That’s Mansour Bahrami. THE Iranian tennis player.

That’s not much of an exaggeration. When the mullahs took over, they banned tennis outright. Said it was too capitalistic. Too western. Too rich folks-y. After a while, they relented and looked the other way. If I were a betting man, I’ll bet it’s because they saw Mansour play. He’s a great tennis player, don’t get me wrong. You can’t monkey around like that without a titanic game backing you up. But Mansour is so much more. He’s the cure for how stuffy tennis had become. He could amuse the most hidebound person you could name, like an ayatollah, or a tennis fan with a daughter named Muffie. He’s the tennis version of “Why so serious?”

I’ve played tennis up to the high school level. I was taller than the other kids, had arms like an orangutan, and learned to win points using a rocket serve. It was coming from higher up and faster than the opponents were accustomed to. Unfortunately, being about as athletic as a sloth, that was the entire extent of my game. And of course the bane of the attempted rocket serve is the double fault. In my mind’s eye, I can picture a spectator at one of my matches. I have to picture it in my mind’s eye, because it never happened, but still. Watching a guy lose a match by double faulting twice to every aced serve would be awful. Literally nothing interesting is ever happening. It’s either not in play, or not in play.

Every modern tennis player is playing that very same game, only not sucking at it like I did. The modern racquet made it almost mandatory. I started out with a wooden racquet with a small, oval face, and you had to put some serious mustard on the ball to serve an ace, and put it in exactly the right spot. Slower serves, and ball speed overall, meant the other guy could probably reach more volleys to hit back. The ball would travel over the net more than once or twice.

By the time I got to high school, we were all kitted with those big steel or composite frames with a plastic gutstring face as big as a trampoline, and tight enough to send balls into low earth orbit. That’s exactly where I put them most of the time instead of into the one-third of the court where they belonged. The guys who could hit it hard plus where they were aiming made the game even worse, if that’s possible. Scorching serve, the return into the net, or maybe lamely popped up for a return slam isn’t interesting to watch.

For a while, women’s tennis was more interesting than men’s because something happened. The ball traveled back and forth a little. Then the women got ugly and the found muscles in some jar somewhere and there wasn’t much point in watching that, either. The game was boring to play, and boring to watch. After a while, people only tuned in to see misbehavior by ill mannered participants. Complaining to the umpire got to be the only amusement left in it. It was  the equivalent of watching NASCAR for the crashes.

The game might not have seemed so dreary if it didn’t take itself so seriously. Hushed crowds, anachronistic scoring and various other customs worthy of a cricket match suited Bill Tilden et. al., wearing long pants and sweaters and swinging tiny rackets, playing on grass. Even the bad boys of tennis were more like toddlers pitching a fit in church than a rebellion against the stuffiness of a game that had entirely retreated to the baseline to try to return a serve once in a while. It’s why pickleball has caught on down at The Villages, I guess. It’s faster and more convivial. Less stuck-up. But I’m sure Americans propensity to never leave well enough alone will wreck that eventually, too.

And then along comes Mansour. He could have fixed tennis all by himself, I think, but not many people ever see him play. He’s the Harlem Globetrotters and Victor Borge and a standup comedian rolled into one pair of Izod togs. He’s the Dad Jokes of tennis, a sport that desperately needed to hear a joke, no matter how lame, as long as it was funny. Just like the Globetrotters and Borge, his tomfoolery was backed up by prodigious talent, completely subsumed to serve the end result: Harmless, amusing fun.