Leonardo Dicaprio & David Thewlis Gay Kiss scene from the 1995 film Total Eclipse.
I love this scene from the 1995 gay film Total Eclipse because Leonardo and David really gave everything in this scene. The gay kiss is powerful and very erotic.
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New York Observer Article Blasts Andy Roddick For His Disgusting Unprofessional Conduct At The Us Open!
Roddick Disappoints Again (Update with Video)
Andy Roddick threw a tantrum. He did it in the third set after he had been—correctly—called for a foot fault. He asked the lineswoman if it was his right or left foot that hit the line. The lineswoman said it was his right. In fact, it was his left, so Roddick decided to make a federal case out of it.
It looked like it was his Serena Williams Foot Fault moment. But since it was in the third set—and far, far away from the situation that Serena faced with her match riding on the line—there was something that seemed gratuitous and irritating about his complaints. Something that seemed a little less spectacular than Serena’s meltdown, and a little more grating.
What was odd about the foot fault was Roddick’s fixation on it. Even after the match ended, he still couldn’t give it up. He slammed the table he was seated at in Media Room 1 when it was brought up. He said if the lineswoman told him it was his left foot, he would have been fine—just fine—with the decision.
“There would have been no discussion,” he said. “There would have been zero discussion. There was two [foot faults] after that. It was the fact that I couldn’t get her to admit that it wasn’t the right foot just infuriated me beyond…”
He trailed off.
The point is it doesn’t matter. Not to the big picture. Roddick would lose the match in four sets, and so, here is yet another disappointing performance to put in the Big Book of American Disappointments Since the Era of Sampras-Agassi.
I think it’s tempting to say “Andy Roddick ran into a wall tonight.” And give credit to Janko Tipsarevic, sure. But this keeps happening to Roddick. It happened to him last year against Isner in the third round. It happened in 2005 in the first round. At this pace, we basically can go into every Open expecting as much out of him as we do Lleyton Hewitt.
This means that in three of his last six Opens he has been knocked out in the first week. The first week.
Did he feel like this was yet another opportunity lost?
“Tonight I felt like the guy earned it,” he said. “That’s probably easier to deal it, when you make the guy earn it and he comes up with the goods. Still not fun obviously.”
No, not fun, and yet another excuse. The bottom line is another guy shouldn’t earn it in the first week. Roddick should just win it.
When Roddick left the court tonight, and entered the tunnel inside Ashe, I was there waiting for him. He didn’t curse. He didn’t meltdown. He was just wearing a Lacoste baseball cap backwards looking cranky like a spoiled tennis club kid. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen this face on Andy before at the Open. It’s exhausting to watch. And still not fun.
Who Is The Worst Tennis Writer In North America?
If you’ve noticed the vast majority of the anti Williams Sisters writers in the media are male.
Of course, no one should be surprised.
Some heterosexual men are extremely sexist against female athletes for a variety of reasons.
A lot of people have complained to me about the unprofessionalism and the blatant anti Williams Sisters articles published in the media. So now it is time for the public to vote. Who do you believe is the worst tennis writer in North America?
Jason Whitlock crticized Serena Williams about her weight yet has he looked in the mirror? Jason Whitlock is an overweight black man that should not throw stones in glass houses! Whitlock needs to put down the hamburger and fries and hit the gym!
Next, we have Chris Chase an annoying writer for Yahoo tennis section. Every single week Chris Chase always writes something negative about Serena Williams. Even though Serena is not competing at the 2010 US Open, Yahoo news realizes Serena Williams names generates hits to their website. It is interesting that Chris Chase made an excuse for Andy Roddick’s deleterious behaviour at the US Open. Is anyone really surprised? Andy Roddick is a white American male and Chris Chase is also a white American male I guess they stick together.
Other candidates for the worst tennis writer in North America are the annoying trio Peter Bodo, Matt Cronin, and Bill Dwyre.
Guardian UK Article: Racist & Sexist Double Standards The USTA Still Slient About Andy Roddick Tantrum At Us Open!
US Open: Andy Roddick puts his foot in it for bullying millionaires
The American has been allowed to develop in this way by a culture of cringing compliance towards the sport’s cash cows
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- Kevin Mitchell at Flushing Meadows
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 September 2010 20.15 BST
Andy Roddick, unhappy with a foot fault, had no thought for the embarrassment to the female line judge paid a pittance to help him and his opponent complete the game. Photograph: Henny Ray Abrams/APTennis players always need something or someone to whinge about. In New York this week, it has, yet again, been the officials who judge their marginal shots and indiscretions.
Andy Roddick has been the most prominent and predictable, but by no means isolated, whinger. His reaction when caught foot-vaulting on his way out in the second round of the US Open was appalling, and it remains a mystery why he was not even cautioned, let alone fined – as Serena Williams was last year. His uncouth verbal assault was made on the line judge who rightly caught him out with one foot on the line when serving at 2-5 in the third set against the altogether more agreeable Janko Tipsarevic.
