Almost three years ago I spent much of my summer training my body and preparing my mind for the United States Tennis Association sectionals for Southern California in Costa Mesa, California. I dedicated myself to get ready for the big weekend starting on August 3, 2019.
And then it arrived. I played two hard matches and lost both. The first one I might have been able to win but didn’t. The second match I just got blown off the court by clearly superior opponents. It was a long day of hard and discouraging tennis. I had trained all summer to be ready and it was not enough. I don’t think my team won a single match that entire weekend. It was deflating, to put it mildly.
A spectacularly unspectacular day of tennis for our team.
But so it goes. You sort of expect this sort of thing at “play-off”-level events. The competition was intense.
But my memory of that weekend back in 2019 was poisoned by one unhappy event which had nothing to do with me. In between tennis matches I went to my car to change out of my incredibly sweaty, stinky outfit into a fresh set of clothes. While sitting there I made the mistake of checking my phone, and I saw the news that some total wingnut had shot a bunch of random shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. I later learned that the guy had bought an AK-47 and then drove hundreds of miles south to shoot Latino shoppers near the Mexican border. After he had killed 23 random shoppers, wounded 23 others, and run out of ammo, he simply dropped his rifle and surrendered to the police. This was the very definition of a terrorist act: an ideologically directed act of violence to make a sociopolitical point. Here are two images from that horrible scene –
I remember sitting in my car horrified by the news. It was like a skunk had stunk up my weekend; the stench of the El Paso shooting stuck onto my larger memories of the 2019 Costa Mesa tennis sectionals, and sort of ruined it. It is the most emotionally resonant memory I have of that weekend, unfortunately.
Who gave some “lone wolf” 21-year old terrorist the power to take innocent lives and kidnap the 24/7 modern news media to talk about him and his act non-stop for weeks? One person out of the approximately 333 million people in the United States has this power to get all the attention of the country? An extremist and his hateful act can take up all the oxygen in the room? A lonely loser radicalized on the Internet is worth this much attention? Any attention? Because he committed a horrific act of cold-blooded murder? Will copycat extremists follow in his footsteps? Looking for free publicity for their hateful ideologies?
The same thing happened last weekend: another sectionals weekend and a tragic mass shooting.
Let me explain. I am playing intense tennis all weekend at USTA sectionals in San Diego, and I am losing. I am exhausted. Two toenails on my right foot have turned black and will fall off eventually. I hurt. I am too busy to look at my phone and stay abreast of breaking news: I am preoccupied all Saturday. But when the dust settles and I am driving home Sunday afternoon I see the news of the Buffalo shooter and his act of evil. Like in El Paso 30 months earlier, a white kid barely out of high school had driven hundreds of miles to shoot members of an ethnic minority. He had reportedly been radicalized online. He had a rifle. He surrendered to the police. He had clear racist motivations to perform a terrorist act towards an annunciated sociopolitical goal. I will not mention the names of either of these despicable individuals anywhere in this essay and give them any free publicity, and I sort of wish the police had shot them on the scene. At the least these two can spend the rest of their lives in prison, but even that does not erase the horror of their acts.
It confuses and irritates me. Why am I paying any attention to this low-level shithead who is more of a mental health reject barely out of high school rather than a cogent political activist/revolutionary? Because he murdered people to gain attention for his ridiculous extreme racial views? His opinion is unworthy of my attention, except for the fact that he has tried to hijack my attention by killing innocent people. But here is the undeniable truth: he did succeed in getting my attention and earning my anger, for at least a day or two.
The white supremacist teenager in the Buffalo shooting supposedly had painted on his rifle the name of a lady who was killed by the black guy in the Waukesha Christmas parade attack where several bystanders were run over in Wisconsin. Or another low-life lonely loser who traveled from Milwaukee to the Bronx to shoot people in the subway for vague racial (or whatever) reasons. The Buffalo shooter also claimed to have been inspired by the trailer-trash white kid who walked into an African American church in Charleston, SC and shot innocent worshippers (the perp being yet another low-life who I am not sure had an IQ above room temperature) and that fuckstick in Norway who shot all those people on the island in 2011. Or the weird Chinese guy who walked into a church full of Taiwanese Presbyterians in Laguna Woods, California yesterday and shot it up to protest Taiwanese independence from Communist China (or something). Or that “Incel” asshole who shot those coeds in Isla Vista in Santa Barbara 45 miles from where I live back in 2015. Or the total loser who murdered his mom, and then went and shot up his mom’s Connecticut kindergarten class back in 2012. Or the plethora of mass shooters in high schools and universities. The one begins to bleed into another; it all begins to add up. And we’re not even touching on any of the Islamist terrorists who have created so much havoc and death over the past thirty years worldwide. None of these people deserve one jot of anyone else’s time or attention. I refuse even to acknowledge these people have names. They should be “memory-holed.” I see today that President Biden intends to travel to Buffalo to give a speech about last weekend’s shooting. Bad idea. Deprive the terrorists of the free publicity which will encourage future attacks, or else you will foster more such terrorism. (“I can murder a bunch of innocent people and the President will drop what he is doing and come talk about me and my work! Wonderful!”) Don’t feed the fire by providing oxygen to it with public attention.
