While we're waiting for the action in Mon'rayall to heat up,I went over a few recent notes and found myself pondering a question that I agonize over from time to time: Is it a good thing to change your mind and disown your past convictions, or is it more noble to cleave to the same attitudes and ideas you've had since Day One?
To me, the dilemma is perfectly incorporated in this absurd rhetorical (or not) question: What does it say about you if, 40 years after Woodstock, you still believe passionately that The Grateful Dead is the greatest band, ever? Does this make you a person who sticks to his or her guns - a person of great integrity, who knows the true, lasting value of things, or just an inflexible butthead who stopped growing long ago - growth being one of the agents that may lead you to change your convictions.
If you want, you can divide the camps into the "fickle" and the "ossified", and I only use those pejoratives to make sure nobody starts feeling all high and mighty about being in one or the other camp. I need to keep everyone - myself included - humble around here, so we can get some good hard thinking and work done, right?
At any rate, I do cast longing glances over the fence from the "fickle" side, and sometimes admire those folks who cling to their convictions and weltanschauung with dogged ferocity. Yet at the end of the day I wouldn't want to be one of them. I can't imagine not changing my mind about things - or, things in the realm of opinion and ideas, anyway.
I got thinking about this the other day when I was talking in an old pal, Liz, about Bjorn Borg. You know that Borg is about to return to play on the senior tour again, right? Liz thought Borg was da bomb, and told me that she misses that element about tennis, that whatever-it-was that lifted Borg to the towering status he once enjoyed - like he was The Beatles or something.
Why doesn't a Roger Federer or a Rafael Nadal hit that note these days? I can't really answer that, except to say that I suspect it has nothing whatsoever to do with the relative star power (or lack thereof) of The Mighty Fed or Jet Boy. And I think we have just defined the difference between tennis then and now, and that even that may not explain it all. For some of it surely had to do with Borg's image and character, the entire package and how the world perceived it.
We got to talking about that weird episode a year or two ago, when Borg was going to put his trophies up for sale in some fancy auction house like Sotheby's. It was funny, everyone started running around, wringing his hands, worrying about Borg's financial health. John McEnroe led the charge, essentially saying it would be criminal if those trophies went to the highest bidder. There was talk of Borg being in desperate financial straits (a charge that Borg denied), and all his old cronies - along with today's stars - discussed together to buy the trophies from him, for donation to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. . . It was, at best, a public embarrassment to one of the greatest of all players.
And that's when my revisionist gene kicked in. . .
I found myself seriously entertaining a thought that most people would find odious: Hey, maybe it was none of anybody's business what Borg wanted to do with his trophies. And Borg wasn't in the midst of a financial crisis, and maybe all those former players were just meddling, to the ultimate end of doing just what they partly were trying to avoid: embarrassing the hail out of Borg - for who, after Borg's plan made the news and all the tennis biggies weighed in, actually believed that Borg could have any motive other than raising cash for contemplating such a sad stunt?.
But the point is, maybe it all was as innocent a Borg made it seem. Maybe he was cleaning out his garage, having grown a little irritated by all the junk he had lying around (I'm like that - a thrower-outer among savers), and he came across a couple of boxes containing some trophies. Maybe he picked through them, curiously, shrugged, and thought: I don't need all of these, I've got that one in dining room and the other one in the bedroom. I'll bet I can get a lot for these on Ebay and somebody out there might get a big kick out of having them . . .
Wait, you cry! This is sacrilege, putting Wimbledon trophies on Ebay!
Well, yes and no, I say. Maybe Borg is more like you and me than you think. Maybe he's a thrower-outer rather than a saver, and thats a divide across which the respective constituents really can't find much common ground. Some people like to get rid of stuff - maybe even Wimbledon trophies - other's don't.
To some people, stuff means a lot. To others, it means nothing, or close to nothing, especially if someone else is willing to pay a whole lot of money for it. Perhaps some people, having won Wimbledon five times, don't feel a particular need to have a lot of mementos lying around - it isn't like Borg's name is going to vanish from the history book if he melts down his Wimbledon trophies and has the material re-cast into tiny metal pentacles that he distributes as party favors, right?
So the bottom line to me is that selling your Wimbledon trophies is a ghastly act of venality only if those trophies actually mean a whole lot to you, and it's entirely conceivable to me that they wouldn't, necessarily. And it's mighty presumptuous to assume that they should mean the same to Borg as they would to you or me, because you and I have no idea of what a Wimbledon trophy would mean because we never earned one. John McEnroe knows what a Wimbledon trophy means, but clearly it means something different to him than it does to Borg. Is one man's attitude "better" than the other's?
It's also unwise to postulate some kind of extra "sensitivity" to those who are sentimentally attached to icons or even images. I know how much I love my boy Cowboy Luke, but we don't have a lot of pictures of him around the house. Come to think of it, you also would not be able to guess my occupation from examining either of my homes (except for the bookshelves). Some people simply like to have, or display, tangible symbols of their passions or achievements more than others do. It doesn't mean they "care" one bit less - or more.
And in the end, I like the idea of Borg not needing all these trophies lying around. The very word "trophy" has really mixed connotations for me, although I'll be the first to admit it's different for a tennis player. Unless he's a very special tennis player, whose trophy is his memory and his store of experience.
Does everybody think I'm nuts about all this?