Bernard Tomic's Grim Odyssey

If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me that they can’t stand Bernard Tomic I’d have,like, 30 dollars.

It totally annoys me. I have long been of the opinion that only myself and Belinda Neal are authorised to express unfettered disdain toward total strangers. Who are all these other under-informed and over-opinionated imposters and why do they remind me of nothing so much as those dogs that bring discredit to their entire species by standing and barking witlessly at people and/or inanimate objects?   

Women handing me change from cash registers tell me they don’t like him. “Why can’t he just keep his mouth shut?’ they say.  They shift uneasily on their swollen ankles as my avian, specifically seagull stare penetrates their stinking souls. Their disapproval is without context, and they have ham-hock cankles. I reject their reality.

My mother tells me she doesn’t like him. ‘Why doesn’t he smile?’ she says. I do not tell her to look forward to being strapped upright and unattended in an unforgiving chair while pureed corn beef dribbles down her chin later in life because she’s heard it many times now and the threat is in danger of losing its potency so I just bark “HE DOES FUCKING SMILE: AFTER HE WINS MATCHES ON WITS AND GRIT AND WHILE HE IS BEING INTERVIEWED BY JIM COURIER AND JIM COURIER’S SPECTACULAR SWOOSH OF STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE HAIR HE FUCKING SMILES. BESIDES, HE’S OF EASTERN EUROPEAN DESCENT – THEY HAVE POOR DIETS MADE UP OF TERRIBLE CLAGGY FOODS AND WHILE OUR PEOPLE WERE CLEARING BUSH AND RELEASING CRATE LOADS OF RABBITS INTO WHAT WAS LEFT OF IT HIS PEOPLE WERE BEING ETHNICALLY CLEANSED AND RAPED BY COSSACKS WITH A GIDDY LUST FOR ATROCITIES, OR SUCH IS THE COMBINED TOTAL OF MY UNDERSTANDING OF AUSTRALIAN AND BALTIC HISTORY.”

Anyway, no matter. Now he lives the Kanye West version of The Good Life, splitting his time between the Gold Coast and Monte Carlo; but don’t worry, Old-Worlders, because his grim odyssey is not over yet - he supports the Titans in what is an obvious nod to ancient ancestral hardships and struggle, and long may it flourish.

Speaking of ancient struggles, over in Hollywood Dax Shepard is unhappy that Justin Beiber has moved into the mansion next to him - “The music and the parties and the paparazzi,” Dax reveals. “I mean, it’s like living in Lebanon now.”

A provocative claim, but perception is a curious thing. What might represent ‘reality’ to Dax Shepard (he dates Veronica Mars you know) is outright unrecognisable to, like, the less obnoxious and those of us who have the misfortune of not being, like, American.

I don’t know. Maybe Tomic’s various neighbours think the same thing, what with the 5:30am spa-bath based brawlings and the revving of high performance luxury cars and the crunch of jack-boots on gravel as police try to gain racially-motivated entry and the assumed explosions of Old Man Tomic because if there’s one thing years of tennis history has shown it is that it really helps to have a paranoid, delusional or manic father in your corner, and that it is best to hang fast to their principles, even to the detriment of your career.

Anyway, what a fucking baller -  I mean have you ever tried to even clamber out of a spa-bath when you’re out of your mind messy? Remember the attorney in the White Rabbit “I want a rising sound” bathtub scene in Fear and Loathing? It’s not easy, even for the lithe and spry, which you, reader, are probably not. Look at you, right now, wincing even as you shift in your ergonomic executive swivel chair, regretting that attempt at blow-drying your balls in the gym locker room earlier. Don’t you feel stupid!

The Dirtiest, The Hardest, The Best

The whole rotten edifice of Lance Armstrong’s dream world comes crashing down and I’m so busy fangirling over Bernard Tomic I barely have time to enjoy the full reveal of the cold, calculated glory of Armstrong’s sociopathic nature. What can I say. It’s a rich life. It’s also one full of extremely flawed men. Some of them are the greatest sportspeople of our age; the rest of them are my ex-boyfriends.

I love Tomic and I kind of like Lance Armstrong too, or at least I did until yesterday. The more strident his lies the more I liked him. The chilling demeanour, the callous disregard for others, the brutal denials, the cancerous balls, calling that female accuser a fat prostitute… I also recognised the ‘if something’s worth doing it’s worth doing right’ ethos inherent in his diabolical master-plan – my favourite ethos, as it were.  

Jonathan Horn in The Age criticised the people who have come after Armstrong wielding flame-throwers:

“All sense of proportion has been lost. Lance Armstrong isn’t Jimmy Savile. He isn’t the subject of a royal commission. In an ethically bereft sport, he was the dirtiest, the hardest and the best.”

Goddamn right.  He doped hard he rode hard and he lied hard.

It’s been real.

Coping With Canberra - A Raiders Progress Report

For the football fan, summer is the soul’s winter.

For the footballers themselves, summer is the season in which to comfortingly return to character.  As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly: Proverbs 26, 11.

In Canberra, the Raiders are busily engaging in vivid and unrestrained off-field activities which cast an impression of quality living.

