Bo--ring!

Boom Boom Boom dept.

Jannik Sinner completed the Sunshine Double on Sunday.

The Sunshine Double.

That’s sweeping Indian Wells and the Miami Open, consecutively.

Not easy to do.

Sabalenka did it on the women’s side, too, but we’re not concerned here with Sabalenka, but with Sinner.

Sinner is a great player. Phenomenal.

He’s very tall and very quick and hits the holy living crap out of the ball.

His forehand is a whip. An absolute whip.

But here’s the thing with Sinner.

He’s a bit…I hate to say it.

Boring.

I realize you have to be exceedingly great to be boring at that level.

You have to be able to hit great shot after great shot, over and over.

But still. He’s a little…boring.

They had to ban him for awhile last year. Just for being boring.

Sinner

They said it was for doping. They said there was some trace amount of something in some cream his trainer used when administering Sinner’s between-match massages, some trace amount that was on some list somewhere of stuff you couldn’t allow any part of your body to have any contact with because it might be slightly stronger than Nescafe, and give you an unfair advantage over the competition.

That’s what they said it was for. Doping. So they banned him for awhile. He didn’t play the Sunshine Double last year.

But it wasn’t doping.

They banned him because he was boring.

It’s great when he plays Alcaraz, because while Sinner is boring, Alcaraz plays with great fire and imagination. He hits drop shots, he tries cool angles, he goes to the net.

The Alcaraz-Sinner matches are scintillating affairs. Sinner is a greyhound who bludgeons the ball, while Alcaraz is a magician.

But on his own, Sinner is, I hate to say it….boring.

The only other player who was truly great but as boring as Sinner would be Pete Sampras.

Sampras

Sampras was really, really great.

But….a little boring.

Sampras was lucky to have a rival in Agassi who was as imaginative in his way as is Alcaraz.

Lendl may have been boring but alongside McEnroe and Connors it barely mattered.

Edberg was boring but his game was not, and Becker was not, especially the young Becker.

Borg was not boring. He was the coolest guy in the world.

Nastase was obviously not boring.

Nastase

Stan Smith could have been boring but somehow was not.

In truth, the further back you go, you get to a point where really none of them were boring.

They smoked Marlboros between games, they showed up for matches drunk, they drove to tournaments and slept in their cars, and none of them had coaches or trainers or agents. They were paid cash under the table and if they broke a string they patched it themselves with the stringing machine in their trunk. They argued with the linesmen, they smashed rackets, they didn’t pat each other’s tummies after a match but either fought under the stands or went out to dinner, and they sure as heck didn’t have between-match massages administered by some paid masseur to rub them with cream which may or may not have been laced with a banned substance which would allow them to drill overhead smashes for 7 hours straight.

Also, those guys played mostly on grass, and really, it’s hard for anyone to be boring, playing on grass.

On the women’s side, historically, only Chris Evert was boring.

She was phenomenal, but neither her personality nor her game gave you much of anything, except for clinical precision and unwavering perfection.

Evert

Only her much-ballyhooed (mostly by her, but what the hell) rivalry with Martina lifted her matches into bouts of electricity, most of which ultimately went to Martina (or so it seemed), making Evert, finally, kind of interesting.

But it’s easy to call someone boring from the cheap seats.

I once saw Evert wipe the floor with Virginia Wade in the Royal Albert Hall (the same place some guy supposedly yelled “Judas!” at Dylan, even though it was actually in Manchester).

Dylan

I mean, Evert hit every line. Wade, only a year after winning Wimbledon, had no more chance with Evert than I would have.

Well, she got one game. It was 6-1, 6-0. So Wade got one more game than I would have. Fine.

The point is, seeing Evert up close destroy Wade, in the Royal Albert Hall, was certainly not boring.

I didn’t leave saying, “That was boring.”

So it’s kind of unfair.

And, really, who isn’t boring sometimes?

I eat the same thing every day, a lot.

I complain about the same things, over and over.

I wear the same clothes I wore 30 years ago.

When you think about it, the modern Algorithm plays into all of our boring-ness.

It doesn’t give you new things to look at and think about and consider.

It just gives you more of whatever you already like, over and over and over.

Maybe it’s contributing to our boring-ness.

Or maybe it knows we’re boring, and is just responding.

Anyway….it doesn’t really matter who I think is boring or not.

Honestly, a lot of people think Folksingers are boring.

Here’s Andrew Calhoun’s (only somewhat) ironic song, “Folksingers Are Boring”: