Seat Beefs
And other fun things about Italians
Campo Centrale looks like an open sardine on Google Maps.
It’s a sunken red clay tennis court surrounded by a concrete oval with 10,400 seats. They’ll soon expand seating by 2,000, which still won’t be enough for Italians who for some reason have a total disregard for advanced-purchase ticketing protocols.
I experienced this myself during a day session of the Italian Open last Tuesday. After a brief hop out to the Lavazza Espresso Cart, I returned to find an Italian gentleman comfortably in my seat…
With a sort of NYC subway confidence, I pointed to the seat and instructed him to vacate. In about the same tone, except in broken English, he informs me he can’t possibly move until the changeover… you gotta be kidding me.
The changeover is where players switch sides of the court. It’s at an odd number of completed games. That means at 1,3,5,7, or 9 total games completed in the set.
At an even number of total games, you stay put. Technically, spectators should not enter or exit. It’s optically disruptive. Tennis being a gentleman’s game and all.
In this case, with the world #1 about to serve to start the next game, I forced the issue, and he caved.
Cultural Experience
I watched this seat drama unfold around me almost every changeover for four straight sessions.
The most amusing incident was a hired muscle duo flanking a guy with neck tattoos, likely some famous Italian. He wore a Prada cross-strap man purse including the add-on wallet accessory, which until this moment I thought nobody ever bought. These three sat down, messed with their phones, and fired up cigarettes.
I like the smell of cigarettes. There’s something nostalgic about it. If a dozen years of carpooling with chain-smoking eastern North Carolina moms in wood-paneled station wagons didn’t kill me, an errant smoke ring won’t either.
Some uptight Scandinavian-looking guys behind them did not like it. They complained. The beefy trio said they’d put them out when they finished, which is a great answer.
Later in the match, the actual ticketholder showed up unaware of any of this drama. He asked them to move. They relocated across the aisle into someone else’s seats.
Say what you will about Italians… but they’re on top of the tennis world. Which wasn’t always the case.
Until last Sunday, an Italian hadn’t won the Italian Open for fifty years. Five zero. It’s a lifetime.
Halfway through this dormant era, the Federazione Italiana Tennis decided to invest heavily in junior player development… it worked. They now have four of the top twenty players, all exactly 24 years old.
They have seven total in the top 100. With #1 so far ahead in the points he’s unbeatable.
See Things While You Can
Almost immediately after the event, construction crews started working on the extra seats and retractable roof for the sardine can.
I prefer outdoor tennis. Especially on clay.
The clay season runs from an early-April 250-point event in Houston, Texas through the French Open, which starts next week. That’s a grand slam, worth 2000 points.
These points are critical. They accrue on a rolling basis dropping off one year after a win. They determine how you seed into the next event.
While current world #1 Jannik Sinner won the event earning 1,000 points, Norwegian Casper Ruud took second place earning 650 points.
Sinner took this week off; Ruud rushed to Geneva for the Gonet 250. (Gonet is a Swiss bank and the title sponsor of the Geneva event). By Monday, he’ll be in Paris playing in the early rounds of the French Open.
The whole year goes like this. The clay season is my favorite part of it.
Red clay is essentially crushed red brick. Same material.
The Italian Federation starts with gravel-sized rock then piles progressively smaller rock in layers. Finishing with the fine clay dust.
The French use a 7-layer base with various aggregates. Opinions on all of this get highly technical.
While I’ve been to the French Open, it’s not my favorite of the clay swing. It’s expensive, and dramatic.
I saw four complete sessions of world-class tennis in Rome last week for less than the cost of one mid-round day session at Roland Garros.
He Sold Me a $15 Hat
After clay wraps up in Paris, the grass season begins. Then it’s hard court, and the whole thing starts over.
The 1000-point events are pure tennis. There are nine of them total spread across the year. Technically called the ATP Masters 1000 Series, almost every major player shows up. Most of the camera-obsessed celebs who flock to the major events don’t.
Best case, you know the names of a few top players. Outside of that, world-class tennis plays out in near obscurity.
The 493rd-ranked player in the world sold me a hat in a Naples, Florida pro shop last weekend. He strings racquets, sells retail items, and probably tidies up the locker room for spare cash. Yet his game is so good he could beat me if he played on crutches.
There’s absolutely no financial payoff outside the top-100. Even cracking that means running on money fumes. Between coaches, travel, physios, and merely keeping up, you’re blowing through every cent of winnings.
