for tennis fans and non-fans
I’m a tennis non-fan, i.e. in general I enjoy watching tennis but its somewhere in #7800231 in my list of priorities… Still, loved this really cool article by Scott Adams!
After some calls that went against Hewitt, the Aussie singled out an African-American linesperson and complained to the chair umpire. Hewitt used a poor choice of words that led observers to think he was complaining of racial favoritism. Hewitt says he didn’t mean it that way, but nonetheless it became the story. And the media tried hard to get Blake to bite. They wanted him to complain about racism, maybe get a little mad about it. That’s good TV. But Blake didn’t take the bait. He politely pointed out that people say things in the heat of the moment, and whatever Hewitt said was Hewitt’s problem, not his. It seemed to me the perfect response. Sometimes trivializing is the best strategy.
More than anything else, I found it pretty amazing how having a discriminated against background, he had every reason to get irked by the situation – but took it so impersonally and resisted from a typical logical reaction of retaliation. He didn’t add fuel to the fire but just got on with tennis!