Perhaps Vincius Jnior will go on to have a happy and successful career and explore the outer fringes of his own talent. The wider question is: why do this to him?
I may not have been sure what really did interest me. But I was absolutely sure what didnt.
I dont know why. But I felt a little bit bored out there to be completely honest.
Lets play guess who said it. One of the above quotes is from the worlds No59-ranked tennis player Bernard Tomic, who exited the mens singles at Wimbledon in the first round this week. The other is a quote from Meursault, narrator of Albert Camuss novel The Outsider, an existentialist anti-hero who murders a man on a beach while contemplating the basic emptiness of all human existence.
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
I just couldnt find anything. Its happened to me a lot. Just cant find anything.
Tomic or Meursault? Meursault or Tomic? OK, its probably not that hard. But then again it has been a notably rough week for Tomic, with defeat in three room-temperature sets against Mischa Zverev capped by a startlingly disaffected press conference during which the Australian basically waved away his entire professional life as a grand charade, and which has seen him dismissed as a quitter, wastrel and all-round king of the cosseted smartphone-douchebag generation.
Like Meursault, whose wider crime was not so much his crime itself as his reaction, an absence of feeling, of regret, Tomic does seem to have made a lot of people angry. Former players have criticised him for not caring enough.
The argument that Tomic is rich and should therefore be immune to all unhappiness has been trotted out. Others have suggested sympathy would be a more appropriate response for a young man who sounds utterly alienated.
Perhaps it might be better just to listen to him. One thing is certain. Tomic knows his own strange, vertiginously modern sporting existence better than anyone else. Hes been a pro since the age of 15, shovelled up by the usual awful tennis dad, ferried from baking practice court to sealed interior to triple-glazed resort complex. When he says hes bored, that being on court makes him feel like hes acting as a moving part in someone elses machine, he is expressing feelings that will not be recognisable only to other sporting wunderkinds but which speak to a much wider oddity.
Plus, of course, hes obviously right. Modern sport is nuts. Finding yourself at its centre must feel like taking part in an uncontrolled social experiment, like entering Rollerball world, a spectacle that offers vast, transformative rewards, but also inflicts a relentless kind of violence on its young, a business of fun and playfulness and sportsmanship bloated into a superheated global talent exchange.
At which point it is perhaps worth getting around to mentioning Vincius Jnior, who turns 17 next week, and who is already considered the most expensive teenage footballer ever before next years 38m move to Real Madrid, at least until Kylian Mbapp gets going. And whose professional career has continued to sketch out its earliest drafts at Flamengo in the last few days.
If it has taken a while to get to Vincius then this is perhaps because there is nothing much to say as the Brazilian hasnt actually done anything yet.
Vincius did some more not-much on Thursday evening, travelling with Flamengo to play Palestino in Chile. Flamengo won 5-2. Vincius stayed on the bench, failing to add to the 335 minutes of football hes racked up across 11 games this season.
Out of a basic love of supercharged Brazilian attacking prodigies, I have tried to watch every game Vincius has played so far. He has popped up mainly on the left of Flamengos attacking midfield, usually as a late substitute. He hasnt scored a goal. Hes produced the odd slippery turn and played with coltish, slightly clumsy vigour. Basically he looks like what he is, a talented kid making his way, who simply needs to be allowed to breathe.
Vincius made his name playing for Brazil at the South American under-17 championships this year, scoring seven goals. But then, as everyone knows, as Real Madrid know, as Vincius Jnior hopefully knows, this means nothing.
Many of his opponents were 15-year-old boys. Vincius is just an idea at this stage, a suggestion of business confidence, a cypher for wider ambitions, a unit of value.
Perhaps he will go on to have a happy and successful career and explore the outer fringes of his own talent. The wider question is: why do this to him?
Why do we know who he is? Why has money and ambition and rapacious corporate greed flushed him out, blinking and unformed into the light? Why are we allowing sport to do this?
Football in particular is out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. Quite clearly, it has gone insane, stumbling across the square with its wheelbarrow full of cash, all sense of human scale lost. Our own Premier League teams will once again splurge a record amount this summer as once again we gawp at the passing millions, noses pushed up against the glass, eyes glazed, pockets expertly siphoned, dulled by endless droning repetitions. Meanwhile Vincius: the 38m boy is already a candidate for oddest transfer yet. It is a move for the Tomic Times, when so much of professional sport has become a fetishism of talent, an inanity of greed and wild, curdled possibilities.
Hardly surprising at the end of this, that it turns out some of our sports people are a little lost. Tomic has won three tournaments, is worth $10m and drives a canary yellow Lamborghini, although by the sound of it not anywhere he particularly wants to go. Hes not alone. Angst, depression, or depression-like symptoms: it is a quiet plague out there. In football the whispered talk is of young players who simply dont want to play, who are rich already, who have in effect been anaesthetised by the rapaciousness around them.
This is in its own way a gripping kind of theatre. All that seems certain is that we should be kind, that we should save our repulsion for the system that gave us a generation of captive princelings. As Camus, or perhaps Tomic one of them – has pointed out: All that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
