ATP Tennis/Non-India Davis Cup

[prasen9]

This is the sort of thing Michael Madhusudhan Dutta faced when he went to England. I knew all that but hoped that the U.S. was different now than England at that time. My daughter is fluent in Bangla and has always been. She loves our food and music, culture, and some clothing. So all that cultural knowledge and pride in heritage was there. But, wrt identity, I wanted her to be American. Because of the racism at school, she almost identifies as Indian or Indian-American now. I think my idea of one-American was utopian. She now thinks of things as us vs them and that is what I wanted to avoid. Anyway, it is whatever it is.

[jai_in_canada]

My daughter is fluent in Bangla and has always been. She loves our food and music, culture, and some clothing. So all that cultural knowledge and pride in heritage was there. But, wrt identity, I wanted her to be American. Because of the racism at school, she almost identifies as Indian or Indian-American now. I think my idea of one-American was utopian. She now thinks of things as us vs them and that is what I wanted to avoid. Anyway, it is whatever it is.

That's a sad state of affairs - the Divided State of America.

Segueing back to the topic of this thread, Shapovalov did Canada proud yet again yesterday by giving Nadal all he could handle. Held 2 match points but the aging bull fighter fought off the young bull for a narrow win. Nadal has been eking out these wins against the NextGen - Tsitsipas in Barcelona and Shapovalov in Rome. How much longer before the young bulls take down the old bull fighter?

https://www.atptour.com/en/news/nadal-s ... 1-thursday

[jaydeep]

Reilly Opelka serves absurdly and in Rome he reached in the semis before losing to Rafa. Check his kick serve in Rome on clay.

[arjun2761]

Opelka doing well on clay is pretty amazing given how much his game depends on his serve when clay defangs the serve as a weapon....

[PKBasu]

That is an incredible kick serve from Opelka. I presume Nadal countered it by taking it from even further back, and the kick would have just been like a lob to him a long way behind the baseline...

[PKBasu]

Sorry about my choice of words, JIC and prasen9. I didn't mean to be racist -- just wasn't aware that Auger-Aliassime and Andreescu were Canada-born. The latter had two Romanian parents, and the former's father was from Togo but his mother was Canadian -- so he is "properly" Canada born, just as much as Eugenie Bouchard. Andreescu is Canadian too, properly so. There is no racism towards Romanians, Croats, Russians, Poles, etc., but they or their parents escaped to Canada from the persecution and lack of economic opportunities in stifling communist nations. Rusedski was Canada-born, but chose to become a Brit (using his mom as the excuse). I wasn't citing him at all, except as an example of a guy produced by Canada, who chose not to play for that country.

As for Bouchard and Kournikova, it is not sexist (in my view) to point out that -- given their good looks -- they got a lot of extra attention from sponsors, etc., that distracted them from focusing on tennis. It seemed easy enough to make money from modelling contracts, so the tennis played second-fiddle, and they failed to live up to their potential as tennis players.

Let's not get stuck with excessive political correctness though. Canada didn't have any real male tennis tradition until these immigrant kids came along. Rusedski's dad was Polish-Ukrainian, so it isn't so surprising that he didn't feel any particular loyalty to Canada. It's great that Andreescu does feel some such loyalty, but she wasn't part of my original post (which was about the men); JIC brought her in, and I discussed Carling Bassett and Eugene Bouchard in response.

Canada was the part of North America that stayed loyal to the British in 1776-83. (Quebec too, despite its previous Francophone history). In 1914, a ship called the Komagata Maru carrying Indians wasn't allowed to dock at Vancouver port, and was sent back to India. At that time, Canada had a law saying anybody whose ship had stopped at another port on the way to Canada wouldn't be allowed in -- specifically aimed at keeping Indians out, since it wasn't possible for a ship to arrive in Canada from India without stopping either at Tokyo/Osaka or Hong Kong. There was no Canadian citizenship separate from British until the Canada Citizenship Act of 1946.

Non-whites could not become citizens of the US until the change in the law in 1965; there's a poignant story of a Punjabi soldier who fought in the US army in WWI seeking to become a citizen afterward, arguing that he was Caucasian (since his ancestors had come to India as Aryans from the Caucasus -- but it didn't work!). These are nations with histories dripping with racism.

[PKBasu]

Canada's tennis system has been based on nurturing foreign-born talent brilliantly. Started with Rusedski (who defected to Britain to further his prospects, using his Brit mom as the excuse), and then Pospisil, Raonic, Shapovalov, Auger-Aliassime.

