A couple of bagels with my name on them
A pertinent question considering the world we’re living in
Carlos Alcaraz. Remember the name. He’s the Spanish 19year-old who recently made history by being the first tennis player to beat both Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic, the vaccine-buster, on red clay in one tournament, en route to winning the Madrid Open.
By all accounts, he’s the future of tennis. I’m quite an avid tennis fan, but even I didn’t notice him until earlier this year when he wreaked havoc on the US tour. So, you can imagine my surprise when I checked out his stats on Wikipedia and realised that he’s already amassed in excess of $4m (R64m) in prize money. My first thought was, “What? That’s insane!” And then one of the many voices inside my head talked to me in Gary Coleman’s voice, saying: “Whatchutalkinboutwillis?”
There is an insane amount of cash floating around on both the ATP and WTA tours. This usually raises the ire of many of us and we bitch about the obscene amounts of money athletes make. Floyd Mayweather has made so much money he routinely withdraws $2m in cash just to stack it up and admire it. When you calculate Cristiano Ronaldo or
Lebron James’s wages, your head spins from the number of zeroes.
But here’s my contention: athletes deserve every penny they get.
Someone recently shared a breakdown of how much money Tyson Fury made during his recent fight against Dillian Whyte. Apparently, he made $5.6m per round, $1.9m a minute and $442,100 per punch he threw. The point being that it was easy money. What absolute poppycock! Do you have any idea how much blood and sweat it has cost the Gypsy King to become that good at the pugilistic game?
In September of 1987 a South African player, Barry Moir, suffered the ignominy of getting triplebagelled by then world No 1 Ivan Lendl during the US Open. That’s the tennis term for getting beaten 6-0 6-0 6-0. My whiskey-eroded memory is not to be trusted by I think he was ranked about No 99 in the world at the time.
I don’t think the casual tennis fan quite understands just how good one has to be to be ranked anything lower than 300 in world tennis. And yet the gulf between him and Lendl was a triple bagel.
To get an idea of just how much money there is in tennis, the current world No 99 is one Peter Gojowczyk. Yes, who? What would you say if I told you that his career earnings are a whopping $3,444,206? Your calculation is spot on: that’s R55m! And yet you’ve never heard of vowel-averse whatshisface. Madness, right?
Or is it?
When I was a 14-year-old junior I was double-bagelled by a freckled fellow I suspect might have been one Wayne Ferreira at some Dunlop tournament at Westridge Park in Durban. I could be wrong, and talking about some other dot comfaced teenager. The point is that I was in a tennis match with him, but he was just in a first- and secondserve practice. I literally felt like a target screen at the firing range. Balls were coming at me at speeds I didn’t think were earthly possible.
Spinning clockwise, anticlockwise and even counter the planet’s rotation at 3-million revolutions per second.
Back then I probably stood 1.65m tall on bricks, which is about 15cm south of the average 14-year-old tennis player. But I couldn’t Baby
Jake myself out of that butt-kicking. Let’s assume that it was Ferreira who used me for target practice that fateful afternoon. He later went to amass about $10m in his career. And I think he deserved every single cent.
Consider this. If I placed 99.99% of the population 400m from the finish line at the Boston Marathon and told them to beat Eliud Kipchoge to the finish line, they would fail. If I took the winners of the Thembisa Sunday league, put them on the field against just six Man City players and said, “Right guys, you’re leading 5-0 and it’s the 85th minute. Go!” they’d still lose. And if I pitted the average club tennis players against Moir and gave them a 6-0, 6-0, 5-0 advantage at 40-0 and said, “OK, beat Triple Bagel over there,” they’d ultimately lose 6-0, 6-0, 5-7, 0-6 and 0-6. Athletes are our Shakas, our Achilles and our Queen Manthatisis. Let them live off the fat of the land.
I literally felt like a target screen at the firing range. Balls were coming at me at speeds I didn’t think were earthly possible
I’m almost certain that the moment the idea of marriage bubbled up in the minds of our early hominid ancestors, a contract came attached to any and all examples of prospective connubial bliss. The Romans, being of a legal bent, had a marvellously complex set of contractual arrangements governing marriage — who could and couldn’t do it, what would happen to the dowry if the wife strayed from the straight and narrow (she would get half back in the event of a divorce) and, of course, how much money would change hands before the marriage was solemnised?
The ceremony centred on the contract as opposed to any oaths before the gods promising obeisance and such. And once the lawyered-up couple had signed on the dotted line they would seal the deal with a kiss. After which the groom would carry the bride over the threshold, lest she trip over the brutally commercial nature of the agreement she’d just entered into.
So consider the news now breaking in the French press that Prince Albert of Monaco is paying Princess Charlene over €10m (R169m) a year to carry on in the state of wedded unbliss she’s been so patently demonstrating by scowling tragically into the middle distance in pictures. They claim that the payments are so that the princess will return to her princessly duties post-haste. As we know, she’s been on a paid sabbatical for the past year in SA and somewhere in Switzerland.
We should probably see the payments as on a continuum with the Roman way of doing things. This isn’t some cynical negotiation on the part of the princess — perhaps it’s just business as usual. I imagine there was an exit clause built into the first contract, based on a rigorous calculation measuring the relative loss of hairs on the princely head divided by the number of surprise children spawned by the ageing leader of the Monagesque monarchy, and multiplied by a factor of time spent waving on the royal balcony and shaking hands with the public.
The princess obviously felt that her deal warranted some renegotiation, so she took her sweet time to reconsider the entire enterprise. She was obviously wavering after making a break for it — but something had to give. She had to be incentivised to continue performing at a level that would maintain the idea that we’re watching a fairytale Disney romance as opposed to the tired machinations of royal figureheads trotting out the illusion of royal grandeur for the little people. As a certain hiphop artist put it pithily, there can be “no romance without finance”.