The French Open is back and so am I.
After a year of being burned out, this blogger has returned. My sporadic 2010 posts on a now-defunct domain were deleted by the ISP. A year of thinking about tennis totally wiped out. This leaves us with an incomplete archive here at WordPress. When I read through my 2008-09 tennis writing, there are some things I don’t like, others that I was dead wrong about and some pieces that I am still proud of. Overall I stand behind it.
The original purpose of this blog remains the same: tennis talk for the serious tennis fan. I will not be focusing quite as much on rebuking the anti-tennis media. The coverage of tennis by non-tennis media is a little better now than it was five years ago. But the tennis media, led by ESPN, has devolved. Like its news division cousins, tennis journalists increasingly value entertainment and access over truth. That is why Mary Carillo left ESPN.
On this blog we will try to have reality-based discussions about the major tennis issues of the day. Insisting that Roger Federer is about to re-take the #1 ranking is like claiming that the jury is still out on global warming. Fundamentalist believers can ignore reams of evidence if they want but I’m not going to play pretend.
There is one major change I’m making to this blog and it is this – I can no longer promise not to put up the occasional post on politics in America and the world. However, I will strive to keep my focus on tennis. So I invite readers to join the conversation. This has already been one hell of a tennis year and there are many twists and turns to come.
Passing Shots 
Posted on May 23, 2011
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