Saturday, April 07, 2012

Fantastic Dan

I'm really impressed by the way Dan Evans plays in the Davis Cup tennis for Britain. Granted, he lost yesterday, but he did play extremely well, a lot better than his lowly world ranking would suggest. Possibly he likes best-of-five-set matches better, and the lower ranked tennis players very rarely get a chance to play those.

Davis Cup matches only count for the world ranking if you're playing in the top level, the World Group, so his ranking would probably jump up if we managed to qualify for that. We're pretty unlikely to do so, since Britain's only good player thinks the Davis Cup is beneath him, but you never know what might happen one of these days.

Another cool thing about Dan Evans is that I saw an article on the BBC website or somewhere like that in which the writer alleges that he sometimes acts like someone who isn't sure he wants to be a professional tennis player at all. This is cool, because more than any other sport, the top players in tennis all do it because their parents decided that's what they'll do, usually before they were even born. It's really disturbing how many of the big names have spent their entire lives taking orders from their mother and father and never seem to question it. Anyone who shows a bit of independent thought now and then gets a thumbs-up from me.

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