I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: serena williams

  • if the answer is a bridge too far, the question is what is a welcome diversion?


    The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming – down under to the 2021 Australian Open Tennis Tournament that began with high hopes for real live fans in the stands but now those stands have been emptied for a five day Covid lockdown that began Friday night and will hopefully end this week on Tuesday or Wednesday depending on where you (and/or Elmo) are in the complicated time zones that disturb my already disturbed sleep patterns for two weeks every year. Thank goodness for the World Time Clock Converter that promises me it’s really eight o’clock tomorrow night when I wake at 4 a.m. to watch a featured match I must see “live” in Melbourne, Australia. Thank you, ESPN, for your ongoing coverage which may be the death of me.

    Unless, of course, the death of me comes from the unraveling of democracy that I watched during the days that were the actual days for me and the rest of the world as we observed in real time 100 United States Senators who served as jurors during the past week at the impeachment trial of former president Trump for inciting the January 06th. insurrection that was a final desperate attempt to overturn the 2020 election results through mob violence which interrupted a joint session of Congress charged with counting the individually certified state electoral votes that provided for the transition of power to the Biden/Harris administration. The violence resulted in the death of one Capitol police officer beaten to death at the scene, physical injuries to 140 other law enforcement officers, the desecration of the Capitol building, the attempted murder of former vice president Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

    No World Time Clock Converter was available to transport me to a different day or a different outcome of the trial. Not Guilty by reason of insanity – oh yeah, the insanity was my judgment of the 43 Republican Senators who voted to acquit the man who didn’t care whether they lived or died during the attack on January 06th. Whoa. Lead me not into temptation to wallow in depression, but deliver me from the evil of self-righteous power hungry Republican Senators including Graham and Scott of South Carolina. You see, this is why I needed the welcome diversion of the Australian Open tennis, regardless of time zones.

    I gratefully turned my attention to Russian names like Rublev, Medvedev and Karatsev who will be part of the men’s draw as the Australian Open moves into the second week. While #1 seed Novak Djokovich nursed an oblique abdominal issue requiring a large taping he displayed with great fanfare for the cameras as he changed shirts between sets the first week, and #2 seed Rafael Nadal reported the back problem he had at the beginning of the tournament felt better with each match, the younger guys were feeling fit as a fiddle, eager to take the court. The Russians are definitely there, and they’ve brought their best games with them.

    Can one of the Russians spoil the dreams of Djokovich for a 9th Australian Open title, the hopes of Nadal for his second Australian Open title that would put him at the top of the all time men’s tennis Major winners with number 21 ahead of the tie he now shares with Roger Federer at 20? On the other hand, is this the year either Dimitrov, Tsitsipas, Zverev, Berrettini, Fognini – names that have floated as possible usurpers to the thrones of Federer, Nadal and Djokovich for several years – finally break through to win the men’s singles title along with the $2.75 million prize money?

    The Americans are coming, the Americans are coming. In the women’s singles draw for the second week twenty-five year old Jennifer Brady from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania who played for UCLA in her college career; twenty-six year old Jessica Pegula from Buffalo, New York; twenty-eight year old Shelby Rogers who comes from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina down the road from where Pretty and I live; and thirty-nine year old Serena Williams who continues her quest for the elusive Major title #24 in her amazing career that has kept her at the top of women’s singles tennis for the past twenty-five years.

    Serena and her sister Venus Williams have carried the weight of American tennis on their remarkable shoulders for more than two decades while the tennis careers of other American women- and men – have crashed and burned. Can one of these four, I repeat four, American women bring home the Australian Open title, the first Major of 2021? As Martina Navratilova said during her television coverage of the Open, women’s tennis is back in America.

    Let’s hope democracy never leaves us.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • Pride Day at the 2020 US Open!


    The theme of this year’s 2020 US Open grand slam tennis tournament is Be Open.

    “When you keep an Open mind, great things can happen. In the game, and out in the world…Generations of tennis players have been inspired by the examples set by Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King and many more who challenged the sport to remove barriers to fairness and justice by epitomizing the values of diversity, inclusion and respect…for each other, and for the game itself.” (US Open.org)

    the official poster (designed by Dan Stiles)

    When I watched the first US Open televised in 1968, I was a twenty-two-year old closeted lesbian (or so I thought) living alone in Houston, Texas, looking forward to the weekend visits of a girl who didn’t share my enthusiasm for either tennis or romance. Fifty-two years later I am married to a wonder woman who has shared both those passions with me for the past twenty years. Life is good.

    Today was Pride Day at the 2020 US Open, a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community I could never have imagined in 1968 or even in 2001 when Pretty and I began to watch the Grand Slam tennis tournaments together. And yet, here we are watching Serena Williams play in her 20th. US Open while her adoring husband cheers from the almost empty arena. The digital “fans”  give the eerily quiet matches a surreal quality, but the excellent play almost makes me forget a pandemic that necessitated the solitude.

