the conservatives want to increase troop levels. Personally, if John McCain thinks increasing troop levels is a good idea, I’m against it, but what will President Obama do? Will he listen to Vice President Joe Biden or General Stanley McChrystal? Or can he blend the two approaches, as Thomas Ricks suggested? Stay tuned, and we’ll see, but as long as the American body count rises, public support for what no longer seems like a “war of necessity” is likely to decline even further. But then, who pays attention to what the citizens think? If it were left to the majority of citizens, healthcare reform would include a public option, but we have already seen how allergic to that Congress seems to be. Go figure.

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.

Housing Guantanamo Detainees in the United States

This is the way we imagine prison cells, but in a supermax facility, there would be a solid door with just a small window.

Just recently, the United States Senate turned down President Obama's request for funding to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba by a resounding margin (90-6). The ostensible reason was that the president had not yet presented a detailed plan for what to do with the remaining detainees, but there was also a lot of NIMBY (not in my back yard) feeling expressed in the Senate. No one seems to want dangerous terrorists housed in prisons in their state. As President Obama commented in a speech today, there would not be a reason to be looking to house detainees in the United States now if the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had not been opened in the first place, and it would not be necessary to put some prisoners in preventive detention (that is, hold them indefinitely without trial) if the detainees had not been tortured and otherwise mistreated to obtain evidence. Another thing the president has said on several occasions is that no one has ever escaped from a so-called supermax prison in the United States, even though those prisons do include some convicted terrorists in their population. If that is the case, is it really true that no state would accept Guantanamo detainees into a supermax facility?

A "supermax" prison is a highly secure detention facility in which especially dangerous prisoners are held in virtually solitary confinement under the strictest safety precautions. At the present time, there is only one supermax prison in the federal system, which is located at Florence, Colorado. Many so-called supermax prisons or prison units have been cited for all sorts of human rights abuses connected with the level of control believed to be necessary to secure the inmates. Many politicians seem to be afraid that a prison housing terror suspects relocated from Guantanamo Bay would be the focus of efforts by Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations to release the prisoners. That might be true, although based on history to date, it seems improbable. In any case, especially in the current economic climate, there seems no reason to believe that some states would not accept small supermax facilities or units to house Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

Maybe I believe this mainly because prisons are a popular industry in upstate New York, not that far from where I live, and there was a great outcry in some towns when Governor Paterson proposed closing some underutilized prison facilities upstate. I can't believe that, given enough money, some town in upstate New York would not agree to "host" a supermax facility, no matter who the inmates were going to be. And if New York state is like this, there must be other states with similar circumstances.

Whatever happens, there needs to be a careful and rigorous examination of how many prisoners left at Guantanamo need to be detained in the future. We need to accept a few of the detainees ourselves, assuming there are any who would accept living in a country that has treated them so badly, and we need to lean on other countries to accept some of them, as well. There must be a reasonably fair trial process for the dangerous or incorrigible ones, and then they need to be sent to supermax prisons in the USA. I say "reasonably fair" because, given the deplorable actions taken during the Bush administration, some of the worst offenders could not be convicted in a normal criminal trial under U.S. law. After all, how many times was Khalid Sheik Mohammad waterboarded? There may also have to be preventive detention legislation enacted by the U.S. Congress to justify holding the prisoners who simply cannot be tried and convicted. And while all that is going on, it's time to offer supermax facilities to states that are willing to take them.

So let's imagine that a supermax prison or prison unit were constructed in upstate New York to house some of the most dangerous Guantanamo detainees. Given all the security precautions that must be taken, no such prison is going to be pleasant to live in. That said, one could attempt to construct a facility that provided humane conditions for long-term detainees. The rooms, in which the prisoners might spend 23 of 24 hours each day, must be large enough for people to move around comfortably and contain whatever furniture is safe for a prisoner to have. That means things that the prisoner can't use to injure himself or a guard or another inmate. The inmates must have an opportunity to exercise, preferably outside whenever possible, be given decent food that complies with any religion-based dietary restrictions, and whatever medical care is necessary, including mental health treatment.