>>Quality living by Canberra standards I mean. Some other, non-geographically specific things which cast impressions of quality living: STD’s, rural road signs all shot up with bullet holes, getting bit by an animal while trying to get it stoned, ever using the word ‘repo’d’, seafood extender, painting unventilated rooms, ugly dogs hurling themselves against chain-link fences, trawling YouTube for footage of Flynn from Australian Idol’s rendition of Push Up! in morning’s earliest hours, tobacco-stained ceilings, managing to have both long hair and a sunburned scalp, throwing up in potted plants and any type of heaving be it dry or otherwise, threatening loved ones with shoes, staple guns or other unconventional weapons, having part of an eyebrow missing, petrol station pies, Lowes.  

It’s grim there you know. Faded, and with a weird melancholy. So while Bernard Tomic is brawling with his friend in a spa at 5:30am on the Gold Coast, which sounds hedonistic and hot, the Raiders are making the most of things in their own ways. Recent efforts have achieved some solid results, and ACT police have netted several Raiders in their wily civic web.

-         Jack Boom was thrown out of the Foreshore festival and into the drunk-tank for several hours. I read this in the Tele and then never heard a thing about it ever again but I totally buy it the boy is clearly a fiend anyone with a face as sweet as his is a certified fiend.

-         Blake Ferguson was ejected from the same festival for allegedly “spitting” “on” “several patrons”.

-         Joel Thompson has been interviewed about a bottle being thrown at a cyclist during a post-Foreshore party at his apartment. And there are non-existent reports that coach Furner was caught throwing a car battery through a senior player’s car windscreen.   

Well, shit. We liked Brando as Stanley Kowalski didn’t we, all mute surly attitude and explosions of raw seething brutality? What’s the goddamn difference?

Just as the game itself is an acquired taste, the occasionally unwholesome extracurricular activities of the most abhorrent members of society ie. football players are seen to be unpalatable by many also.  These are probably the same flat-pack people who have never slept with a second cousin more than once, never had a dark and savage night of the soul, and never sawed the roof off their car.      

So, whatever. Football is an acquired taste. My best friend told me her boyfriend regards with distaste footballers and the women who love them. He takes it to mean they’re rough or whatever.

But, Canberra. It’s weird there. As anyone who has lived there for any stretch of time will appreciate, the urge to throw bottles from balconies at cyclists is a powerful one which is not easily denied. I myself had to consciously keep two hands positioned on the steering wheel at all times when driving such was my urge to run cyclists down in my car. Nothing personal, you understand, it’s just that they somehow became a very visual and ever-present reminder of my culturally bankrupt and capitalist wasteland surrounds. This created an uneasy atmosphere of foreboding and also made driving something of an ordeal.

So I understand and sympathise with any bottle-throwing, spitting, heavy drinking, drug use, destruction of property and homicidal rampaging that goes on in Canberra. I actually endorse it. Distractions and delay tactics employed by those seeking to avoid the inevitable incursion of real life are a necessary component to coping with Canberra. If I wasn’t so burnt-out and unambitious I would run for office and seek subsidisation for it from Medicare myself.

((*not talking about J-Bo, Gav or Terry Campese anytime I talk about how fucked Canberra is. They all come from Queanbeyan, anyways, and besides which they are three of the best and most well-bred things – animal mineral vegetable or other - to come out of this stinking age we live in.))

Bernard Tomic - The Teenage Dream

Ned Flanders said you’re never alone when you’ve got a fluorescent light. Word. C.S. Lewis said we read to know we are not alone. Word again. I say you know you're not alone when you’re watching sports.

Bernard Tomic administered a five set beating with dramatic splendor last night and, bless the boy’s cotton socks, delivered me to that state of almost narcotic sports-induced bliss. Talk about a bristling thriller. Tennis. Goddamn. What a game. It’s gladiatorial. Two men enter the arena and only one leaves. In a figurative rather than a literal sense, but still. And both players have to lug their own kit bags. I just love this; the way both victor and loser have to set about fussily stowing their gear in those giant bags in the game’s immediate aftermath. It speaks of gritty realism and real-world truth – win or lose YOU CARRY YOUR OWN SHIT.

These – what is the word I’m searching for? – shitheels who only last year were painting Tomic as a demanding and combustible boy overburdened by ego and poised for a slow crash into the chasm of oblivion can today AND FOREVER MORE endure the wretchedness of looking into the dirty mirror of truth and seeing themselves reflected as the fuckwits that they are. Wily precociousness is GO!     

And for the rest of us, this now affords the opportunity to marinate in the self-satisfied smugness that comes from longtime, ‘before they were cool’ fandom. Back when he was all emaciated-adorable swagger, remember? Yes.

There are many reasons to love Bernard Tomic. Here are just four:

1. He has the sheen of a beautiful youth strolling through Elysian fields and at the same time he exudes dark, eastern European cragginess. His father coaches him and, unlike the Dokics, the two of them constitute a charming narrative wherein the weight of European history is exchanged for New World optimism. John Tomic is just dour and spiky enough to preserve the thread of gothic intensity running through this story, and Bernard has just about the right mixture of jovial intensity and together the two are an aching invocation of how truly awesome tennis is.

2. He used his racket to walk a cricket off the court in the middle of round two, thereby saving it from certain death by tennis shoe and endearing himself to me, and, upon my retelling, my judgemental mother, who has never missed an opportunity to comment on how she cares not for his 'hard cold face'. Wench.

3. He crosses himself. Subtly, though. He doesn't, like, drop to his knees in the way of religiously demonstative NFL quarterback Tim Tebow. That would be wack.

4. He goes for the Gold Coast Titans. He is a huge fan. Fantastic. I love finding out people I rate support loser teams. It's one of life's great levellers.