SENIOR tennis players at the courts back in the 80s used to tell us, you can learn a lot about any person by just looking at their overall demeanor right after a tournament match. There’s a grain of truth in that, I know.
Oftentimes, looks on the faces alone, clearly paint a picture of the storm raging inside a person. The winners for example, while they offer their short talks directed at the bowed heads of the conquered, one catches a disguised gloating (not imagined, mind you) that’s only for brief moment, and visible only under a certain light.
“It was a good match, too bad one had to lose. Etcetera.” The gloat is, of course, later validated, once one is in private convo and the guy then clearly sneers to say, ‘I destroyed that guy, didn’t I? Only in private ears.
Meanwhile, on the losing side, the deadpan, blank look into space sometimes appears as the initial and obvious giveaway, but wait awhile and it’s either a shrug or at worse, tantrums, that might follow and we get a front row seat.
In the long run, if one looks closely enough, there is really no such thing as a cool loser and you can take that to the bank. Many might not agree and may have a different say but I leave it there just the same, with a “convince me otherwise” sign on the table.
Meanwhile, back to the old guys at the court, their words still ring clearly in my head often, and especially now. Theirs as often the kind of speak that, when they opened their mouths, you listened, as wisdom came aplenty.
At the time, mine had toads coming out of it. Even when at certain moments in the conversations they merely nodded, you knew right away there was purpose there, almost like a poignant pause. So we just shut our trap.
Nowadays, applying and transposing what the elders have said long ago, theirs is just so much to discover and learn from the way people in the tennis courts of government carry themselves.
In many many ways, there’s also more to see from the way we spectators manage ourselves. It’s just too bad, even as we all know governments can rise and fall, as they all do, we at the gallery align ourselves with either side, fight with one another and then stand ready to fall along with them. There’s still much to know, because even as empires fall, the people remain.
