Dumping Them Out: Tennis Doesn't Have Enough Carlos Alcaraz's

Welcome back to another episode of Dumping Them Out. Sports have been on a hot streak lately. Three nights we got what some are calling the best hockey game of all time in the 6-5 2OT Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Then today we got what must have been the best tennis match I've seen in my life with the French Open Final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. My theory on tennis, which is extraordinarily uneducated and based on a long career of barely watching tennis whatsoever, is that almost nobody is good enough at tennis to make for a tennis match that's entertaining enough to grab the attention of America. I'm sure somebody could give plenty of examples of highly entertaining mid-level matches, but what made today's match great (aside form the 0-2 comeback) was Carlos Alcaraz pulling off some of the wildest most impressive tennis shots ever witnessed. 

Sinner hit a few nice ones himself, but of all the best players in the world, how many are capable of give fans anything close to what that match delivered today? It has to be less then five. In order for tennis to captivate me, the level of play has to be almost impossibly high. If only tennis had 15 to 20 Carlos Alcaraz's, it might be the most popular sport in the world. 

For American purposes, tennis also needs way more American men in the mix. Relatively speaking, American men are remarkably bad at tennis. There's no American's right now who stand a chance against a guy like Alcaraz. Looking at this year's French Open bracket, it appears Ben Shelton (American) at least managed to take one set from Alcaraz in the Round of 16. In the end, the scorecard (or whatever the call it in tennis) looked respectable (6-7, 3-6, 6-4, 4-6). But I'm gonna go out on a limb as say there's no way Alcaraz was at any point worried about dropping that match. 

And if I'm ever going to really get into tennis, I need to start seeing a little more flair from the best players in the world. Alcaraz always brings flair. He's out there hyping up the crowd and all that. But Jannik Sinner does nothing for me personality wise. I know I'm just supposed to appreciate the good tennis, but Jannik Sinner is a boring ass dude. He has zero flavor. Zero zest. The only cool thing about him is that he used to do steroids. You would think an Italian would bring a little more emotion to the court. Or have a better name than Jannik Sinner. If Jannik Sinner was named, Alessandro Amadeo-Romeo, and had some long flowing hair and a fun mustache. If he made more emphatic hand gestures and sometimes cried real tears after big points, then I'd be all in on him. Tennis players have such a golden opportunity to be characters. It's only them out there. They get endless amounts of close up face shots on national TV. If you're a top 10 player in the world, at bare minimum you should be giving as much effort as Alcaraz does when it comes to playing to the crowd and being a personality. 

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Speaking of sports I don't really watch but have a very uneducated take about. The UFC has completely lost me. I used to be a slightly more than casual UFC enjoyer. It helped that I was living down the street from a friend who was a big UFC guy, and always took it upon himself to order the fights and invite people over. But as a guy who only follows the UFC from a far on Twitter, there are way too many fights for me to keep up with nowadays. I swear see my co-workers who do the Spinning Backfist podcast (Robbie Fox, Big Ev, Jack Mac) tweeting out their UFC cards and getting hyped about a big fight every damn weekend. I feel like the UFC diluted themselves. It used to be I could watch maybe one big night of fights per month, and I pretty much knew what was happening in every weight class. I don't know if the cards I see every weekend now are all considered "big fights", I just know the UFC got to a point where they started fighting so much, that for a person like me who's never going to go too far out of his way to keep up with MMA, it became too much to casually keep up with. It's too many people. Unless the name is Jon Joes, Francis Ngannou, the Airbender guy, Sean O'Malley, or one of the Hitler guys, the names mean nothing to me anymore. 

I started watching the show Lost for the first time ever this weekend. Lost was such a huge part of popular culture in the mid-2000's, so I figured I should watch it so I can at least understand the references and such. I know the general consensus on Lost is that the show turns to dog shit before it's even halfway through, but at minimum I want to watch the first couple of seasons. My fiancee was on her bachelorette party this weekend, and I had nothing planned for myself, so I figured I could knock out a decent chunk of the "good part" of the show. About 10 episodes in I assumed I must be nearing the finale. But when I checked how many episodes I had left, I nearly fell off my couch. Fucking Lost has 25 episode seasons. What the hell is that? I thought I was signing up for maybe 25 episodes of good Lost in total. No chance in hell did I think I was committing to a solid 50 episodes of TV. If Lost was airing one episode per week, that must mean they were stretching a single season out over half a calendar year. No modern day TV show, especially not a drama, would ever have the balls to come out the gates swinging with a 25 episode season. We're lucky if a good new television show has more than 8. Sometimes it's even less than that. I admire Lost's ambition, but no wonder the show eventually went to shit when they were committing to 18+ hours of content every season. That's like putting out 9 movies in a year. Young J.J. Abrams was a mad man.