Roddick, an occasionally endearing brat who should have grown up several years ago, turned on the official with all the good grace of a kid caught logging on to a porn site. Or, as the New York Times delicately phrased it, “lost his cool”.
The player said later: “It wasn’t like I was up, and after it happened it was a different result. I’m sure a lot is going to get written about it, but the actual impact on the match was probably close to zero.”
The impact on tennis did not seem to concern him.
Which foot, he wanted to know from the unfortunate official, was at fault? As it happens, she got the wrong foot but the right result, so Roddick, weirdly, felt justified in ranting like some third‑rate Broadway extra at a total stranger, who was powerless to reply and, more importantly, embarrassed on national television in front of a gob-smacked audience of millions.
Roddick’s skewed view was: “It was the fact that I couldn’t get her to admit that it wasn’t the right foot that just infuriated me … The lack of common sense involved in that was unbelievable to me. I just have trouble when they stick to an argument that obviously isn’t right.”
Such is the locker-room mentality of the disconnected modern sports moron. Roddick – in all innocence probably, given that he has been allowed to develop in this way over many years in a culture of cringing compliance by a sport terrified of upsetting its cash cows – could not, initially at least, see what he had done wrong. He had no thought at all for the embarrassment he had delivered on a woman paid a pittance to help him and his opponent to complete their match according to the rules of the game.
Yet, at the same venue last year, Williams felt the brunt of the establishment for her foul-mouthed abuse of Shino Tsurubuchi at match point in her semi-final against Kim Clijsters.
Williams, no darling outside her own home, was docked a point, lost the match, was subsequently fined and, as she put it to me earlier this year with heavy sarcasm, “put on probation”.
She was as wrong as Roddick was this week, probably more so. But the crimes were in the same ballpark and Williams’ punishment was quick and unequivocal. Roddick escaped with the fleeting opprobrium of media commentators.
A black line judge confided in me recently that he felt sickened by the way Williams was treated. “It was not that she didn’t deserve to be censured,” he said. “It was really bad. But the umpire made the unusual step of instigating action without any complaint from the line judge. Why do you think that was?”
It might seem like a scant defence – actually, no defence at all – but it does make the point that different rules sometimes apply to different players.
As unedifying as both spectacles were, however, they are of a piece with thousands of similar incidents stretching back to the bad days of John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors and, well, pick your villain.
Tennis, supposedly the sporting home of probity alongside golf and cricket, accommodates, for reasons impossible to justify, behaviour that would not look out of place in a brothel. Millionaires screaming at the annoyingly compliant officials has always been the most bizarre spectacle. It is no more than bullying.
Where does it come from? Almost without fail, their parents. Anyone who has read Andre Agassi’s compelling autobiography will make that connection. His father was an unremitting ogre, turning the talented and sensitive Andre into a sulking grown-up of explosive tendencies, a minor monster of the court.
Agassi had the good grace to come clean. We will probably wait a long time for Williams or Roddick to do likewise, even though Roddick admitted on reflection that he might have gone “too far”.
He has gone too far quite often in the early days of his career. As have many players, given latitude afforded to athletes in few other sports, notably football, where petulance is tolerated because “that’s the way it is”.
Ny Times Article: Richard Williams Says The American Tennis Industry Is Racist Only Interested In Developing White Tennis Players.
Tennis
Sports of The Times
To Put More Blacks in the Pipeline, Own the Pipeline
Richard Williams watched his daughters play at Wimbledon in July.
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
Published: September 3, 2010
New York Times bloggers are following every serve and volley at the 2010 U.S. Open.
The girls are Venus and Serena Williams, and Richard Williams is their well-known father.
Richard Williams is one of the most intriguing figures in sports, and the story of how his daughters became the defining presence in women’s tennis continues to be the greatest story in contemporary American sports.
Increasingly, the question has been raised: Why after all these years hasn’t another African-American tennis star been identified and developed?
Tennis has had well-documented difficulties in establishing and maintaining an African-American presence in its championship pipeline. Critics point out that the cost of the journey is exorbitant. But Richard Williams said the problem went beyond money.
“You can only be good if you have a system behind you and not ahead of you, blocking you from getting there,” he said. “Institutions that could help blacks refuse. I think they drive blacks away from tennis.”
He said there would not be a significant black presence in tennis until African-Americans build and run their own tennis academies.
His solution is self-sufficiency. His vision is to buy 100 acres in a centrally located area, perhaps Texas, and build a tennis academy that would also house a resort and a school.
“You have to establish your own,” Williams said, referring to a black tennis academy. “If you can’t establish your own, this system has shown you that it is not going to accept you in their house. If I had black people who wanted to work with me and we independently could set up something, we could create black tennis players. Other than that it’ll never happen.”
