In other sports news…

The lack of a segregated sports section in this "reading" (as "chetivo" is probably best translated, though who gives a fuck anyway) cannot stop me from making some sports points here. Let me start with the recent homecoming of a famous tennis player, "The man never seen playing tennis, ever, really". "The man never seen playing tennis, ever, really" is a popular figure from our not too distant past, known mainly for cool abilities such as “the dancing up and down girls’ bodies till they’re dizzy”, “supporting AC Milan”, “deodorizing yourself long in the morning till your sleeping roommate’s conscience is irreparably damaged”, “keeping it cheery”, etc. After becoming a popular figure in the pharmaceutical industry, persuading his boss to invest 1 million hard cash in a Japanese tree, and becoming personal friend with no less than 11 laboratory rats (not to be confused with laboratory mice, which are much smaller, much more aggressive, and lack the notorious plastic tube in the head, the one that supplies electricity and thus makes you high, remember high school, well, these rats, it seems, have inherited the behavioral traits and general outlook and demeanor of the Persian cats, probably due to some half-illegal experiment (in the dungeons of The Most Secret Pharmaceutical Plant Under the Swiss Alps) going awfully wrong after the by-phone intervention of The Main Scientist’s wife, demanding that he came back home immediately, even if he had to cross the French border by bicycle, and also demanding that he brought home two tin cans of Whiskas Deluxe...well, I definitely went on a tangent here, which I’ll quickly remedy by closing the parentheses), so after these accomplishments, the man I will henceforth refer to as tennisplayer, started paying some more attention to the surrounding world, to the result that he discovered one very important and undeniable truth – that Turkish grocery stores are the only ones open on Sunday in Basle. The fact that the Turkish grocery stores offered even Croatian ljutenica enlightened his existence even further, and, feeling suddenly and inexplicably cheered up, tennisplayer succumbed to an old and very nasty habit of his – fooling his best friends into believing he regularly played tennis. A quick retrospective, reaching to the very depths of his evil quintessence, helped his mind recover what has long been known as The Methods: namely, the vile, cunning, and irresistibly successful tricks (oh, “Tricks”, what a poor word you are in the circumstances, but where are your more powerful brothers?), which helped him fool the world into visualizing him on the court, hitting aces as easy as it is to hit the road or The Main Scientist’s wife, returning the furry green balls better than Andre Agassi on Prozac (which is easy, but not that much), and generally doing things like smashes, lobs, short backhands, sweating, net volleys, winners, reverse backhands, stop-volleys, adjusting your hair so that it looks Italian, deuces, advantages, first serves, second serves, second second serves, etc. Things that are associated with only the truly great tennis players. Having remembered how he managed to keep one of the biggest scams in history going for the better part of eight years, tennisplayer coolly boarded Swiss Air, wryly invested 40 duty free Swiss franks into a bottle of Glenfiddich, thus shortening his roommate’s life with another month, and appeared at our door with the, supposedly, extremely professional and informed tennis opinion that: “Eh, da gi eba tija francuzi, sja pyk se opitvat da natopjat nashto momiche Sesil Karatancheva* che bila vzimala doping, ya baa…” Duly, nobody believed him. We are much wiser these days, after we got the plastic tubes removed from our heads, and are no longer permanently high on electricity. So there is nothing left for tennisplayer to do but go back to a Turkish grocery store on a Sunday. But who knows, he might even meet a nice Bulgarian girl in a traditional nosija, exploring the streets of Basle in search of kori za banitza…Who would then deny the cleverness of his plot?

*Sesil (Cecile) Karatancheva would have been Bulgaria’s best chance of a Number 1 tennis player – if she had withstood the lure of doping, that is. But she didn’t, if the French are to be believed…Are they? Stay tuned.

imm