I never made it to the Press Conference. I drove home after leaving my poor puzzled friend on the court. Who knows? He might still be there to this day. At home there was a wailing and a gnashing of teeth and I was sent to see Dr Davies who sent me to see a Psychiatrist and Psychologist.
Now my problems had nothing to do with the fact that I was shit at tennis but they had everything to do with a seep seated depression that had begun age 13 and was now manifesting itself at age 20. Situational depression linked to being sent from a completely Welsh medium primary to a completely English medium secondary school where I was required to fail Latin for O level. For fuck's sake you don't want to read about my travails but you do want to hear my take on Naomi Osaka don't you?
Competitive sport kills! It kills your spirit because winning is the only thing that matters so much so that if you lose, people with a press card in their hat want to ask you how it feels to have lost? How do you think it fucking feels? lousy.
I am on team Naomi Osaka. At the school tennis courts, where I was playing when I had the first delirium tremens of a nervous breakdown, two or three years previously on the circular athletics track, me and a pal agreed halfway around not to race each other and we jogged in leisurely across the finish line. Did we get a row? It was as if we had committed a blasphemy against the God's of competitive sport. If I remember rightly, the punishment was to be sent on a cross country run with an instruction to make sure we 'COMPETE' whistling around our ears.
It is the culture of competition that destroys the inner confidence of so many people. To become an elite athlete of course you have to compete but what if it's not the competition you get a kick out of. What if it's the love of the game?
What if you are in love with tennis and the winning at all costs regardless of your mental health is what is destroying you inside? She has been a brilliantly brave woman to stick two fingers up to the French Open.
We've heard all too often about Toxic Masculinity, well what about Toxic Competitivity? What if both are linked? What if both are linked to voyeurism where the spectator/press because they have paid their money demand to see the entrails of the vanquished competitor as if they were on the floor of the Colosseum in Rome.
I wonder if Toxic Masculinity occurs because of the demands of competition on the male of the species? Competing to get the biggest Woolly Mammoth, competing for the best position in the boardroom, competing for that promotion? Compete, Compete, Compete does not compute.
Competition thrives in Capitalist Societies because there have to be winners and losers because we cannot all be winners under such a structure.
Unfortunately due to the contracts that you sign and the intrusive interruptions that you must suffer to your mindset, winners are often made to feel like losers also.
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