Reason's lib
Hans Keller
By common consent amongst all my psychic agencies—ego, super-ego, id and, above all, my very own discovery, the supei -id, which tells the other internal contestants not to use you or Wimbledon or argument or art towards the solution of my boring conflicts—the climax of this year's championship was reached shortly after the ladies', sorry, the women's final, when the champion was interviewed on television. Mind you, it wasn't anything she said; in fact, she didn't say anything. The star was the interviewer. Having successfully concealed his disappointment at Mrs Cawley having been defeated he started what was supposed to be his deeply felt congratulatory peroration by addressing Miss Chris Evert as 'Evonne'. 'Did I call you "Evonne" just now ?"Yes."I'm sorry.' It doesn't matter.' He got a devastating smile: if smiles could kill, we'd have had a malechauvinist-pig-slaughter on our hands.
As it was, Freud could be heard rolling heavily in his grave, furious that he hadn't been able to include this priceless parapraxis (for which his own name, incidentally, was the utterly un-Greek, un-Latin, natural German neologism Fehlleistung) in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life. We can understand his frustration: everybody, Miss Evert, the interviewer and indeed the viewer, was perfectly aware of what, psychoanalytically speaking, was going on, even though they may never have heard of psychoanalysis and Freudian slips in their lives—a reminder, this, to trendy objectors to psychoanalytic -knowledge. We had always known what Freud discovered, that is to say, but didn't have the guts to facedown to it.
In the context of the current, confused conflict about women's pay at Wimbledon, the interviewer's paiapraxis assumed special significance; in fact, it probably wouldn't have happened in more harmonious circumstances. The conflict rages within people as well as between them. Our interviewer, evidently, was shedding a nostalgic tear for Mrs Cawley—the application of whose name to the winner was an act of overt if unintentional aggression: go to hell, you hard libber, give me Evonne's feminine grace every time, much as her support of the wcimen's boycott is to be regretted.
The problem is that when you get to the bottom of it, it's feminine grace the women want to be paid for, for the simple reason that their tennis as such isn't good enough for equal pay. The interviewer seemed a true representative of the public—one of those countless people in intellectual trouble who resent feminism and love femininity, while it's the more masculine styles, such as Chris Evert's and, before her, Mrs King's, that have proved more successful at Wimbledon. But just as the masterly Mrs King always had the Wimbledon crowd and plenty of other people against her, Mrs Cawley, more feminine than feminist, had last Friday's Wimbledon Crowd and most other people on her side.
The anti-libber, then, is munching the bitter pill of the women he dislikes tending to be better and, conversely, the pro-libber is munching the bitter pill of the only conceivable justification for equal pay being, not equality, but, on the contrary, feminine attractiveness and stylishness, which do not really contribute anything to the game that's connected with its purpose-which is to win. Neither is able to swallow the pill : each coughs it up with unseemly noise.
While they choke, they both regret the men's power service, erstwhile Australian, now more American, which is said to inhibit the finer skills; the women, add the pro-libbers, therefore have far more opportunity to use them and thus delight their paying audiences. It is the stupidest argument of the lot. It isn't only that Roscoe Tanner's 140 mph left-handed service didn't get him beyond the semi-final, but that the very man who beat him, Bjorn Borg, went on towin the championship. No such possibility was foreseen by our service-conscious pundits, one of whom simply called Tanner 'the most dangerous outsider', while on the subject of Borg he delivered himself of this historic forecast : 'May revel in hard draw; could reach semis.' What would we do without our specialists ?—and that goes for life.
However, a vapid argument does not really need empirical evidence to be led ad absurdum; pure reason—the phrase, alas, has an old-fashioned ring—is enough. You can serve at 140 miles per hour until the cows come home and you won't beat my aunt (in the first of those mixed singles at Wimbledon, designed to solve the equal-pay issue once and for all), the reason being that you haven't the skill to break her crafty service game. Nor, of course, has she got the necessary eyesight nowadays to notice your own service; she will have it played back to her in slow motion. Meanwhile, the match will end in tennis history's first draw, because neither party will evince the high degree of skill needed for breaking the other's service—for winning the match. Our most distinguished ladies have never dreamt of the invention and skills that have developed in the return of the power service: let them play in my mixed singles and they'll soon see the need for such dreams.
I have repeatedly expressed my admiration for the liberation initiated by Mrs King's impressive personality, but the Wimbledon blackmail she publicly supported last Saturday is a bit much, since there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the customer is prepared to pay equally for unequal servicss—unequal in terms of both duration and indeed sheer sporting achievement, especially in the rounds preceding the semi-finals. For the first time in the history of Women's Liberation, in fact, we may have to face the emergence of an establishment of female chauvinist pigs— who want to be paid disproportionately just because they are women, and for no other reason. Revolutions, however well motivated, do not readily go with an undisturbed working of the human intelligence--nor, by the way, do they invariably succeed; many has been the boycott happily survived by its intended victims.
Equal reward for equal ,goods. Equal reward for all points would be another matter: what about an Early Points' Liberation? Why the points at the end of games and sets should assume a privileged position passes the thinking comprehension: artificial justice does not become more natural by having been firmly conventionalised for ages. What does all this awe-struck veneration for 'decisive points' which 'count' amount to? Why should they decide? In order for a player to be able to win a match while scoring fewer points than his opponent ? Nothing in the intrinsic structure of the game and the nature of the skills demanded for it makes the winning or losing of game points or set points a different task from the winning or losing of any other points. What indeed is the justification for adopting fundamentally different counting systems in tennis and in table tennis? It is my submission that if the supremely skilled and richly inventive player of either sex were simply allowed to play as well as possible as often as possible, instead of having to pull himself together at arbitrarily established danger points, there would be as few chance results in tennis as there are in other sports. Why, even in last Saturday's mood, Ike Nastase might have gradually started to collect points and won Wimbledon—and which admirer of the finer skills of the game would have regretted that ?
Previous page