The prisoners must have the chance to worship, to watch television, and to read whatever they want. There should be no physical or psychological abuse of any kind, and no control based on drugs. Every cell must have a good-sized window with bulletproof glass that looks out onto a pleasant landscape, such as a garden or a park. If there is a way for the inmates to socialize on a limited basis, they should be permitted to do so. Anything that can be done within the realm of safety to stimulate their minds and provide exercise for their bodies should be done.

Yes, I know what you're thinking: Such a prison would be incredibly expensive. Too bad. If we had not created this situation, we wouldn't have to deal with the consequences of it now. It's our responsibility, and we have to assume the burden, whether we like it or not.

Lilac Time

I can't think of a more magical time in my neighborhood than the end of May, when the scent of lilacs permeates the air. I took my dog for a walk this afternoon and came home high on lilacs. You can have your drug of choice, but I'll take lilacs every time.

Here, where spring comes late, if it comes at all, there is an established progression among the flowering trees and shrubs. The forsythia comes first, followed by the cherries and magnolias, then the apples, crab apples, quince and redbud trees, then finally the lilacs. I love them all, but in my book, the lilacs are the best.

When I was a kid, people around here brought lilacs to the cemeteries for Memorial Day. There was a special holder for them, a cone-shaped green metal thing with two prongs at the bottom. You stuck it in the ground by means of the prongs, poured in water, then put the cut lilacs in the container. When you visited the cemetery, no matter what other pots of flowers or wreaths you might see, there were always bouquets of lilacs all around. After a while, the people who ran the cemeteries didn't want the lilacs in their metal containers, but some people continued to bring them for years. I don't know if they sell those metal containers anymore. Maybe people used to bring them home and reuse them. They looked fine, much better than coffee cans wrapped in aluminum foil, which you also saw in those days.

Back then, you mostly saw the common blue lilacs, which grow into trees after a while. They are everywhere in my neighborhood, but they seem to be challenged now by white, pink, and even deep purple varieties, which are eye-catching and beautiful. None of them has the intoxicating scent of the blue lilacs, however, and those are my favorites. The scent of lilacs is amazing. I don't mean that air freshener smell or the perfumed candle smell that is supposed to be lilac. No, I mean the scent of real lilacs outside in the fresh air on a cool but sunny day in May. Superb, and more or less free, thanks to my neighbors who planted them.

And the best thing about lilac time in Oswego is that it lasts for quite a while. Even when the flowers begin to fade, the scent lingers and the colors take on a new cast and continue to adorn the neighborhood. And when lilac time is over, it's time for the bridal wreath spireas to bloom. No scent, but lovely all the same. How lucky we are to live here!

Redefining the American Dream

A recent article in the New York Times reports on the results of a poll administered by the Times and CBS last month. In the poll, people were asked "What does the American Dream mean to you?" They were also asked if they thought they had or would achieve it.

Given the current recession, it's no suprise that people's responses about having achieved the American Dream, or their prospects for doing so, were more pessimistic than they once were. Many people did not think they would have more and live better than their parents. But the survey also found that people were redefining their dream away from material success toward more abstract values. Concepts like freedom, equality, and opportunity were mentioned as the "real" American dream by an increasing number of people.

Obviously, this says something about people's optimism in difficult times. It also signals a welcome, if temporary, departure from measuring success in terms of how much "stuff" one can acquire. I think this trend should be encouraged, and I herewith state my New American Dream and hope that others will share it:

1. That we in the USA stop polluting the planet and do what needs to be done to reverse the damage, even if it means our standard of living declines somewhat.

2. That everyone in the USA has sufficient food, clothing, and shelter.

3. That everyone in the USA has adequate health care coverage that is not tied to employment.

4. That we in the USA take proper care of children and the elderly.

5. That we in the USA stop discriminating against one another on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or any similar factor.

6. That the USA be responsible for providing meaningful work for its population that doesn't involve only providing consumer items for everyone else.

7. That the USA develop and administer an education policy that is inclusive and effective and focuses more on learning and thinking than on self-esteem building.

8. That rich people and corporations in the USA accept that they have to pay a fair amount of taxes to support the country and its people.

9. That the government of the USA stop sending its citizens to die in irrelevant wars and instead concentrate on helping people who need it.

10. That everyone in the USA stop waving guns and flags around and concentrate instead on items 1-9.

And that's it, folks.