It doesn't teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things. I told him that I wanted to be a real major-league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish. I would dribble blindfolded in the house.
Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity.
One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad. Charles Barkley, about playing against Michael Jordan, 1993. However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.