The rules are simple and stable. The winners don’t get to change them. The winners obtain that status by merit. The losers accept the outcome with grace. The decision between the two is made with the utmost transparency.
Players thank the referee and congratulate each other with humility. The fans adhere to the decorum of silence during play. The game is open to everyone willing to do the hard work to rise up the ranks.
I’m speaking of course of tennis, a game of medieval origins but global popularity today. The U.S. Open is ongoing right now, and watching it is endlessly engaging, though vicariously exhausting. One wonders how anyone can muster the stamina to play that hard in such a hot environment for so many hours under constant pressure to perform, as announcers deconstruct your every move for viewers all over the world.
Those of us who knock the ball around the neighborhood courts can only watch in awe at the mastery on display. How is it possible to send in a clean serve that flies 140 miles per hour? How can anyone return such a ball of fire? Amazing. But even so, seeing such virtuosity doesn’t demotivate us normal folk but rather inspires us.
This is all part of the great goal: “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
So yes, in tennis, people do shake hands, even ritualistically. I cannot even imagine the global outcry that would occur should it not happen following a match. Would it lead to a permanent ban from the game?
(The symbolism of hand shaking itself deserves comment. It is a sign of trust and, yes, related to affirming an absence of fear of infectious disease.)
Watching the U.S. Open, then, provides a sense of relief and hope. The bad guys did not get their way. Instead, we have hundreds of thousands of people milling around, sitting next to strangers, sweating together in the hot sun, cheering in stadiums, smiling at each other, rooting for their favorite player, wishing the underdog well, staying hydrated and probably sharing snacks. It’s the Fauci nightmare, and yet it is all beautifully civilized.
What if our government were run like tennis, with simple rules that anyone can intuit just by watching for 30 minutes? If the winners got that way on merit for their achievements and the losers were magnanimous? If compliance with the protocols and rituals were obviously in the interest of everyone instead of arbitrary and brutal? Political science could learn a lot just by watching a few sets. This is how it is done.
My mind races back to an essay penned by the great Joe Sobran during a time when he and I struck up a friendship in the waning months at the end of the Cold War. Now with the great struggle that had defined 40 years of American life over, everyone was asking fundamental questions about social organization. Can we get back to normal life? What is normal life and how does it work? Mr. Sobran leaned seriously in a libertarian direction in that period. He figured that the United States could now return to being a peaceful commercial Republic.
“The umpires don’t care who deserves to win on moral, progressive, or demographic grounds,“ he wrote. ”Their role is modest but crucial, and would be corrupted if they brought any supposed Higher Purpose to their work. They only care about the rules. The Supreme Court could learn from them.
“The rules themselves are remarkably few. They’re designed only to facilitate performance, never to hinder it, beyond maintaining a certain equilibrium between offense and defense. In baseball we enjoy what we no longer find in politics: the Western genius for rule-making.
“A large part of that genius lies in changing the rules as seldom as possible. Baseball is older than the income tax, but its rules can still be printed in a small pamphlet; the tax code runs to several thousand pages. If you’ve played baseball you can intuit most of the rules without reading them, and you don’t need a lawyer to explain them to you. They arise from the game’s internal logic and never seem to have been superimposed for alien or interested purposes.
“In politics, men are elected to bend the rules in someone’s favor. It shouldn’t surprise us when they break them too. A key difference between baseball and democracy is that in baseball the winners don’t get to rewrite the rules. And it never occurs to the losers to blame the rules for their losses. Our deepest norms of order can still be seen in operation on the diamond when they’ve been adulterated everywhere else. Baseball is our Utopia—not in assuring us of the victories we dream of, but in guaranteeing ideal conditions even of defeat.”
God bless this writer! In that period of his life, he was at the height of his rhetorical powers. And everything he says about baseball pertains to tennis too.
There is special drama this year with the return of Novak Djokovic, who had been barred for his principled decision to refuse the vaccine last year. He said his integrity was more important than winning the tournament. He retained his bodily autonomy and is healthier than ever. He has also broken new records at the U.S. Open this year, securing for himself a permanent status as history’s greatest.
And yet right there printed on the stadium is the sponsorship provided by Moderna, which is also providing a great deal of the advertising revenue for the networks airing the event. The ads masquerade as public-service announcements. You can only find out that they are really Moderna ads by getting close to the screen and seeing the word in small print at the end. Because of the Emergency Use Authorization, they are not bound to talk about the side effects or otherwise give any of the conventional warnings.
This company has some gall to advertise in this event after having lobbied for forcing their product on all the players. It should be in disrepute. But these days, pharma advertising corrupts everything, and not only that. Also, the power of the industry has invaded the regulatory bodies, which are now rubber-stamping their products and enjoying their legal indemnification from liability from harms.
The way pharma politics operates is the opposite of tennis. Pharma changed the definition of vaccine and bribed the agencies to go along, then depended on government force to commandeer customers. In tennis, the rules are fixed, the audiences are there voluntarily, no bribes can affect outcomes, and the effectiveness of the players’ skill is judged by the visible outcome of the game itself.
Not all is perfect in this tennis Utopia. It was devastating to see the U.S. Open blank out the country origin of all players from Russia and Belarus, in effect rendering many players stateless. This is wonton and cruel. Why should players be punished for their country’s identity? They are not responsible for Vladimir Putin’s border policies any more than you or I are responsible for President Joe Biden’s. States all over the world are trampling on the rights of their citizens.
All that aside, it’s a joy to watch the tournament this year, if only with the awareness that if the Dr. Faucis of the world had their way, this whole thing would occur in the cursed “metaverse” and we would only be able to enjoy it at home while being masked up. But they didn’t get their way, mostly because the people simply would not comply. Djokovic led the way with bravery. He is a champion on the court. He is our champion too.
