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If Dad Jokes Were a Tennis Player

January 29, 2026 1 Comment

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.

I Won the 2025 Maine Ironman Race

July 28, 2025 1 Comment

It’s that time of year again. The snowbanks in Maine have receded to a distant memory instead of a salty spring puddle, and have long since released their pent up cargo of urban jellyfish (plastic bags from convenient stores) to drift on the sultry, room temperature breezes. That means it’s Ironman time!

Well, I guess that’s what it means. I’m new to the city of Ogguster, our state’s capital. I’m pretty new to cities, period. Apparently, they have this sort of Bataan Death March of Fun every year, and they have it in a lot of places. It attracts contestants from all over the world, but it’s a very American idea to my eye. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” should be stamped on our currency and added to the National Anthem. The last three verses are really weird and you could slip it right in if you have a rhyming dictionary, and no one would notice.

I’m a stranger to Facebook, so I’m a stranger to most current happenings like these. It’s pointless to opine on such matters, but I shouldn’t have to have a Facebook account to look at a police department’s or any other government cabal’s information. But everyone assumes that’s where the squares go for their info, so that’s where they put said info. Oh well. But I honestly didn’t know that they held an Ironman competition in our city. Until I won it.

I’m so ill-informed about the topic that this morning I had to go to the Ironman website to verify exactly what the three portions of athletic misery technically consists of. Apparently, you’re supposed to swim for 1.2 miles in the Kennebec River, past a modest crop of signs that inform you of the wet weather sewer overflow discharge pipes that dot the shoreline. Then you’re required to haul your soggy bottom out of the river and plant it on a bicycle seat and pedal for 56 miles. After that thorough, but no doubt enjoyable chafing session, you’re supposed to trade your $10,000 carbon fiber streamlined bicycle for a wedge of orange to chew on and a cup of lukewarm water (about the same amount of water you still have in your shorts, I’ll bet). Then you run for 13.1 miles, which I noticed is exactly half the length of a marathon. I think they should totally call that a “half marathon.” I’m not on Facebook, so maybe they already do. In any case, I’m sure they all run the whole way while wondering if that guy they left their bike with actually had anything to do with event.

On a morning after basis, that sure sounds daunting. But in the heat of the moment, I just sort of got carried away with the zeitgeist and entered the contest without even trying. And get this, I did it in my pajamas, and my wife did it while naked. Of course this will require some explanation. Here goes:

You see, I don’t think it’s possible to “win” a contest that requires you to swim, bike, and run that far. Don’t get me wrong. In my younger days I was as foolish as the next guy, and ran around like a dog on the 4th of July, and biked like a Tour De France also-ran. Fitness freaks can’t just pull rank on me that easily. I came in 13th in a small town marathon once. I could average 20-25 miles per hour on a bike back in the day on a flat circuit. I’d be accused of cheating on the swimming portion, of course, because of the water wings. But other than that, pointless exertions like this event hold no terrors for me. I’m just not that interested.

Entering the event has many requirements I’m also not that interested in. First, it appears you have to buy all your garments at some kind of trapeze artist unitard store, and we don’t have one hereabouts. These Barnum and Bailey leotard onesies are covered with more slogans and logos than Don Draper’s desk, and I don’t know how exactly you’re supposed to get on that kind of gravy train. I think you have to drink Brawndo while skydiving with a GoPro on your helmet, then land in the bed of a vegan’s electric monster truck, or some other heroic deed, to catch the typical sponsor’s eye. I’m willing of course, but I can’t remember my YouTube login credentials, so the whole scheme would fall apart at the end there.

I would also apparently be required to purchase very elaborate running shoes in electrifying pink or lime green neon colors I haven’t seen since Cyndi Lauper stopped recording. I probably can’t afford those. Everyone was wearing those Randy Savage sunglasses, too, that looked like you could weld with them, or run through gamma rays or something. Maybe it was to protect you from going blind from the radioactive pink sneakers. I dunno. But while I used to own a welding helmet, I don’t remember where I put it. That’s another investment I don’t need to make, and I don’t think getting a beef jerky sponsorship logo on my unitard would impress the other contestants anyway.

I also noticed that some of the female runners had a male trailing them on a bicycle, exhorting them to keep going, with encouragements like, “You can do it!” and, “Keep up the pace!”, and “You got this!”, mostly to women who manifestly couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep up, and didn’t got this, so to speak. I imagined how many stab wounds I’d wake up with the next day if I tried this with my wife. Besides, as I mentioned, she was naked, and being naked, there would be no place to display any logos of energy drinks or energy bars or energy potions, so there would be no point in her competing.

