Saturday, September 04, 2004

From Russia with Love I once heard ESPN's tennis anchorman Cliff Drysdale refer to Anna Kournikova as "Fournikova."  You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out where that one came from. In recent months, Kournikova's title as top female tennis pinup has been usurped by Maria Sharapova,  the tall, leggy, 17 year old Russian blond who rocketed to stardom in July by blasting Serena Williams off the court to win the Wimbledon championship. Sharapova lost today in her third-round match at the U.S. Open, but she retains her title as most-searched-for name on the web.  In fact, one of my own commentaries has been turning up in various Sharapova keyword searches. This shows how imprecise search engines are.  No doubt some pimply-faced pubescent out there in cyberspace is Googling for some Sharapova cheesecake photos so he can have himself a nice wank, and what he finds instead are my ruminations on the vagaries of Slavic pronunciation.  Life, as Jimmy Carter once said, is not fair. 4:02:56 PM

Faith-Based Tennis Roger Federer, the world's number-one-ranked male tennis player, has just advanced to the fourth round of the U.S. Open by beating the Frenchman with the fashion designer name, Fabrice Santoro. Santoro's unorthodox "slice-and-dice" game forced the normally smooth and unflappable Federer into numerous mishits, a word one must be careful to spell with the correct number of Ss.   But as commentator Patrick McEnroe said in an unintentional rap lyric: Federer knew That he would get through Maybe so, but Federer has never gotten through the fourth round in previous U.S. Opens.  If he does so this year, he could face a quarterfinal match against the ageless Andre Agassi, now playing in his 19th Open.  The bimbo who interviewed Federer after the match obviously knew nothing about tennis.  She kept referring to his opponent as "Santero," making him sound like a practitioner of the Caribbean Santeria religion.  But no appeal to any deity, whether pagan or monotheistic, would have helped Santoro beat Federer today. 10:46:08 AM