Blast From The Past

It hasn't been a good week for the legends of the sport - and I'm not talking Federer and Nadal, our current legends, here. No, we're going old school. Tennis is clearly fraught with drama, even from beyond the proverbial grave.

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First, Boris Becker gets dumped by text message. I thought this was pretty hilarious, to tell the truth. Tennis Australia does this piece every week called 'Off The Court' - here's a paragraph from their article on the Becker incident:

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'Becker has led a tortured personal life in recent decades, divorcing from the mother of his two sons, Barbara Feltus, in 2001. He later gained playboy notoriety after fathering a child, now eight, with a Russian model, after a tryst in a London restaurant broom closet.'

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Can you tell me that he doesn't deserve to get dumped by text message? He seems like a bit of a tool, really. Maybe this is some kind of grand karmic revenge. Ha ha ha. That's pretty much all I have to say on the matter.

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And then Jimmy Connors goes and gets arrested at a basketball game. Guess he took his break up (presumably not by text message) with Andy Roddick pretty hard, returning to his old badarse ways after a brief stint as a respectable coach type. John McEnroe got sent off the court in a seniors match a while back for being a dickhead - guess Connors couldn't stand to be beaten and had to one-up him.

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It kind of makes you wonder - what will today's tennis heroes be like in twenty years? I would bet you any money that Roger and Rafa will be tennis statesmen in the model of Laver and Agassi, the classy guys: still making the sport proud, quiet family types, some endorsements, light commentary duties. (Can you imagine Rafa the commentator? Hilarious!) Djokovic, on the other hand, will still be trying to seduce Paraguayan javelin throwers and Slovakian singers, and will probably be getting dumped by text message for his troubles...