    Thanks to the US Open for jumping through a ton of hoops to make another Grand Slam event possible in a chaotic year, for keeping the safety of everyone involved uppermost in their minds, and especially today for recognizing Love is more than a tennis score.

    Happy Pride!

    Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Dancing with Destiny – the Williams Sisters


    At her press conference following her loss in the 2019 singles finals at Wimbledon, Serena Williams was questioned about why she lost. Although she tried to say her opponent played a brilliant match, the members of the press wouldn’t let it go. They asked her if she thought her lack of match play in 2019 had hurt her, whether her role as a mother took too much time away from her tennis, and finally someone said they heard Billie Jean King wondered if she spent too much time supporting equal rights or other political issues.

    Serena’s quick response to that question was “The day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.”

    For more than twenty years beginning in 1997 the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, carried the heavy burden of American tennis (both women and men) on their shoulders; the load was never an easy one. Their two-person dynasty has often been controversial, but their attitudes about the sport they represented matured as their games became more powerful. Their popularity increased as they turned out to be more comfortable with their celebrity, more confident in their games. They grew up in front of a nation and, eventually, the world.

    Serena won her history making 23rd. singles major at the 2017 Australian Open but made even bigger news when she announced her pregnancy following the tournament. The tennis world gasped at the possibility of a French Open, Wimbledon and even a US Open without its reigning diva who struck fear into the rackets of any player unlucky enough to see her name on Serena’s side of the draw.

     

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    Venus Williams and her little sister Serena

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    Never in their 27 professional matches prior to that night were the theater and drama more exciting than in the quarterfinals of the 2015 US Open under the lights in New York City.  Approximately 23,000 fans came to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows to watch a match that was more than a game, and the Williams sisters delivered another thrilling exhibition of tennis at the highest level. As the ESPN commentators noted before the match, this was a big-time American sporting event with all the bells and whistles we love in our fascination with sports.

    Tom Rinaldi who replaced Dick Enberg as the TV tennis philosopher that adds stories to evoke our emotional attachment to an event, made these remarks prior to the match: “In an individual sport, their stories will always be linked…in our view of the Williams sisters, we see champions sharing a court, a desire to win, and a name. True, one will win –  but both have prevailed.”

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    As a tennis fan who has followed their careers since they first played competitively and in keeping with our celebration of women’s history month, I salute two American women who personify persistence and perseverance to be the very best in their sport and in so doing, prove repeatedly that they are both the images of true champions. Their love of family speaks volumes about their character, and their love of playing tennis is a gift we can all be grateful to appreciate

    You rock, girls – keep going. Records are made to be broken.

    Stay tuned.

    (I have written countless posts with references to the Williams sisters, and I took excerpts from a few of them to write this one.)

     

  • and on the flip side…


    Canada has a new 19-year-old super star, Bianca Andreescu, who won the 2019 U.S. Open Women’s Championship in New York City this past Saturday. With that victory she became the first Canadian to win a grand slam singles title…ever. #SheTheNorth. Congratulations to Bianca and to a rebirth of professional tennis in our neighbors to the north. Although I was disappointed that Serena Williams had another missed opportunity to win major title #24, I had to be happy for the young woman who beat Serena at her own power game that was virtually unbeatable for the past 20 years. #SerenaTheQueen.

    And let me also add my best wishes to Rafael Nadal who won the Men’s Championship on Sunday in a 5-set match that was packed with everything a tennis fan could ever dream of in a U.S. Open final. Daniil Medvedev, the young 23-year-old Russian, was fearless in his pursuit of the title – fearless, tireless, an ingenius combination of drop shots intermingled with ground strokes of nearly 100 miles an hour. This young man had all the weapons to beat Nadal, and yet Nadal somehow brought the tenacity and focus to play every shot as if it were his last. At 33 years of age, Nadal is the first man to win 5 majors after reaching the age of 30. He is one win closer to Roger Federer’s record pace of 20 total grand slam titles. Fed Fans probably weren’t happy with Nadal’s 19th, but I don’t think any tennis fan could deny Nadal’s counterpunching every shot in the grinding 5 hour match. Vamos Rafa!! My heart still belongs to you.

    I was so happy to have the U. S. Open to lift me out of my post-operative fog following my surgery on August 28th.  So happy with tennis that I rarely clicked on the news. I missed the headlines of the Taliban leaders’ invitation to Camp David to sit down with the American President. Seriously? Inviting the Taliban to Camp David for a little chat on the weekend before the 18th anniversary of 09-11. Even wild-eyed National Security Advisor John Bolton couldn’t go along with such madness. So before I came totally out of my fog, John Bolton was gone. Oh my. That would be four national security advisors in three years. Quite a record.

    The fog has finally lifted after two weeks of post-operative rehab and the ongoing care of Pretty who continues to add stars to her crown in this world and the next. She does love me and wants me to recover fully by the time our first grandbaby Ella arrives. Fingers crossed! Thanks to our friends here who show up with food and foolishness to help sustain and entertain me – you will always be on my good side and I will never forget your kindnesses.

