teppanyaki party at home today, joel christie yeeyeo and von in attendance. feasted on salmon, prawn, crabstick, 2 kinds of beef, golden pin mushrooms, shitake mushrooms, dou miao, daogay, chicken, fishcake... while watching the turkey-senegal match over dinner, although after the excitement of the south korea win earlier today this practically pales. i am not the sort that can watch football or stand excitement for long. i keep getting out of the room every 5mins or so to walk around because i can't bear the nervousness of watching. i come racing back after someone yells goal! to see the replay. otherwise i go frantic with nervousness. i'm the useless sort who would also switch channels to avoid watching a particularly unpleasant scene on tv so you see. von has discovered some of his roots, re: chinese poetry, and he is contemplating becoming a buddhist, so i pack him off to talk to my mother. i need to wash my hair which smells of smoke and oil, but i'm trying to sit here and cool off for now.

as wimbledon starts to gear up and the world cup is drawing to its climax i find it difficult to watch tennis immediately after watching football. i first felt this two weeks ago, just after england had beaten argentina in the first round, emotions still high, and then changing channels to catch the last two sets of the costa-corretja french open semis. suddenly, the landscape was too spare: not enough crowd (probably all home watching france struggle in the world cup), not enough colours even - the orange-brown of the clay court looked so sterile, and a few BNP or addidas advertisements. probably the fact that they're playing on clay too made everything seem slower, the long rallies tedious.

david foster wallace has an essay on how tennis is *the* sport. he praised it for the physical precision, style, cleanliness (i.e. not messy with 20 men littering the field) and truly allowing you to confront your opponent mano a mano. it's an attractive argument, i've bought it all along, and the funny thing is that for most of my life, if you had asked me which i preferred, tennis or football, i would have said tennis every time. i don't even follow any of the major football leagues, but at one time i could tell you exactly what the tennis rankings were that week, and the names of any of the grand slam finalists of the previous five years, or who had just changed coaches, got married, got a back injury.

however much i think i believe it though, considering each in isolation, it just didn't work for me like that in reality, when suddenly the two sports are placed beside each other. when you have just collected your mind from a football match, you find there is something very tame, ridiculously overly-civilised about tennis. not 10 minutes after i'd tuned into the match, corretja slips and falls and scrapes his knuckles and arms. this doesn't look like the least damaging. costa comes up to the net to see if he's alright. everything is put on hold. there is a medical break, which is okay, but of such an embarrassingly long time that i felt quite put out. i could not help thinking that this was trifling, that he was being far too wimpy, and that if this were a football match you'd either be asked to get on with it or else you'd have got it for faking. everyone else patiently sits on until he finds himself ready to resume the game. that's the other thing, in tennis you get to sit down not only between sets but between every other game. you drink, change your shirt, towel your face, eat bananas. there's ridiculous civility, which isn't entirely about sportsmanship, but something more to do with etiquette, with manners, the little bob to whichever royalty happen to be in the box, the way the worst you can do is to break your racket and be fined for it, and how most players close to never challenge the calls of the linesmen. consider the umpire who sits in his high chair, the detached observer, the rational judge from above, unlike the football referee in the thick of things, prone to errors. consider the tennis spectator at his match, where even his applause has to be reserved till after a point has been played (and what's more, when he is also obliged to applaud each point, even if it's just cos the fellow on court was inept enough to net his shot.) now contrast that with the feverish atmosphere of a football stadium, the universal and spontaneous cry of "GOAL" that goes up in every house, that sort of communal celebration that isn't in the individual clapping of the tennis spectator.

and then there is something else about all this, and i think this something has to do with the cruelty of time running out in a football match, and a kind of cruelty of the sudden-death approach, or a kind of primal feeling of penalty shootouts. it has to do with a kind of game in which mistakes count, and a missed chance is irrecoverable, and not always through your own fault. a kind of game where you're tackled at every turn, you must make the best shot in however chaotic and pressured situations, that you find yourself let down by others at crucial moments. the cruel irony that being the better man, the better team overall doesn't count when a sudden shot can undo you. then take the tennis match that takes as long as is necessary, the way one plays slowly up to one's potential. a game with allowances for faults, foot faults, the two point advantage, always providing a second chance. a game between two people in artificial isolation. all that civility. watch the ball go back and forth, back and forth...

there is something about football matches that seem like life, and tennis only a prettified lifestyle. besides, david foster wallace is an american, and what do they know about football? aha.