2002-03 Washington Wizards
128 · 2026-06-30 · medium
"Serena's 44 and hasn't had a match in four years," Samantha Stosur recently told the Australian Associated Press, "so she's got nothing but question marks." Leave it to TMM's favorite 42-year-old former tennis player to deliver the straight steer, as Aussies like to put it. That's right, it's the final week in June, which means it's also the first week of The Championships. Wimbledon is the worst of the four Slams, on the worst surface. Its Centre Court looks like a pub ashtray, which as of 2009 has a used pub napkin on top. I once spent a night sleeping rough in The Queue (which sucked ass, bugs crawled into my underwear) and my reward was getting to see Slammin' Sammy lose to somebody unseeded. Fourteen years later, there she was again at SW19, in the player's box of lovely young ginger prodigy Maya Joint as she battled Stosur's old nemesis... TMM's second-favorite Williams sister. I'm at the beach this week and don't have access to all my extra sports channels, so I had to ingest 10 hours of Andy Roddick and Caroline Wozniacki on ESPN (via Armed Forces Network), performing what Joint's generation refers to as glazing. Why did she come back? Was this all an ad for her husband's GLP-1 weight loss injections? Oh, look, there it finally is: the 30-second spot of her literally shooting up, during a changeover in the third set as she's fading out hard. She's down a break and a half, and Sam Stosur – going grey now, like one of Judi Dench's English queens – is tapping the tips of her fingers together in the front row. Excellent. Anyway, basketball. Twenty-four years ago, I paid real American cash to a subway scalper to watch Michael Jordan play live, something I never got to do during the 1990s. I sat in the third-to-last row of Section 314 at First Union Center, it's dark up there. The only thing I recall about the game was that the Sixers Dancers did a routine to "Ain't It Funny", which was the kind of popsong folks enjoyed in 2002. Jordan came off the bench and needed 16 shots to score 19 points. "It registered that what we were all doing was actually quite creepy and inappropriate," I wrote years later in my anthology The Woods. "We had paid 20 dollars to watch an old guy masturbate in public." Serena Williams' embarrassing and flatfooted comeback was a pleasant couple of days for the tennis press; just like the holiday I'm on now, they got a couple days off from the current WTA generation, many of whom are inconveniently Russian. I think you get to fall for one of these things during your lifetime. You get one Jordan-on-the-Wizards pass. After that, more fool you.