    Thanks to everyone around the world who sent me encouraging words, complete sentences, and short paragraphs designed to make my second knee surgery less stressful and my recovery speedy. I really appreciated your support from places I have never seen but would love to visit now that I’m a bit more mobile.

    Finally, I am truly grateful to have only two knees.

    Stay tuned.

     

     

     

  • nobody says it better than Serena


    This past Tuesday night I spoke at Chris Maw’s monthly social Words and Wine which brings authors and readers together in an informal setting for food, wine, and friendly interaction. My thanks to a friend of many moons, Fred Quattlebaum of Modern Family Asset Management, for sponsoring the event and to musicians Marty Lopez and Julien Kaprino for providing great entertainment. I was invited to talk about my newest book, Four Ticket Ride, but whenever I speak about my writing, my thoughts turn to truth and equality.

    I read while…

     

    …Pretty’s smile sells books!

    At her press conference this past Saturday following her loss in the finals at Wimbledon, Serena Williams was questioned about why she lost. Although she tried to say her opponent played a brilliant match, the members of the press wouldn’t let it go. They asked her if she thought her lack of match play in 2019 had hurt her, whether her role as a mother took too much time away from her tennis, and finally someone said they heard Billie Jean King wondered if she spent too much time supporting equal rights or other political issues.

    Serena’s quick response to that question was “The day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.” I can identify with her answer because I’d like to believe my actions to support equality and social justice are two of the dominant forces of my life.

    My first understanding of how it teels to be treated as a second class person came at an early age and became the impetus for my lifetime support of equality, too. My dad gave me the vision of looking at the whole world as my territory. Nothing should be impossible if I set goals and then worked hard to achieve them.  There were no limits, according to him. When I entered the work force at the age of 21 in 1967, I learned very quickly that there were, indeed, limits.

    Limits were imposed by powerful men in positions of leadership in the places I worked from Houston, Texas to Seattle, Washington to Columbia, South Carolina – men with tanned skins and silver hair who sat behind large impressive oak desks, men who saw me despite my impeccable credentials as lesser than my co-workers whose singular good fortune was that their gender and the color of their skin made them superior to me in the eyes of my bosses.

    It was a rude awakening for me to find out that my dad had been wrong. But that rude awakening changed my life as I took part in the battleground for ratification of the equal rights amendment here in South Carolina in the 1970s, my involvement in the civil rights movement in Columbia in the 1980s and eventually coming to the most passionate cause of my life: the LGBTQ movement for equality in the 1990s. I want to be able to say with Serena that the day I stop supporting equality is the day I die.

    For me, writing has been my platform for supporting equal rights during the past 13 years. For ten of those years, I have had the most fun as a blogger on my wordpress blog I’ll Call It Like I See It. When I finish a blog, usually after many re-writes, all I have to do is click on the word publish and my words fly through cyberspace to readers who either choose to follow me or randomly read my posts whenever a topic interests them. One observation I’ve made about my readers is that you all are far more interested in Pretty than you are in my political commentaries.

    I saw a segment about the author, vlogger and you tube super star John Green on Sixty Minutes this past Sunday night. John Green, the author of the Fault in our Stars and a ton of other titles has a Twitter following of more than 5 million. My blog, I’ll Call it Like I see It, on the other hand, has 1,700 followers. Thank goodness my daddy also offered me the good advice of never comparing myself to others. Some people will be better off and some people will not, but that’s not how we are measured.  In spite of that advice, I will do a small comparison.

    I am thrilled that in the first 6 months of 2019, I’ve reached people in more than 60 countries from Argentina to Vietnam through 36 posts with nearly 5,000 hits. My top five countries for followers are the US, the UK, India, Canada and France. Small potatoes to John Green, but quite an amazing audience for a little girl from deep in the piney woods of Grimes County, Texas who grew up in a time where her family’s only communication device was a two party telephone line that her grandmother on her daddy’s side used for spying on her neighbors.

    Truth telling is a lost art.  Honesty is no longer a virtue nor is it admired by everyone we come in contact with.  Nonfiction writing lacks the pop and sizzle of fiction, although I like to think sometimes it’s a close second.

    One of my favorite scenes in the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the scene where the tortured son Brick played by Paul Newman discussed his problems with his father Big Daddy played by Burl Ives. Brick blamed his alcoholism on mendacity which he claimed affected everything in the universe but especially the family he came from.  Big Daddy wasn’t so sure about that claim, but I have to say Brick just might have been on to something powerful. I was so impressed with this idea that I devoted a chapter I call Human Frailty and Mendacity in my latest book Four Ticket Ride to the concept.

    Ideas for writing come to me in random places, but what I can promise you is that I try to bring truth telling to every piece I write.

    Stay tuned.

    P.S. Thanks so much to everyone who bought my books from Pretty Tuesday night – we almost sold out! I loved meeting you all and look forward to seeing you again in November.

    P.S.P.S. Thanks to our friend Saskia for taking pictures.