All England Grass Smoking Club Bans Ruskies
All England Grass Smoking Club Bans Ruskies
Never get high on your own idea of yourself.
The All England Club of wise elders in white pants and purple polos gathered at the Prime Minister’s office for tea and politicking today and decided to ban Russians and Belarusian players from this year’s lawn tennis festivities.
The ban will affect several top players, notably Daniil Medvedev, Andrey Rublev, and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, and will most certainly help Ukrainian war efforts. In fact, you can feel the tide turning on the fronts of Donbas already from this decision alone.
The decision supersedes an earlier directive by tennis authorities the ITF, WTA, and ATP which said that Russian and Belarusian players could continue to appear at tour events, but only as neutrals and without displaying national colors.
On Tuesday, the Lawn Tennis Association was in "complex" talks with Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the issue but ultimately issued this statement:
In the circumstances of such unjustified and unprecedented military aggression, it would be unacceptable for the Russian regime to derive any benefits from the involvement of Russian or Belarusian players with The Championships.
It is therefore our intention, with deep regret, to decline entries from Russian and Belarusian players to The Championships 2022.
Ian Hewitt, Chairman of the All England Club, commented: “We recognise that this is hard on the individuals affected, and it is with sadness that they will suffer for the actions of the leaders of the Russian regime.
Suffer for the actions of their leaders?
In 1914 three Germans were playing the tournament when on the fourth day Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated. While powers were mobilizing toward war, the tournament continued. One of those Germans would go on to play a thrilling five-set final, and end up settling for runner-up that year.
After his runner-up performance Otto Froitzheim, who was later engaged to Leni Riefenstahl, would travel across the Atlantic to Pittsburgh for a team match against Australasia with his German compatriot Oskar Kreuzer. In the middle of the match, the organizers refused to tell Oskar and Otto that war (World War I) had broken out, not wanting to disturb their tennis form. They would later be taken prisoner after their cruise liner home was captured by a British warship near Gibraltar, and both men would spend the entire war in English prison camps.
In 1939 after Hitler was already given Czechoslovakia and marched into Austria as a liberator, Nazi tennis sensation Henner Henkel battled his way to the semifinals. Less than two months later amphetamine boosted Wermacht battalions blitzed their way across Poland and Britain declared war on Henkel’s Reich.
History shows it’s never easy to recognize your enemies in any sporting competition and circumstances can change with an inconvenient assassination or the whims of a syphilitic dictator. It usually requires one nation to be at war with another and the powers involved decide to halt competition entirely. At least it used to.
Did Russia declare war on Britain?
At some point, it became en vogue to simply ban competitors of specific nations based on the behavior of that sportsman’s government or ruler as arbitrarily interpreted by that one prestigious body of international relations experts with years of adjudicating border disputes, war crimes, and genocide - The All England Club Management of Champions who can astutely determine who will and will not suffer for the actions of the leaders of their regime.
We all remember how Arthur Ashe, Pancho Gonzales, and Stan Smith were banned from Wimbledon in the late 1960s and early 1970s because of U.S. carpet bombing operations in Cambodia and Vietnam that killed half a million civilians. The All England Club committee was outraged by these war crimes and made sure those Americans paid the price for the actions of war criminal Henry Kissinger. Didn’t they?
Andy Roddick, James Blake, Andre Agassi, the Williams sisters, and Britain’s own Tim Henman were banned from the 2003 Wimbledon tournament due to the shock and awe bombing campaign of Iraq based on fabrications of “weapons of mass destruction”. Again this led to the indiscriminate deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians and left the western media outraged (if it’s possible to drool and have multiple orgasms live on air while outraged) as it dragged on for six weeks before the ground invasion began. The All England Club had no choice given the actions of war criminals George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tony Blair. Those players had to suffer for the actions of the leaders of their regime. Didn’t they?
Two years later the Americans were banned again when it was discovered they used white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Falluja resulting in catastrophic birth defects still seen today. Weren’t they?
In fact, Americans would be banned from the tournament for the next twenty years based on annual war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. French players were banned in 2011 and 2012 for supporting their country’s indiscriminate bombing of Libya on behalf of the Petrodollar cartel and IMF enforcers in NATO. This turned Libya into a failed state with open slave markets, which it remains to this day.
There’s no word on when American players will be able to return to the tournament given the nation’s support of Saudia Arabia's war against Yemen and the ongoing humanitarian disaster there resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation.
This kind of thing happens all the time, doesn’t it?
Innocent athletes who mind their own business and just want to master their craft are always caught up in the hysteria and outrage of international relations disputes that get to be arbitrarily interpreted by the All England Club and their team of highly trained virtue experts in white pants and purple polos.
If a few evil Ruskies have to sit out this year’s tournament, it’s only because it’s in line with long-standing international sports rules for athletes that “…unfortunately will suffer for the actions of the leaders of their regime.”
OR maybe.
Some athletes are more equal than others.
The Ukrainian Borg is alive and well.
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It’s embarrassing and sad as an American to read all the atrocities perpetrated over the past 50 years.
I've been hearing about Russian art being cancelled, but we can all dig up an old copy of Tolstoy or listen to some Stravinsky whenever. No intermediary is necessary. But this canceling of artistic performers and athletes who have honed a craft or trained a sport and have a very small window to be at their peak is despicable. It feels like a perverse continuation of the covid crap: you don't get to be on stage..you don't get to be on the court...too bad, so sad, it's for the greater good. I hate these people.