When things are going bad, you look for any sign of hope. Rafael Nadal lost the China Open Sunday to Novak Djokovic 6-2, 6-2, while the Colin-Kaepernick-led San Francisco 49ers lost to the New York Giants 30-27.
Rafa is having one of his worst years, and the Niners are off to a terrible start (1-4). And while there are plenty of naysayers for both, I prefer to accentuate the positive, as the song says. ...
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Had an interesting conversation with a saleswoman the other day regarding watches. I remarked that it’s intriguing that so many watch manufacturers have tennis players for pitch men – and women. You don’t see as many NFL players representing watches.
That might seem counterintuitive since tennis isn’t played against a clock – although it certainly records the time of each match, whereas football is played in four 15-minute intervals, albeit with lots of timeouts and a halftime. Shouldn’t Peyton Manning be the spokesman for Piaget?
But a watch – a gift of time – is a classy thing, she said. Tennis players are classy, she added. By implication, football players are not.
It’s always dangerous to generalize, of course, but there is some truth in what she said, as I myself have pointed out in this blog. Tennis has prescribed rules for deportment and an intimate, relatively quieter setting – though it can get pretty loud – that underscores infractions. When Novak Djokovic sarcastically applauded the crowd as it applauded his double-fault in a semifinal against Kei Nishikori at the Barclay’s ATP World Tour Finals in London Nov. 15, he was quick to blame himself for letting the crowd get to him and losing his concentration.
Read MoreWith the Czech Republic’s defeat of Serbia to retain the Davis Cup Nov. 17, the men’s tennis season draws to a close – except not really. There’s Abu Dhabi right after Christmas and then the Hopman Cup, which I had the pleasure of watching from my sickbed in Jakarta last New Year’s Eve. (Hey, not every woman can say she spent New Year’s Eve with Novak Djokovic, but there we were, so to speak – me, Nole and Pippa. No, not Middleton. My sister Jana’s Black Lab.)
Anyway, as I said to Pippa, who concurred, the Hopman Cup is like a party and not just ’cause it falls during Christmas week. There’s men’s singles, women’s singles and mixed doubles. Nole played mixed doubles with Ana Ivanovic, who looks like a young Princess Caroline. The men in my family were smitten.
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