One day I will write that book, the one where I will probably upset a few more than I already have but the one that will tell all as to who I am and why I am so argumentative. It will quite possibly be called the above headline.
I posted those clips of me hitting just recently as I want my kids to know that even though I was slowing down I was still focused on the one thing that has kept me both amused and frustrated for as long as I can remember. So at age 46 if my kids are anything like me (God forbid ) I hope that they will still pursue something that they perhaps felt a comfort with when they were young as I did with tennis.
If ever I get hit by a bus or get taken out by a hit man for upsetting the wrong person on this site then I would hope that someone lets the young Thompson kids know that their old man had a site that really was quite unique, if not totally absurd.
When I write on this site I don't tell too many people but if I put something down that I see some sort of 'genius' in then I may send the chapter on email through to some people who I regard as friends, I don't have many though......
Nature of the game I call it, the nature of the beast, the game which turns 'ordinary' people into complete nutcases as they chase personal glory in a game that can only be described as 'egotistical'.
Why else would you see someone like Novak Djokovic tearing his shirt off after a Grand Slam victory and yelling like a possessed beast at the crowd who paid good money to see two testosterone fuelled gladiators belt a small ball into submission ? It's all about ego and self indulgence.
Looking back on my rather colourful journey through tennis from a kid of 13 to a rather argumentative bastard of 46 I wonder at times if I could have done much different. I don't ponder too much because I was simply no where near good enough to make money from the sport and I apologize all these years later to my folks for putting them through the whole silly personal quest.
Yet when you think about it, that's what parents do, they support even the strangest ideas of their kids' because they want their children to learn from the experience, to better themselves and to pass down both their successes and failures in life to their own kids.
I refused to learn at school, I have often said that when asked 'When did you leave school'? I replied "Usually at lunch time to go and play tennis", because that's what I did. I used to call into the Burger Spot, grab a two litre bottle of coke and make my way to the tennis club where I convinced another mate to train with me. Our attendance records weren't actually that bad as our names were only ever marked off early in the day, you see we 'did the sums'. The problem was though at exams time, that's when we were found out, it had to catch up with us in the end.
I wonder how I would take the news if I found out that one of my three kids were skipping school to pursue a personal dream, maybe I would be ok with it, after all it's a learning process. We can't all be scholars and we can't all be sports stars so we should just try to be ourselves, the inbetweeners, the rest of the population who dare to dream.
I had two chances of becoming a tennis professional, none and bugger all because I lacked talent and I was chasing a needle in a haystack, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow but boy I had fun chasing it. I met some great people , I met some knob heads, I saw Monte Carlo and Paris and I learned to tell French women that they were beautiful after a pint or two of the local beer served at places I only ever dreamed of as a kid.
I reckon a book titled the above could just be an absolute flop in a book store but a real hit for my kids as they may just understand one day why I wrote 380 chapters on a site from the spur of the moment and some days after a few ales. In fact I seemed to write more on this site after a few beers, it got all of my silly ideas out of my head and onto a site which one day may earn my kids two dollars each for having an argumentative Father.
No matter what happens I am happy with what has transpired because it's been a hell of a good time, at times frustrating yet educational all the same. I am 46, I am on the You Tube hitting a reasonable tennis ball at an age where many of my old school mates are too over weight to walk down to the local sporting club and roll the arm over.
I am an argumentative bastard but I can still win my local championship and I can still beat kids half my age. Egotistical ? You betcha............
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