Because these are copycat “lone wolf” losers who are unhinged, unpredictable, and dangerous. They are impervious to reason. They are evil unleashed. There are not many of them, thankfully. They can kill maybe dozens but not hundreds or thousands; their reach and ability to kill is limited. But still… there will be more such attacks. The chances of becoming a victim of one of these psychopaths is extremely slim. If you look strictly at the numbers, these are very rare events. But the emotional impact of an unexpected terrorist act results in a species of violence which punches well above its weight. Isn’t that the cold calculus of the terrorist? Show up out of nowhere and suddenly murder 25 random strangers in public and thereby terrorize and enrage a country of 330 million? On its own terms, terrorism is very effective. And it is almost unstoppable.
Jesus.
Over the past two decades the whack jobs here and there have come out of the woodwork to claim their fifteen minutes of fame (before they eat a bullet from their own gun or spend the rest of their lives in prison). What can anyone do? Read the news and weep, I guess.
So it was a hard weekend I just completed. Grinding and unsuccessful USTA sectionals tennis punctuated by an unspeakable terrorist act. Not dissimilar to what happened on August 3, 2019.
Weird.
In terms of tennis, my mind seeks to find the silver-lining to a weekend of hard-fought losses. Do I become more “match-tough” in competing against such stiff competition? Does my tennis game elevate as a result of waging these WWI-style scorched-earth tennis battles? Maybe. Maybe not. Did I have fun playing so much tennis? Sort of. Sort of not.
I am famous among my tennis buddies for not being a fan of tennis at these USTA sectionals playoffs. You play three hard matches in one weekend? You play these “champion sandbaggers” at the 4.5 level and lose to them? My goal for these weekends would be the following: to emerge from sectionals uninjured, regardless of losing or winning. But the day after it is over I am limping from the two bruised and black toenails on my right foot which are dead and hanging on by a few threads.
I have been to sectionals four times in the past nine months. It is great that my team is able to win consistently our Ventura County league and qualify to compete at sectionals against the other top teams from other Southern California counties. But I say, Let some other team from Ventura travel to sectionals and play hard and lose! I am done.
Intense tennis matches. I see the same players over and over again at sectionals, and I never see them anywhere else. I look at this former college tennis player now competing at the 4.5 level to win a “Gold Ball” trophy at USTA sectionals and I sigh and say to myself, “That fucking guy again…”
Yet it is like in so many other things in life: the bad is mixed in with the good.
The unhappy tennis (and mass shooting tragedy) last weekend was more than balanced out by the camaraderie with my tennis buddies. We rented an Airbnb house in Ocean Beach, San Diego near the Barnes Tennis Center. I took Friday off from work to drive down south to the Mission Bay area. We went out to dinner on Friday and Saturday to the downtown “Gaslamp Quarter.” It was a wonderful weekend with the guys. The tennis at sectionals I could take or leave, but I need my tennis buddies.
This is so important to me.
In the above photo we are all sitting there over dinner and drinks while talking shit and laughing for hours. Just hanging out with your buddies and enjoying the fast friendship and easy banter. A guy’s weekend away from wives and children. We were relaxed and happy. We come back better husbands and fathers afterwards. The social animal inside each of us has been fed, and we were ready to return home.
So there is the complicated mix of the good and the bad. Life is so often that way! The unhappy exhausting tennis matches at sectionals are mixed in with the unexpected news of a tragic, infuriating mass shooting in Buffalo, NY. That is tough to take. But the blast of negativity is offset by the warm embrace of my friends – the camaraderie of my tennis buddies during a weekend of fun away from home. The final result is a rollercoaster ride of mixed emotions. Despite your best efforts you are only so much in control of events, and you take the good and the bad and try to roll with it as best you can.
I mean, what else can you do?