It’s a fascinating existence… to be that good at something and unable to afford respectable housing. Then to keep charging ahead.
Maybe it’s better than what most people do. They’ll sit at a job they don’t like hoarding up money they’re terrified to spend. At least #493 likes it enough he’d rather starve trying to make it than sell out. It’s respectable.
Plus, I think it’s more human than the alternative. We’re constantly changing. We pursue things. If we do it without fear, with pure gusto, we learn from it. That affects the next thing we do. If we keep evolving, eventually, we do something notable.
No Wonder People Stay Confused
The Tucker kids know where they stand with tennis.
They’re drilled on the rules. Any violation of the rules like touching the net or walking across someone else’s court results in me rifling balls physically at them full speed. 80mph body shots change behavior in a hurry.
They’ll enter early adulthood being able to suit up and play strong intermediate-level club tennis, enjoying all the physical and social benefits that go with it. But advancing beyond that into some tennis-as-a-job zone is strongly discouraged. No offense to #493… And thanks for the hat.
The junior tennis circuit, however, is a case study in whacked out American culture. You’ve got dads with video camera tripods, moms scaling the fence desperate to deliver codependent praise, non-athletic siblings mowing down bags of Chick-fil-A.
Ordering Chick-fil-A for mobile delivery these days seems to qualify as “good parenting.” Pretty much everyone agrees on this.
It’s in line with how we do most things now. We’re herd animals, there’s a perceived warmth sticking within the group.
The major issue with it is, you mistake the group for the point of the whole thing. Once enmeshed in any group, you’ll begin focusing effort on status and rank within the group. Never mind if the group itself is going nowhere.
It starts out with school, early social groups our parents initiate us into, then it’s work, clubs, companies. It must go this way until we’re in assisted living and worried about who sits closest to the television when Price is Right comes on.
The antidote to all of this is simple. Maybe too simple to feel like a good idea… we seem to value things when they’re tough. This one is not… all you have to do is, whatever you want.
The View from Outside
If you can’t figure out what you want to do, because you’ve spent your whole life doing what you think other people might find impressive, that might be the most honest thing you’ll ever admit.
In this case, your best outcome is somehow getting banished from your groups. You’ll never leave otherwise. Which means you’ll never see the group from the outside. To notice how utterly small and insignificant it is.
The same thing happens with investment ideas. They form groups of believers who then try to outdo each other. It happens with any popular trend. It happened with gold earlier this year.
The big gold move finally arrived… and the gold community was max bullish on the highs.
Not that there’s anything wrong with owning some gold. You’re sort of crazy not to own some… but the dizzyingly bullish tone at ~$5,600 felt good inside the herd.
From the outside, $5,600 seemed like enough. That’s ~$39 trillion worth of gold, total world value. It’s a lot. Go on an interview and say that and the gold bugs lose their minds.
What you start to see is the idea doesn’t matter. It’s how you handle it. Meaning, if you get ideological about it, carried away so to speak, you’re in trouble.
There’s something about people hooked on an idea. They can’t see anything else. They adopt slogans, in-groups, out-groups, us-and-them, it becomes a whole thing. If you let it.
Take it from me… I’ve got gold bugs sending hostile comments, and Bitcoin people alleging I don’t care enough, and marketing people dying to associate with TTL for credibility. Kind of like pro tennis players who sell their left arm sleeve to a tire manufacturer and their serving arm for more to a foreign air carrier. Everything gets a price, and it sucks all the fun out of it.
It’s A Curse
Independent thought might sound appealing… In reality, it’s a curse.
You end up spending a tremendous amount of time alone. Seeing 250-point grass tennis events sponsored by companies with names you can’t pronounce in obscure central European secondary cities.
There is good news about tournaments at this level… no more seat beefs. Stretch out, they barely sell half the tickets.
Without a herd membership, you walk alone. You don’t have any group members to get over on, compete with, or envy. It’s just you, so you notice everything. You see the patterns, people chasing ideas that aren’t worth catching. They start to look like chickens obsessed with a chalk line.
You also see things that make a lot of sense yet sit idle. Nobody chases these things. It’s almost like nobody wants things right when they’re most valuable. Maybe they can’t see it until everyone else tells them it’s a good idea…
We have a stock set up like this in the portfolio right now. With a hefty long-term profit booked from selling our gold miners, we should look closer at it. The odds of a material “upside surprise” look high.