Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Your moment of weird

Lots of weird stuff has happened in this Year of the Bastard Plague, most of it on account of the Bastard Plague.  This is not exactly a statement bursting with insight.

After all, in 2020, they threw an Indianapolis 500 and a Kentucky Derby and no one was there to watch it.

And it's early September and the NHL and NBA are pretending it's late May, with both the Stanley Cup and NBA playoffs ongoing.

And baseball didn't start until almost August, and football will start on time but who knows how long that will last.

Weird on weird. And so you can probably just say it was 2020 that bit Novak Djokovic the other day.

What happened was Djokovic, the No. 1 seed in the U.S. Open and No. 1 player in the world, got booted from the Open for hitting a linesperson with a ball.

He didn't mean to hit her. He just kind of swiped without looking at a spare ball because he was miffed and his shoulder hurt, and of course it hit this linesperson square in the throat. Some moments of distress followed as she tried to catch her breath.

Any other year, the ball would have sailed harmlessly into the backstop, and Joker would have gotten a severe warning or been docked a point or two for his small show of temper. But not in 2020. Oh, no. In 2020 it hits a linesperson in the throat and steals her air for a few frightening moments, and Joker is gone because it's an automatic default to hit a linesperson with a ball not in play.

So he's gone and the other two members of the ruling triumvirate in men's tennis, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, skipped the Open, so whoever wins will be a first-time Grand Slam champ. Which is kind of cool, I guess, unless 2020 has something else up its sleeve we haven't seen yet.

A double default in the finals, perhaps?

Stay tuned.

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