In an earlier era, the US had Sampras and Agassi (born of Greek and Iranian immigrant parents). Perhaps the US isn't attracting enough immigrants any more!

This was my original post, which prasen9 utilized to call me "racist". All the names there are white (except Auger-Aliassime, who is partly black), so I'm not sure what is racist about saying they are foreign-born. As it turns out, only Raonic and Shapovalov were foreign-born. The others had foreign parents: Rusedski's father was Polish-Ukrainian and mother British, while Felix's father had arrived from Togo just a few years before he was born, although his mother was Canadian. The similarity to Sampras and Agassi was what I was pointing out. Pospisil's parents arrived from Czechoslovakia via Austria just a few months before he was born. Sorry I didn't look up where precisely they were born. Canada has consciously sought to become more multi-cultural, but its history is as that part of Britain's North American territories that remained loyal to Britain in the 18th century, and there was no separate Canadian citizenship (apart from British nationality) before 1946. And only slowly was that changed to the current multi-culturalism that Justin Trudeau advocates.

[jayakris]

Non-whites could not become citizens of the US until the change in the law in 1965

I am sure you meant non-white immigrants... Non-whites (like African Americans) born in the US could be citizens from 1868 onward. America then did everything possible to keep away Asians with various tricks like "literacy tests" and outright bans on Asiatic Zone and all that. The 1965 laws changed all that. Actually the African Americans still needed the Civil Rights movement that followed, to become fully equal citizens (on paper).

[jai_in_canada]

Canada's tennis system has been based on nurturing foreign-born talent brilliantly. Started with Rusedski (who defected to Britain to further his prospects, using his Brit mom as the excuse), and then Pospisil, Raonic, Shapovalov, Auger-Aliassime.

In an earlier era, the US had Sampras and Agassi (born of Greek and Iranian immigrant parents). Perhaps the US isn't attracting enough immigrants any more!

This was my original post, which prasen9 utilized to call me "racist". ...

Canada has consciously sought to become more multi-cultural, but its history is as that part of Britain's North American territories that remained loyal to Britain in the 18th century, and there was no separate Canadian citizenship (apart from British nationality) before 1946. And only slowly was that changed to the current multi-culturalism that Justin Trudeau advocates.

PKB, I certainly did not mean to even imply that YOU were racist. And I am sure Prasen didn't either. We were just alerting to the fact that terms like "true Canadian" and "pure Canadian" or "properly Canada born" are considered racist because they are nowadays used by the alt-Right to delegitimize citizens of non-WASP ancestry. Same in the US and UK. It is not just an issue of political correctness. It is more personal than that, as Prasen indicated with his daughter's recent experiences and changes in perspective. She was born in the US, and it wasn't in her control that her parents immigrated from another country. So she's no different than any other person born in the USA. It's just that there is more sensitivity around this topic now since the explosion of Trumpism on to the political scene.

Having said that, the extreme Right is not the only ones to co-opt terms. The extreme Left has also appropriated language, and even co-opted moral outrage. Moral outrage used to be a Conservative thing until the 60's when they frowned upon things like interracial relationships, pre-marital sex, drug use, and rock n roll (devil music) etc. Now the Left has co-opted moral outrage and extreme Leftism has become the new orthodoxy - which has led to Cancel Culture and extreme censorship on University campuses, stand up comedy, mainstream media, and social media. If you don't subsribe to the Extreme Left's philosophy, beliefs, and tenets then you were a heathen, a devil worshiper, and a sinner who should be excommunicated right out of society. It is running fast in the direction of fascism, although it is not there yet. Fascism also is not the sole purview of the Right. Historically has manifested both on the extreme Left and extreme Right ends of the political spectrum. So Political Correctness has indeed run amuck.

And, yes, Canada officially enshrined Multiculturism into its Charter of Rights & Freedoms in 1988 - thanks to Pierre Elliot Trudeau. His far less stellar son only mindlessly touts Left Wing ideology like a parrot that says things but doesn't understand what it's saying. Still Canada, like the US, UK, Australia, France and Spain, has a sordid history of racism.

If your point was that children of immigrant parents are more motivated to succeed in tennis and that the USTA needs to do better job of promoting tennis to that demographic, I agree with you. Even before this generation, the US has seen tennis success by immigrants - Pancho Gonzalez, Pancho Segura, Vitas Gerulaitis come to mind - along with Sampras, Agassi and Chang. Strangely the current crop of the best US players is not of new immigrant parentage - John Isner, Steve Johnson, Taylor Fritz, Sam Querry, Jack Sock, Tennys Sandgren (although his mother is from South Africa), and Reilly Opelka for example. But there is Frances Tiafoe. France famously had Yannick Noah. But the UK has not produced any good players of immigrant parentage - unless you want to consider Arvind Parmar. I think the British LTA has also done a poor job of promoting and encouraging tennis participation amongst the immigrant demographic, and is thus likely missing out on good talent.

[suresh]

What exactly is extreme right and extreme left?

[jai_in_canada]

What exactly is extreme right and extreme left?

I'll give you my layman understanding of what they are.

Extreme Right/alt-Right in the context of countries that have a history of colonization is the viewpoint that their true cultural identity is Christian & Anglo Saxon. It is a nationalistic, religious and racist way of identifying who "belongs". It has been characterized as espousing white supremacism, white separatism, right-wing populism, anti-immigration, racism, anti-communism, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, Holocaust denial, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, antifeminism, homophobia etc. So if you are not of Western European/White Anglo Saxon Protestant back ground then you are not legitimately American/Canadian; and your very existence diminishes the true culture, values, way of life and standing in the World of "their" country.

The extreme Left are apparently former Marxists who had no place to go after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR. So that ideology has spread to Western democracies where they purportedly fight against all the things that the alt-Right stand for. But in reality they are just as intolerant and close minded. They are against free enterprise, capital markets, are pro union, pro welfare state, pro huge taxes, pro open borders, anti free speech etc. Basically it's Communist ideology.

Both are nuts and scare me because there is no room for nuanced open civil conversation or debate. No shades of grey, it's all black and white.

There is some seepage of both philosophies into India, but not yet as polarized, angry and divided as the US, Germany, Denmark, and France. The media loves this extreme dichotomy because it makes for compelling viewing and reading.

[suresh]

^^ Thanks.

[PKBasu]

Non-whites could not become citizens of the US until the change in the law in 1965

I am sure you meant non-white immigrants... Non-whites (like African Americans) born in the US could be citizens from 1868 onward. America then did everything possible to keep away Asians with various tricks like "literacy tests" and outright bans on Asiatic Zone and all that. The 1965 laws changed all that. Actually the African Americans still needed the Civil Rights movement that followed, to become fully equal citizens (on paper).

Yes, I meant non-white immigrants.

The gains of the US Civil War (1861-65) were effectively destroyed by the assassination of Lincoln. He had picked a Southern Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his running mate in 1864. Johnson overturned Reconstruction, which would have given Blacks (African-Americans) full civil and voting rights. Had that happened, Georgia would immediately have had a black majority, and elected blacks as governor, senator, etc. in 1865-68, rather than in 2021 for the first time.

Unlike Andrew Johnson a century earlier, Lyndon B Johnson in 1963, did not overturn JFK's policies -- on civil rights and immigration laws. Kennedy was an Irish Catholic, so he belonged to an "outsider" underclass community (although he himself was super-rich because of his dad's Wall Street wealth, partly acquired through greenmailing and other tactics that he outlawed once he became SEC chief). LBJ, although a southerner who had opposed such changes in the Senate all his life, followed through on JFK's policies and remade America into the multi-cultural melting pot it has now become.

[VReddy]

On a timely note - Rajeev Ram wrote a piece for ATP Tour and USTA on his Indian roots

Tennis has put me in greater touch with my own Indian heritage as I’ve competed in India on a number of occasions and developed close friendships with other players on tour from that country. It has also made me realize that it is OK to come from a different background than most people I grew up with. Being a first-generation person can be quite confusing because you have one culture at home and a totally different culture when you step out the front door. But meeting people that share my home culture as well as my passion for tennis has allowed me to look at my situation as a huge benefit because I have the opportunity to take the best from two different ways of life.

Rajeev falls in the latter bucket who prefers to highlight his Indian identity and likes to be called an Indian-American than just as an American.


https://www.atptour.com/en/news/rajeev- ... y-may-2021

[jai_in_canada]

On a timely note - Rajeev Ram wrote a piece for ATP Tour and USTA on his Indian roots
.....

Rajeev falls in the latter bucket who prefers to highlight his Indian identity and likes to be called an Indian-American than just as an American.


https://www.atptour.com/en/news/rajeev- ... y-may-2021

Very relevant and timely to our recent discussions on this thread. Well written by Rajeev Ram. Interesting too, cuz earlier I felt that he wanted to underplay his Indian side and highlight his American side. And now he's proudly embracing and highlighting his Indian side along with his American side.

Thanks for posting this @VReddy.