The idea of a establishing a well-financed African-American tennis academy is overdue. The concept will certainly illicit cries of resegregation and laments of “I thought we were beyond this.”
But when you look at the tennis landscape, you realize that we’re really not.
“If you went to 1,000 tennis academies in America, how many black kids would you see there?” Williams said.
Not many.
“They wouldn’t be there because they don’t want you there,” he said. “It’s not that they dislike you, they just don’t want another Venus or Serena showing up. Not at all.”
The United States Tennis Association would probably disagree. It would point to the number of its programs aimed at increasing diversity. But the history speaks for itself: the championship gap between Althea Gibson’s last title in a major in 1958 and the Williams sisters is enormous, and there hasn’t been a male African-American Grand Slam champion since Arthur Ashe in 1975. Clearly there needs to be another model.
African-Americans have been playing tennis since the last part of the 19th century, not long after the modern game originated. They had their own clubs and their own champions — Gibson most famously. These clubs were a response to a legacy of racism — African-Americans being denied access to exclusive clubs, tournaments and training.
Today large numbers of affluent African-Americans belong to predominantly white country clubs, but the vast majority of African-Americans do not. Some families can afford to give their children the lessons, camps, clubs and tournaments necessary to travel on the tennis conveyor belt. But the vast majority cannot.
But beyond money, Williams points out that the tennis environment — what he calls the system — has not been welcoming to African-Americans. He uses his experiences with his daughters as Exhibit A.
“The system has been at a point where it doesn’t want to help us get any further,” Williams said. “There were a lot of great players; what happened is that the system crushed them. I’ve seen a lot of black kids come up to me and say, ‘I would never want to play tennis after what I see them say to you, Mr. Williams.’ I’ve seen black girls that quit, who wouldn’t play tennis for fear of what would happen to them.”
Perhaps, it was suggested, Williams suffered from being a pioneer, and the next black star will have an easier time.
Williams doesn’t think so. The resistance is deeply rooted, he said.
“When they tried to pick on me and Venus and Serena, they weren’t picking at them, in all reality,” Williams said. “They were picking at other blacks, saying, ‘This is what’s going to happen to you if you come here, so keep your butts away.’ They aren’t doing this to hurt us, they do it to discourage little black girls and black boys so they won’t take over tennis like they did football and basketball and baseball.”
There is an abundance of talent throughout the United States just waiting to be developed. Their families may not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in the process, but Richard Williams demonstrated that you don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“I believe girls and boys can be better than Venus and Serena,” Williams said. “I really believe that with all my heart.”
What you need is care, courage, dedication and love.
Those qualities, more often than not, are homegrown.
Guardian UK Article: Tennis Legend Talks About Her Foot Injury!
Serena Williams reveals details of her serious foot injury
• American explains freak tendon injury in Munich in July
• Williams had 12 stitches in her right foot
- Kevin Mitchell at Flushing Meadows
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 September 2010 00.14 BST
Serena Williams has revealed how she was injured in a freak accident by broken glass in Munich in July. Photograph: Jason Kempin/Getty ImagesSerena Williams has broken a three-month silence to reveal details of the accident that has put her out of tennis since she won Wimbledon in June.
The world No1, who is not playing in the US Open title but will attend Flushing Meadows tomorrow to support her sister Venus, told USA Today she cut tendons in her right foot when she stepped on broken glass on her way out of a restaurant in Munich on 7 July. She was wearing sandals at the time and did not immediately realise what had happened.
She said: “The pain felt like kind of a stubbed foot, like ‘Ow,’ and I thought, ‘Wow, I stubbed my foot.’ Then in 20 seconds, or a minute, I started walking again. And it hurt some more. So we looked down and there was glass all over the floor. I was standing, recovering, thinking I got a little cut and telling my nephew, who was with us, to be careful. Then my practice partner put a cellphone down to the floor so we could see, and there was a huge puddle of blood. I said, ‘OMG, I don’t think this is good.'”
Williams had 12 stitches in her right foot and six on the bottom of her left foot. She said she had surgery a week later in Los Angeles to correct a drooping right toe.
“I came back to the United States from Germany and knew something was not right,” said Williams. “My big toe was drooping, and I thought, ‘My toe shouldn’t be hanging like this.’ I saw a specialist in New York and had an MRI, and he said I had a tendon that was torn. He said I didn’t necessarily have to fix it, but I’d have a droopy toe the rest of my life. I thought it over and decided it was better to have the surgical procedure, for my career and for my life.”
Williams had repeatedly refused to talk about the accident until today. Although her injury needed stitches, she was able to play in an exhibition against Kim Clijsters in Belgium shortly afterwards.
She nevertheless withdrew from the US Open, where she was disqualified and fined last year for swearing at a line judge.
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