So as I mentioned, I feel as though I’m the only real winner of the Augusta Ironman competition. It’s just that the events in my version of the race varied slightly from the swim, cycle, and the “sorta run, sorta walk fast” final leg. My version of the competition did have three amazing portions of exertions, and I nailed them:

  1. Get woken up at 3:30 in the morning by the neighbor across the hall pounding on our door. The air conditioning unit for our apartment is on the fritz, so my wife was sleeping naked. She woke me up and sent me to the door in my jammies, (gym shorts and a t-shirt). Luckily for me, I used to be a professional musician, so I was used to naked girls hanging around while people hammered on my door telling me the cops had arrived. It’s part of the job description, I think. At any rate, the neighbor told me the cops were towing everybody’s cars out of the parking lot, mine included. That’s where the Ironman race was starting, and we were supposed to move our cars out of there. We had it on our Facebook page, I don’t know how you could have missed it.
  2. The second leg was going down three flights of stairs. I did it in seventeen seconds. I’m sure that record will stand for a while.
  3. The third leg was the most difficult, and I  believe my performance was one for the record books. There were about a dozen policemen and about the same number of tow trucks in the parking lot. One wrecker was backed up to our car, and the driver was standing there holding the hook. And get this: I somehow convinced a tow truck driver and several policemen to move the tow truck and let me drive out of there instead of being towed. I talked ragtime faster than Joe Isuzu on meth. I’m still not sure how I managed it. As far as I know, it’s never even been attempted, never mind accomplished. Everyone else got towed, and a $350 bill to get their car back.

So we sat in our living room and watched the cyclists and the runners pass by our front windows, serene in the knowledge that no matter how you tote up the results, we won the Augusta Ironman competition, going away. And we got a spray of flowers to commemorate the victory.

We gave them to our neighbor, of course.

World’s Greatest Inventors, Chapter 11: George Hackenschmidt. Wait, Who?

March 20, 2024 2 Comments

We all know Tommie Edison’s name. Alexander Graham Bell is pretty widely known, although less so since they took his name off the phone company. Everybody in the internet age knows who Nikola Tesla was, although most couldn’t tell you what he is really notable for. There are lots of guys who remain household names many decades after they shuffled off this mortal coil, because their name is still on the company masthead. A guy named Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber. John Deere made plows, and his company still does, 125+ years after his death. Samuel Morse won’t be forgotten soon, because the code he invented is still in use. But what about George Hackenschmidt? Have you guys forgotten about him?

Of course you haven’t, because you can’t forget what you never knew. Admit it, you’ve never heard of George. But as far as inventing things in common use, he’s right up there with Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Because Hackenschmidt invented the bench press exercise.

Pretty much everyone knows what a bench press is. Pretty much no one knows where it came from.

George was an Estonian (Russian Empire) wrestler born in 1878, back when (warning: spoiler) wrestling wasn’t entirely fake. Wrestling was considered a primo sport, with traditions going back to the original Olympics. George was always into physical fitness, but his first competitive sport was cycling, of all things. He was a blacksmith’s apprentice that raced for prizes on his days off. Then one day, a wrestler and strongman named Georg Lurich came to town with a kind of circus, and challenged any and all local comers to beat him. Hackenschmidt tried it, and lost, but liked the idea. He went into training in St. Petersburg, and eventually became a wrestler and strongman like Lurich. He won lots of formal weightlifting and wrestling competitions. Sometimes he’d wrestle five opponents during one evening, and beat them all.

Hackenschmidt might be obscure now, but he was a worldwide phenomenon in his day. He once wrestled at Comiskey Park, in front of 30,000 spectators for a gate of $87,000. That’s nearly three million in today’s money. He lost, by the way.

Hackenschmidt was was considered quite handsome, and was something of a clothes horse. He wasn’t a dullard either. He was educated and sophisticated, and was reported to speak seven languages. Teddy Roosevelt once remarked that “If I wasn’t president of the United States, I would like to be George Hackenschmidt.”

I just find it funny that George Hackenschmidt invented the bench press. I mean someone had to invent it, I guess. Someone invented the wheel, for instance, but we don’t know his name. Maybe if his name wasn’t Hackenschmidt, lying on your back and lifting a barbell off your chest over and over would be named after him, and he’d be a household word, like kleenex or something. But it was not to be. “Lie down and give me 20 hackenschmidts” just doesn’t roll off the tongue. Life isn’t fair sometimes.

Tag: sports

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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