Song Of The Day 7/26/2016: Paul Trelewski – “The Tennis Song”

Wide Room of Sports – I don't have a lot to say about tennis. Watching tennis is like watching golf with austere landscaping and overtones of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence. In many ways it's the most reductionist form of athletics there is: I'm gonna whack this thing at you, and you whack it back, and we'll keep going until one of us doesn't whack it back. It's given a measure of obstacle by an elongated net, which exists to humiliate players who can't elevate their service over it. The scoring is adorably screwy. The term for a score of zero is "love," which makes me fantasize the whole deal was invented by Sartre. Also, the surface you play on changes depending on where you are. In France it's clay. At Wimbleton it's grass. At the U.S. Open it's something called DecoTurf. In Australia it's something more eerily called Plexicushion. In Canada it's maple syrup. In Romania it's the ground-up bones of the innocents. And in the Rio Olympics they'll be playing on raw sewage, the Zika virus and long-missing enemies of Comando Vermelho.

Tennis -- I love it! That's wordplay. That's why you pay me the big bucks.